Splinter Cell: Conviction Interview

At the same time, I saw the movie Man on Fire, with Denzel Washington. In that movie they do super-imposed parts, so there’s a scene when a guy’s sitting in a car, and the camera’s filming him from the side, so you’ve got his head, the steering wheel and the window. And he’s talking, and what he’s talking about overlaps the window, a movie of what happened. It’s interesting because he’s talking about ‘A’, and you see ‘A’ while you’re seeing him.

So that was another inspiration that we had. And the artistic director in the presentation team tried a lot of different elements to make that work, and that’s when we had the idea of projecting them. We built a technology where we could basically play any movie in any surface of the game. So we could take this texture [taps table] and instead of being white, it’s a movie, it’s a big movie that we’re playing.

But then the idea of projecting it – because we’re Splinter Cell, a game of light and shadow, we’re having a real actual light projecting it. It’s cool because if you’re walking in front it projects onto Sam. I think it works super-well, it’s immersive, it doesn’t clash when you play, it just feels natural, and I think it’s much better than cutting to a cut scene where you lose control and you go between passive, now-I’m-watching mode and oh-now-I-play.

You’re more in control, and that was my number one thing, other than what I’ve said about stealth, my number one objective was to make a game where the player would be immersed all the time, and not do that switch in his brain from ‘I’m active’ to ‘I’m passive’.

VGD: It’s interesting to see this level of integration – not just between cinematics and the environment, but also between HUD and environment – so soon after reviewing Heavy Rain, which employs similar tactics. I think it compliments the game very well. Do you think the cut-scene dependent mode of storytelling is going to dry up and vanish, as games become more sophisticated?

Beland: I am a firm believer in everything. So I don’t believe that the stealth action genre is dead, I don’t think we’re only going to make big blockbuster triple-A games, I think there’s room for all different genres. I think there’s room for games like Metal Gear Solid that have a sh*tload of cinematics, games like Uncharted that have amazing production values in their cinematics – just watching those cinematics in Uncharted 2, I was blown away. So I think there’s room for that, and there’s room for games that have no cinematics.

If the game is fun and immersive, the rest is just the director’s choice I guess, what tools he wants to use to tell the story, for the player to live the game.

VGD: Splinter Cell: Conviction has standalone cooperative, competitive and single player campaign options. That strong three-way split seems to be the trend in action gaming now, after Resistance 2 and Modern Warfare 2. What was the rationale behind the mode structure?

Beland: What’s interesting is that you always… You can’t work on a game for 10 years, OK, so you need to pick which angles you want to hit and which ones it’s not worth hitting. And I think for us because Conviction was a game where we had a strong story with a strong character, and we wanted to push that, it made sense that we’d do the same for our multiplayer, and I think we did it well.