Splinter Cell: Conviction Interview

VGD: In Double Agent, one of the more talked-about features was moral choice. I can see potential for that here in the form of Sam’s interrogation sequences – perhaps you have to choose whether to kill a suspect or not. Does that potential ever become a reality?

Beland: That’s a good question. For me, after having played Double Agent and starting to work on Conviction, it was a real issue because we didn’t know what happened, we had to take a stance on whether Sam shot Lambert or not, for example. Half the players did, half the players didn’t.

What do we do with that? Do we try to make Splinter Cell 5 and not take a stance on that? What we decided to do was take a stance on the decisions that you, the player, took in Double Agent. And shooting Lambert or not plays a major role in Conviction, because it’s something that affected Sam, just like the death of his daughter at the beginning of Double Agent, that’s something that affected Sam more than anything.

So we had to build Conviction with those elements in mind. I wanted to make a story that we could tell from beginning to end. I didn’t want to finish with ‘To Be Continued’. I didn’t want players to finish and say: ‘I don’t know what really happened – I did that, but…’ I think we have a good idea for a story with the whole Sarah thing, and we just said, ‘look, we’re going to tell our story, everybody’s going to have the same story, the player-determined aspects are going to be how you’re actually playing the game and what are your moments that are unique’.

So we decided not to go with moral choice in the game. Except for – because we like to do these little things! – at the end there’s something, the player has a decision to make.

VGD: While playing the preview builds today I noticed quite a lot of tearing and a few frame-rate drops. Will those be rectified in the final product?

Beland: That’s what the team is Montreal is taking care of as we speak! I can’t fix that! The guys in Montreal are working on it, yeah.

VGD: What inspired the storytelling element whereby pre-rendered sequences are projected onto walls?

Beland: There are two things that inspired them. The first one was basically a direction that I wanted to take for Conviction. I wanted to have a game where the player was in control all the time. And we couldn’t let the player have control all the time, but we did our best to leave in control at least of the camera as much as possible.

So what I decided to do was to make a game that has no camera cuts. You’ve played it, you’ve seen the transitions between the Malta street and the museum – basically you finish interrogating the guy in the bathroom, and the camera goes down through the floor which gives us black, and from there we come through the ceiling of the room with Kobin. It’s not cut, it’s all fluid.

We wanted to make a game where the player was in control as much as possible, but at the same time we had a cool story we wanted to tell. So we needed a way to do cinematics without cutting to a cinematic.