Despite a number of delays, Ubisoft's Splinter Cell: Conviction finally has a nailed down UK release date - and is shaping up to be one of 2010's most anticipated games.
We caught up with the game's designer Patrick Redding at X10 last month to grill him on its development...
There have been a number of delays to the game's release. What have you done in that time to bring it up to standard? Honestly? In some ways it was the best possible scenario for us because we were angling towards our original release date in February. You know, as is always the case, you develop this kind of laundry list and think: "Aw man if only we had an extra bit of polish time to really go after that and that and that, plus all the usual debugging, that'd be wonderful."
So I mean a lot of it has been fixing issues with the AI, adding different challenge levels, giving the player the right level of difficulty at first.
I mean, you know, that's a delicate path because you push back too far and the player's like: "Ah man you guys are cheating me, I'm invincible" and other times they end up looking dumb. That for us was a really delicate part of the process because of course you have a mix of scripted events in the game, obviously regarding the story, but then also a huge amount of the AI is really emergent. It's ultra-systemic you know - they're going on patrols, they're trying to flank the player, they're using all of the various tools that we've given the player like the LKP as a way of determining where the player is.
That's a really delicate complex and potentially fragile system to try to tune and balance so we've been really putting a lot of time into that.
The story has a kind of 'going rogue' element this time. How has that affected the gameplay? I think it's strongly reflected in the choice to move away from what I would call the sort of slow, calculating, stealth model into something we have been generally referring to as the 'predatory model'.
You're still Sam Fisher, but you don't have time to be sitting there trying to pick locks and hack into a computer and watch every guard patrol eight times to take a break, you don't have time to be moving bodies.
Your goal is to get to your target and get the information you need out of them and get the hell out of dodge - because you've got the entire wave; you've got the authorities after you, as well the bad guys so that sense of urgency; that sense of: "I don't have a lot of time to stick around". But a lot of the gameplay is about getting into trouble and then getting out of trouble - and that's what inspires the whole Mark and Execute concept.
It's this idea that if I'm being stealthy and things are going incredibly well then of course they'll never know I'm here, and I may never have to fire a shot - I'll be snapping necks and that'll be that. But if I do get discovered, if the shit does hit the fan - which it invariably does in a good story - then he's going to be able to kind of 'ding, ding, ding', take everyone out and jump out the window. I think that's really what informed the gameplay, that's what informed the dynamics of this new Splinter Cell.
So would you say it was a more frantic than previous Splinter Cells? I think it can be more frantic and I think some players are going to feel as though it is, you know, a more intense experience.
They're tending to get into combat situations more easily but I think that if you want to be stealthy and if you want to take the cold and calculating approach it's still available to you. We don't deny the player that option but there are maybe a few situations, for instance, where someone springs a trap on you in which case you're going to have to get out of dodge - but it's not the kind of thing that we try to purposely introduce too often.
How has Sam's personality changed in comparison to previous Splinter Cell games? What always defined Sam was that he's the kind of grizzled vet who's maybe seen a bit too much and he's been haunted by his experiences - but has always been able to maintain that gallows humour and that kind of professional detachment from the events that are going on around him.
So even when he realises there's something dirty about all this: "Oh well, that's my job and because it's me doing it and not somebody else doing it maybe the outcome will be just a bit better, maybe a few more lives will be saved, maybe the country's reputation will be relatively untarnished." I think that what we have here is Sam has been completely disabused of that.
He no longer has the shelter that he can take, kind of, making a joke about it and saying, "Hey know I'm doing what has to be done." Now he's realising that these tools that he's been given in his training and through previous experience, you know, he's not really putting them to work for anyone anymore other than his own self and his own family. And so you get to the bottom of what's obsessing him and haunting him, which is, you know, the death of his daughter.
So obviously that has a big impact in the way he's characterised in the game and because we don't just want that to live in the narrative, we don't want it just to be a dialogue thing. The mechanics of the game have really been retuned to reflect that Sam's been taken off the leash - it's Sam without the rules of engagement holding him back, Sam really operating according to his own code of conduct.
Which titles influenced you during the game's development? That list is giant. I think it goes without saying that right from the beginning, you know, we took a very, very serious look at the previous Splinter Cells. I think in particular Chaos Theory, certainly from my point of view with developers working on the co-op side, was our primary kind of reference point. We said: "Alright, you know, what are the things that are going to be shaping the player's expectations of this, what are the things that we want to adhere to what are the things we want to step away from and do differently?"
So that, for me personally, was the [biggest influence]. But I mean, I've been sort of, a lot of my own personal feelings about co-operative play were strongly influenced by through the co-op campaign for example in Ghost Recon, Gears Of War 2 and Left 4 Dead - it's just trying to find ways to encourage players to work together without necessarily forcing them to by making them jump through the bottle neck.
More often what you try to do is create situations where the players have a very powerful incentive to work together and for each other - so you don't just have these two individuals running around the map, kind of, in parallel.
Onto Project Natal: How much of a game changer do you think it will be, are you interested in working with it? It's funny, for years, even in talks with other designers at GDC and the like, I've been rambling kind of incoherently about this thing that I call the 'thin pipe, fat pipe' problem - which is the idea that for years, literally decades now, we have been pushing and pushing to increase the fidelity of our game output.
We're constantly making our games more beautiful, more lush, better lit, more physically immersive, like we're creating these worlds that for all intents and purposes are saying to the player: This is the real world so you can use all of the tools that you have in the real world to play this game.
But the reality is that this [controller] as wonderful an input as it is, is the same kind of input that players have had for quite some time. I think that that 'thin pipe' is really restricting the player's ability to express themselves in the game and it's constricting the player's ability to enjoy nuanced input into the game.
What's exciting about Natal - and it's not by any means an easy problem, it's an extremely complicated problem for developers but I think it's the kind of problem we like - is that we're now looking at ways to give the players the ability to give more nuance, almost gesturally to the game.
If we're smart enough or if our game can be made smart enough to detect that, then I think it's going to open up this entire continuum of gameplay input in the player that's going to allow them to do things like walk into a crowd in a street and be able to interpret and communicate with body language and all these kind of non-verbal things that the AI will then be able to respond to.
I think we want to make games that feel more human. The more we're able to move in this direction the more we can explore participating cinematic themes. All of this is an extremely long winded way of saying that I think it's really exciting.
Of course we're going to be embracing the opportunities. It's going to be an interesting problem to see how we apply it to a traditional game title. I think it's always an interesting question about how much you can ask the player to do physically - there's a whole social contract that has to be worked out there - but those are really all interesting problems to have. I don't think we're going to stop making commercial mass market games that are interesting to hardcore players just so that we can make Natal work - we'll find ways to integrate.
Do you think Natal is an exclusively mass market, mainstream proposition - or can it do it for the hardcore? I think so. There's always that 'kid in a candy store' phenomenon that happens when you first get access to something like this. It's so powerful - it's the Jurassic Park thing: We're so busy asking if we could, we forgot to ask if we should. But we'll discover ways to use it subtly.
I think an obvious one of those is in driving games. If I don't need a physical wheel but it can still interpret my movements, I'm taking all the skills I had as a hardcore driving gamer and using it in a different way. If that means I can reach up and adjust my rear view mirror, I think hardcore gamers are going to appreciate that.
Do you have any tentative plans to put Natal compatability in a Tom Clancy title? I totally cannot talk about that. It's a great question, and I totally appreciate why you're asking. But, look, there are super-smart people at Ubisoft thinking about that problem and I'm sure they'll have things to say about it eventually.
And what about 3D? The 'kid in the candy store' thing must go even more so for that... I'm still trying to assimilate my own feelings about that because I'll be honest, until I walked into an Imax theatre and saw Avatar I was as sceptical as anyone on this planet about whether it was a worthwhile thing to do. Of course, nothing can really prepare you because you walk in there thinking 'I'm about to see a movie that happens to have three dimensional elements in it', but in fact that's not what it is at all.
I think that it is probably is the equivalent to audiences walking into a theatre and seeing Wizard Of Oz in 1940 or whatever it was and having that experience of seeing colour [movies]. They had that "Oh my God" kind of moment - and that's what we just had. For me personally the first thing that occurred to me was: "Ok now I understand and yes we have to have this in games."
If anything, we have a better opportunity to exploit 3D maybe even than the film industry, because we've already come to grips with that notion of immersion and these ideas of interaction in the environment, whereas in film there's always this tension; that tight control over what's in the frame vs. what the audience is doing. And I think we're a lot more comfortable with that problem so we're definitely in a better position to take advantage of it. The real trick is - like anything else - if we can avoid making it into a gimmick.
I would be perfectly content to play, I don't know, Dead Space 5 - let's just say hypothetically - and to be playing the game on screen but then to be able to look over floating 20 inches from my face to see all those cool Dead Space holographic images exploding in my living room. Something as simple as that I think would be an interesting application of it. Then from there we can start layering, layering and layering and I think people are going to find ways of using it in games that are far more interesting.
I have personally interviewed Patrick Redding about Far Cry 2 at Play.com live at wembly stadium and I've got to say the man is a complete gent. It was my first time interviewing anyone in the industry and he was awesome, open to my questions and really made me feel at ease as a newbie journo. You can check out the interview if you fancy it at www.righteousreviews.com the quality is a bit naff but i do this without getting paid so my resources are the bare minimum. If you ever get the chance to meet the guy you have an enjoyable chat.
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