The Splinter Cell series has always been about stealth; sneaking through environments, avoiding detection and occasionally engaging in the odd burst of gunplay. Splinter Cell: Blacklist keeps this core gameplay, yet presents it as one option nestled next to more action-packed styles of play. We had a hands-on with Blacklist at Ubisoft's development studio in Toronto and then spoke to the game's creative director Maxime Beland about putting together the latest Splinter Cell game.
The Splinter Cell series was built on the back of stealth gameplay, but in Blacklist, stealth is just one of the options players have out of three different styles of play. Is the reason for this that you can’t make a pure stealth game in the current climate?
I think the formula is very simple but very complicated. It’s a question of quality and money. Attaining the highest level of quality means that you’re spending a lot of money and time on your game. It’s also about how many sales targets we need to hit.
The climate in the industry these days is: there’s not a lot of room for average games. If you’re not at 8.5 (on metacritic) I don’t think you’re on the map, and if you need to sell 4 or 5 million units to break even, an 8.2 review score isn’t going to help you reach those targets.
It’s very simple. You can make an ultra hardcore stealth game for a budget of $5 million but then you only need to sell 200,000 copies to make money. A good example of that is Mark Of The Ninja, which is a pure stealth game – and it’s a great stealth game – and is hardcore through and through. How much did that cost? How much did it sell? Did the developers make money at the any of the day?
I think the challenge facing bigger games like Hitman or Metal Gear is that their budgets are really really big. To break even, you need to sell a lot. Selling 2 million or 3 million copies doesn’t really cut it for a $40 to $50 million project. I saw in the news this week that Thief has been in development for five years now and it still isn’t ready for release. They’ll need to sell a lot of copies.
The climate is tough, but if you make an amazing game, it will sell.
How do you go about crafting level design so it accommodates all the different playing styles? Or are there some levels that reward one style of play more than the others?
The play styles are rewarded differently. The most rewarded play style is Ghost (pure stealth) because it’s the hardest. Just like in life if you have a harder job you’re rewarded more – in theory! I mean, I hope if you’re a brain surgeon that you’re paid more than someone who makes games or there’s no justice in the world!
So, Ghost gets the most reward, then Panther (a mixture of stealth and action) and then Assault (total action). But you don’t have to pick one play style for the whole game, though. You can switch between gameplay on the fly; if Ghost isn’t working for you, go Panther. There are certain moments where we encourage certain styles – for example in Grimm’s co-op missions, Ghost is probably the best way to play.
You’re not just balancing gameplay styles, though, you’re also balancing authenticity with a power fantasy. Where do you draw the line?
It’s even worse than that because reality often isn’t all that believable. At the beginning of this project we brought on three advisers – and they’re advisers who won’t be in the credits and I can’t tell you about them, but they were ‘holy s**t’ people! Like, completely crazy. One was military, one was private security and one was information tech and data tracking – and all of them were as crazy as you can go!
Some of the stories they told us we thought… well, first we though they were lying and second if we put it in a game, players would think it was too ridiculous. I can’t give you an example, but if we did some of the things they told us, we’d lose credibility with the audience.
The other problem with reality at times is that it’s very boring. I mean you think about the perfect Sam Fisher spy, okay? Imagine he was spying on us. What’s his day like? He gets up before dawn, infiltrates a vent in the building, sleeps a couple of hours until we have our meeting and then records what we say. Then he goes home. That would be the perfect stealth mission, but in a game it would suck. There’s no fun to be had in a mission where you’re waiting for twelve hours in a vent. The first Splinter Cell tie-in novel actually starts like that; Sam’s woken up by his watch because he’s fallen asleep in a vent on a surveillance mission.
So the short answer here is it’s a gut feeling. We draw the line at how we think players will react and whether they think it’s believable. For example, the sonar goggles in the game that allows Sam to see through walls? Yeah, they don’t exist. The technology doesn’t exist yet, although there are some prototypes that allow you to see heat signatures so it may exist some day. The EMP gadgets, though, are completely true.
At the E3 demo last year, there was a rather graphic interrogation scene. Is that still in the game?
They’re there but they’re non-interactive because we didn’t feel that it was serving our message well. When I have something to say about interrogation in real life, I’ll say it properly in a different game.
We’ve been told the villains in the game – The Engineers – are a group of rogue nations. Are these nations made up or is the inspiration here from current events?
We don’t name them. We want to be realistic, sure, and we have a good story to tell, but at the same time there’s no reason to stir the pot on something that the game really isn’t about.
Is that why the Blacklist is presented as a counterbalance? The themes of the attacks – Oil, Freedom, Power, Consumption and so on – are both aspects of the USA and legitimate concerns outsiders have with that nation.
The biggest challenges we have on Splinter Cell – and even Rainbow Six – is coming up with a realistic story that feels fresh. You know ‘bad guys want to kill some people’ isn’t really a story. With Blacklist, what I’m excited about and a little stressed about, is that it really could happen.
Look at the Boston Marathon. I saw what happened there and it proved to me how fragile we are as a society. We’ve got great lives in the West. We have our little MacBook Pros and iPhones and everything’s great in our lives. And then two guys and one bomb later an entire city is shut down. We’re so fragile.
Blacklist talks about that. One enemy can’t take down the USA, because it’s so strong, but what if its enemies band together. You don’t need a hundred countries to go against the USA, you just need ten. Ten nation tell ten people to target the states and what happens then?
Our story is very simple, but it’s beautiful because of that. Because it’s plausible. Boston showed us that. Imagine something had happened in New York the next day? Or LA the day after that? You don’t need 1,000 Russians parachuting in from planes to hurt the USA – and it’s the same for Canada and the same for any European city. We are fragile as a society.
I think the formula is very simple but very complicated. It’s a question of quality and money. Attaining the highest level of quality means that you’re spending a lot of money and time on your game. It’s also about how many sales targets we need to hit.
The climate in the industry these days is: there’s not a lot of room for average games. If you’re not at 8.5 (on metacritic) I don’t think you’re on the map, and if you need to sell 4 or 5 million units to break even, an 8.2 review score isn’t going to help you reach those targets.
It’s very simple. You can make an ultra hardcore stealth game for a budget of $5 million but then you only need to sell 200,000 copies to make money. A good example of that is Mark Of The Ninja, which is a pure stealth game – and it’s a great stealth game – and is hardcore through and through. How much did that cost? How much did it sell? Did the developers make money at the any of the day?
I think the challenge facing bigger games like Hitman or Metal Gear is that their budgets are really really big. To break even, you need to sell a lot. Selling 2 million or 3 million copies doesn’t really cut it for a $40 to $50 million project. I saw in the news this week that Thief has been in development for five years now and it still isn’t ready for release. They’ll need to sell a lot of copies.
The climate is tough, but if you make an amazing game, it will sell.
How do you go about crafting level design so it accommodates all the different playing styles? Or are there some levels that reward one style of play more than the others?
The play styles are rewarded differently. The most rewarded play style is Ghost (pure stealth) because it’s the hardest. Just like in life if you have a harder job you’re rewarded more – in theory! I mean, I hope if you’re a brain surgeon that you’re paid more than someone who makes games or there’s no justice in the world!
So, Ghost gets the most reward, then Panther (a mixture of stealth and action) and then Assault (total action). But you don’t have to pick one play style for the whole game, though. You can switch between gameplay on the fly; if Ghost isn’t working for you, go Panther. There are certain moments where we encourage certain styles – for example in Grimm’s co-op missions, Ghost is probably the best way to play.
You’re not just balancing gameplay styles, though, you’re also balancing authenticity with a power fantasy. Where do you draw the line?
It’s even worse than that because reality often isn’t all that believable. At the beginning of this project we brought on three advisers – and they’re advisers who won’t be in the credits and I can’t tell you about them, but they were ‘holy s**t’ people! Like, completely crazy. One was military, one was private security and one was information tech and data tracking – and all of them were as crazy as you can go!
Some of the stories they told us we thought… well, first we though they were lying and second if we put it in a game, players would think it was too ridiculous. I can’t give you an example, but if we did some of the things they told us, we’d lose credibility with the audience.
The other problem with reality at times is that it’s very boring. I mean you think about the perfect Sam Fisher spy, okay? Imagine he was spying on us. What’s his day like? He gets up before dawn, infiltrates a vent in the building, sleeps a couple of hours until we have our meeting and then records what we say. Then he goes home. That would be the perfect stealth mission, but in a game it would suck. There’s no fun to be had in a mission where you’re waiting for twelve hours in a vent. The first Splinter Cell tie-in novel actually starts like that; Sam’s woken up by his watch because he’s fallen asleep in a vent on a surveillance mission.
So the short answer here is it’s a gut feeling. We draw the line at how we think players will react and whether they think it’s believable. For example, the sonar goggles in the game that allows Sam to see through walls? Yeah, they don’t exist. The technology doesn’t exist yet, although there are some prototypes that allow you to see heat signatures so it may exist some day. The EMP gadgets, though, are completely true.
At the E3 demo last year, there was a rather graphic interrogation scene. Is that still in the game?
They’re there but they’re non-interactive because we didn’t feel that it was serving our message well. When I have something to say about interrogation in real life, I’ll say it properly in a different game.
We’ve been told the villains in the game – The Engineers – are a group of rogue nations. Are these nations made up or is the inspiration here from current events?
We don’t name them. We want to be realistic, sure, and we have a good story to tell, but at the same time there’s no reason to stir the pot on something that the game really isn’t about.
Is that why the Blacklist is presented as a counterbalance? The themes of the attacks – Oil, Freedom, Power, Consumption and so on – are both aspects of the USA and legitimate concerns outsiders have with that nation.
The biggest challenges we have on Splinter Cell – and even Rainbow Six – is coming up with a realistic story that feels fresh. You know ‘bad guys want to kill some people’ isn’t really a story. With Blacklist, what I’m excited about and a little stressed about, is that it really could happen.
Look at the Boston Marathon. I saw what happened there and it proved to me how fragile we are as a society. We’ve got great lives in the West. We have our little MacBook Pros and iPhones and everything’s great in our lives. And then two guys and one bomb later an entire city is shut down. We’re so fragile.
Blacklist talks about that. One enemy can’t take down the USA, because it’s so strong, but what if its enemies band together. You don’t need a hundred countries to go against the USA, you just need ten. Ten nation tell ten people to target the states and what happens then?
Our story is very simple, but it’s beautiful because of that. Because it’s plausible. Boston showed us that. Imagine something had happened in New York the next day? Or LA the day after that? You don’t need 1,000 Russians parachuting in from planes to hurt the USA – and it’s the same for Canada and the same for any European city. We are fragile as a society.
No comments:
Post a Comment