Echoes of Activated Goggles

"Splinter Cell Remake Begins Development at Ubisoft Toronto" thumbnail. Taken from Ubisoft.

Back in June, when I wrote and published "A Blink Return of Splinter Cell", I knew something is going to happen to this series in the next year. Reason for that is its 20th anniversary, which is a perfect opportunity to bring Sam Fisher into the spotlight. With announcement and teases of both animated series for Netflix and VR title on Oculus, my best guess was for both of them getting a full-on teasers. Maybe even with the releases in the same  year, but even now I have my doubts.

As time went on, however, it actually seems like Ubisoft does a lot more with Splinter Cell than its community or the majority of the industry would expect. Despite being quite late to the party, I wanted to just briefly go over some things were and there to share my thoughts and perspective on what's to come for Splinter Cell in 2022 with recent developments & leaks.

Flash Announcement.

We all know why Ubisoft announced the creation of Splinter Cell's remake in a way they did in that particular point in time. Recently they've been one of the leading companies in industry's race for worst negative image possible. Even though there's no way they would beat Activision Blizzard anytime soon, you can say that Ubisoft is pretty close up there with its own ABetterUbisoft movement, "the great exodus" and other controversial headlines. At some point even the most stubborn parties would want to improve their public image or at least tone down the negativity surrouding them, although Ubisoft in particular kind of contradicts that with that NFT thing or whatever... Anyway.

In spite of very clear intent of recovering from previously mentions "exodus" via this announcement, I wouldn't say that Ubisoft decided to give original Splinter Cell a "Sands of Time Remake" treatment simply because of that. In fact, I mean believe they just pushed its announcement December 15 for that as opposed to what I think was original plan: November 17, 2022. Yes, the release date of original game is a perfect target for showing a trailer or some promo material that was done during the first year of remake's development. Perhaps Ubisoft would've just acknowledged remake being in the works like they ended up doing, but I have a feeling they wanted to repeat the reveal of "return" of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.

Stubborn Whistle.

Speaking of which, that's a good point to start my usual grumblings about this topic. You remember they announced a remake of The Sands of Time, right? Since its initial reveal and mostly negative or concerned feedback regarding the visuals, it was delayed like 1-2 times & not shown on this years' Ubisoft Forward event. And now Toronto studio within Ubisoft makes another remake. I already talked about it once here, but I'm not a fan of current iteration of remakes in gaming industry: just make a new title at this point, you don't have to do much to turn it into one anyway.

That's the main point of my concern and critics of this announcement. Terminology, approach and scope. When you look deeper at modern remakes and the way they end up, it becomes apparent that phrases like "make sure the spirit of the early games remains intact" and "building it from the ground up" are counter-intuitive. More you distance from the original game when it comes to these kinds of developments, more likely you as a creator to actually lose aforementioned essence of classic game you want to reintroduce.

As many other folks, I felt positive due to some general things you've talked about in news article and announcement video. That's why I would really encourage you to take a step back and reconsider the scope of the project and the terminology you use to describe it. Again, look at how things are going for your colleagues at Pune & Mumbai studios that work on The Sands of Time Remake. Think again about what exactly you want Splinter Cell Remake to be, can you achieve these goals and is it even necessary. Right now is the best moment to make such changes as afterwards it would have more negative impact on both development and public/critical perception. You showed nothing, so reducing the scope of the project is easier now more than ever will be.

Even the most beloved remakes of recent games are quite different from the original games and why I consider them more of a "almost reboots" as that's what they seem to be. I'm not saying they're bad, just too different from what they claim to be and is it really what hardcore audience would want at the end? How likely is it to end up like XIII Remake? Alright, I have no right to speak for Splinter Cell community and more likely to get criticised for my views on remakes and "ruining the fun for others". Just saying that in order to make something that stays true to the original game, you have to use it as a foundation instead of starting from the clean slate.

I did mentioned my ideas of "Third Echelon Archive" approach a few times ago online and think it would've been nice to dive into it more deeper in "Just an Idea" post sometime whenever I have a spare time for it: a lot of plans in January and busy with some IRL stuff. So this time around I would just leave it as that... However, there's one more point to be made. I feel like there's a high chance you would go for Xbox exclusivity with Splinter Cell Remake, and I would personally say "go for it". That just makes a lot of sense since the story this series has with Microsoft's consoles and, besides, it would be much better than going with Epic Games Store again...

Shadow Strikes... Again?

With that, I would like to finish it off with bringing up a couple of more "unreliable" news that might relate to future of Splinter Cell series. First of all, I need to mention the GeForce Now leak. Although its worth to examine it with benefit of the doubt, many listed titles from there have ended up actually releasing. We should also pay attention to Ubisoft's reaction as they didn't want to see their titles there. While several sites pointed out the codenamed projects, but, as a retrogames, I took notice of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow being there. All fans of the series know the state of its PC version and why you can get it only for consoles, through physical copes or "other means" (not that I encourage that), so seeing that this is the only game of the entire series listed there kind of makes me believe that we might see an actual re-release next year.

On top of that, we might see new Ubisoft titles visiting Steam yet again as recently their launcher was spotted to be added in its packages. While you likely would still need to have Ubisoft Connect account and launcher to access those, I guess it would truly open up more titles for PC audience... Whatever those games are. Splinter Cell's remake might as well follow the same path. Point is that we might very well get much more content and announcement related to Sam Fisher sometime the next year. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think you can see where I'm coming from.