Sam was a former Navy SEAL and not the kind of man to mess around. Unlike in Thief, Dishonored, and Hitman, Splinter Cell’s missions were planned with military precision because, well, you were in the military. On top of that, having smaller, more linear levels dialed up Splinter Cell’s tension. Splinter Cell didn’t give you marks for style, but each time I played, I was mentally tallying up my “cool factor.” Let’s face it – if you’re being voiced by Michael Ironside, you sure as hell don’t want to let the man down. You could just duck behind a desk, but it was far cooler to do a split jump into a corridor and KO an enemy as they walked beneath you. Maybe you could lurk in those darkened areas, but were they dimly lit enough to conceal your presence? Sure, crawling along that pipe might have seemed like the easy option, but you’d be a sitting duck if someone spotted you. Making the levels smaller meant you had to quickly assess the opportunities available to you and act on them appropriately. How you reached that exit was up to you, but given the reduced size of these mini-areas, you had fewer choices than in, say, Hitman: Contracts.īut it was absolutely the right choice. There was, typically, only an exit from each area. Splinter Cell featured a range of environments, but once you passed through a door, there was no going back. After you sneaked or punched your way past to the door at the end of that corridor, you might have ended up in an open-plan office. Once you made your way to the door on the opposite side, you found yourself in a smaller area, maybe a corridor and a security room. So, instead of roaming around a building, making your way through myriad patrolling guards, the largest location you’d freely explore would be a single courtyard. Afterwards, the level design direction was refocused for the better.” As a result, the first round of levels were never completed. The team behind the original Splinter Cell, Ubisoft Montreal, did start off with large, open level design, but as they explained in a recent interview, “We ended up creating levels that were too big, which resulted in badly paced gameplay. For instance, Thief: Deadly Shadows divided its levels into two chunks and separated them with an obtrusive glowing portal in order to fit on Xbox, despite its levels already being smaller than those of Thief or Thief 2. Some games did of course suffer from being ported to PlayStation 2 and/or Xbox. “Wasn’t that down to hardware limitations?” Surprisingly, no. ![]() In that title, and its direct sequel, the maps themselves were chunked into smaller, more linear paths. But that’s not the way things were in the original Splinter Cell. “We are going to keep it linear like the original games, not make it open world,” Ubisoft has remarked.īut the question remains: just how linear? I suspect they’re referring to the way that, from the third Splinter Cell game onwards, you tackled each map in turn. It’s been confirmed that the remake of the original Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell won’t employ open-world level design, which is a blessing – if there’s one Ubisoft character who’d look ridiculous climbing a radio tower, it’s protagonist Sam Fisher.
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