Ubisoft Is Remaking The Original ‘Splinter Cell’

Well this is better news than I expected. Ubisoft is remaking the original Splinter Cell game.

Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell was released in 2002 on PC, the original Xbox, PlayStation 2, Mac, GameCube and the Game Boy Advanced. It took inspiration from Metal Gear Solid 2 and kicked off a series of popular stealth-based games that rather suddenly dropped off the face of the earth after the 2013 release of Splinter Cell: Blacklist.

When I recently posted about leaks and rumors of a new Splinter Cell game, I worried that Ubisoft was going to push the series in an entirely new direction—making it just another open-world action game like The Division, Assassin’s Creed or Watch Dogs.

Instead, we’re getting a remake of the original, linear stealth game—hopefully that means we’ll avoid all the busy work that so many Ubisoft titles foist upon us these days.

The remake will be created using the Snowdrop game engine that’s being used to create the new Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora game and the upcoming, still untitled Star Wars game, both in development at Massive Entertainment. It’s being developed by Ubisoft Toronto.

In an interview on Ubisoft’s blog,  Creative Director Chris Auty notes: “It’s safe to say a lot of us on the team are stealth purists, and we’re behind that level of seriousness when it comes to those kinds of mechanics, and those sorts of things that we want to see in this game. And we’re very, very aware of what makes classic Splinter Cell what it is.”

This is good news because while they clearly have to modernize the game’s controls and mechanics (and graphics, obviously) gamers don’t want the things that made the original game scrapped, either.

“There’s stuff that simply needs to be redone from scratch to be up to snuff for a modern gameplay experience,” Producer Matt West notes. “With that, though, what do we need to do to absolutely preserve the feeling of early Splinter Cell? We’re going to be straddling the line between the spirit of the old, and the comfort of the new, so that we can excite and surprise new players, but also make sure that when our returning players pick up the controller, they have that sigh of relief, saying “Ahhh, they got it.”

He goes on to say, “We talked earlier about that dense world, where every square inch is important because they’re all a consequence of a choice or setting the table for the next choice from the player’s point of view. So that kind of density, that packed nature that I think was so palpable in the first trilogy – it’s going to be one of our guiding lights as we go forward.”

The importance of a “dense world, where every square inch” matters is essentially the opposite of what Ubisoft has done with its open-world formula, so this is great to hear. Auty finishes the interview by saying that with the remake, “we are building a solid base for the future of Splinter Cell.” I certainly hope so.

I wouldn’t mind a stealth-and-tactics-based Ghost Recon revival, either. Maybe they can start by remaking the original game from that series next.

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