Splinter Cell HD Remake REBORN: The Definitive Review
Ubisoft True To Form With True To Form Remake From Ubisoft
It may be down to my own particularly grubby preferences, but my phone’s algo-generated news page has surprisingly frequent mentions of Splinter Cell and its expected remake. Recent hubbub about the original has thrown up plenty of, shall we say novel1, takes on both the game and Sam Fisher himself, including some quite grand claims - even going as far as suggesting that Splinter Cell is actually an ironic satire of Tom Clancy. This is reported, of course, without a single shred of irony itself. Mostly because even if that stated aim was true, it was never discernible, nor did it ever really develop into anything substantial. The Splinter Cell games spiralled into increasing acts of stupidity, a betrayal of its core values and eventually outright desperation. Sam Fisher, a man so wedded to the franchise that his life story can be considered nothing short of fucking ridiculous as a result, became a literal asset for Ubisoft to append to whichever mil-porn product it was failing to topple Modern Warfare with. Unsurprisingly, his concept and value was being diluted with every shamelessly exploitative step. Put it this way; when you go from the three-alarm failstate rigour of Splinter Cell to the on-rails explode-the-baddies pap of Fisher’s Ghost Recon: Breakpoint DLC episode, it’s kinda obvious that at the very least, you’ve lost sight of whatever the fuck Fisher was originally supposed to represent. Even if that was indeed some ironic recasting of the Clancy-patriot mythic supersoldier. At worst, it illustrates how little Ubisoft actually cared about the IP other than as a monetisable brand.
If there’s one thing that depresses me about the modern videogame industry and its audience alike, it’s the popularity of remakes. I recall the late-80s trend of the CD remaster, as pioneered by Led Zeppelin’s crop-circle-covered volume, opening up a new market for the medium as people disposed of superb vinyl collections to buy everything on shiny discs at 44Khz. Now, I’m not some vinyl supremacist - I don’t pay any credence to claims of superior sound quality or that digitally rendered music is fundamentally, unavoidably colder than analogue, but I do recognise a certain consumerist insanity in ditching a perfectly viable music collection in favour of one loaded with buzzwords to justify its existence. I’m not sure claimed upticks in quality necessarily mean an uptick in user satisfaction beyond rewarding the sunk cost fallacy. In a sense, the rise of the ‘HD Remake’ videogame parallels the abandonment of vinyl as a change in a technological paradigm by coinciding with the rise of the discless gamer and hence, the discless console. The two are almost complementary in some ways with both representing a kind of willing erasure of a physical past, trading freedom for convenience, and ultimately ceding consumer power to the publishers’ conservative hegemony. There is something fundamentally perverse in the public’s willingness to buy remade games at standard retail pricing, reinforcing the same risk-averse lack of investment in new IPs or even new ideas in the AAA tier. It feels at times like remakes are 50% of Capcom’s business and with Dead Rising being next up for remake treatment, it’s perhaps worth reflecting on the difference between the original Romero Dawn of the Dead and the Snyder remake. Remakes generally get praised as they’re generally safe bets on reliable titles, but there’s a circularity to them that I can’t believe works for the greater good. I mean, are we that far off a remaster of a remaster? Probably not. Would people still buy it? Almost certainly. The question of Splinter Cell’s remake is kinda fundamental. What the fuck is it? Ubisoft has been hilariously mute on giving actual details, which is utterly mindfucking considering it’s been at least three years in the making, and that Blacklist was eleven years ago. Details are as follows: new graphics, control and design improvements, still linear, going to bring a new audience. That’s it. There’s been suggestions of a ‘younger’ Sam Fisher in more recent rumours, which all adds up to an uncomfortable truth as I see it: this remake is struggling in development and will probably be a failure at launch. Why? Look no further than Blacklist.
Splinter Cell: Blacklist was conspicuously well-reviewed and yet performed so healthily within the market that Ubisoft didn’t even release the probably already finished DLC episode that the game itself advertises in its (fucking laughable) HQ hub. It killed the franchise with a combination of all of Ubisoft’s worst excesses: pathetically hyperbolic plot, insanely dumb design decisions, regression to videogamey archetypes, having escort sections (FFS) and ending with a fucking boss fight. Blacklist was Ubisoft’s attempt to broaden the audience and it failed, miserably. Though really, it had been set up to fail by consecutive creative disasters in Double Agent and Conviction. In my forthcoming book, Fucking Ubisoft: Twenty Years Of Institutional Sociopathy And Creative Stagnation, I state the following regarding the post-Chaos Theory shift of emphasis onto Fisher himself: “Now, I am a big Splinter Cell fan. I played all of them, multiple times for some, but even I can’t see why the fuck you’d think Sam Fisher is anywhere near interesting enough to bring to the fore for a personal odyssey”. But the worst part is that Double Agent can’t even do its unwarranted psychodrama well. After Sam loses a rookie under his care and is told his daughter has been killed in an accident by way of the game’s intro, I note that “poor Sam, now extremely glum and presumably at the mercy of a whirling internalised maelstrom of grief, is given compassionate leave from his high-stakes, terribly stressful work at Third Echelon. Wonderfully, Fisher’s boss (and now best buddy) Irving Lambert decides the best thing for this psychologically-damaged man in his 50s is to reassign him as an undercover agent tasked with infiltrating a terrorist group. In other words, precisely the same shit he’d do at Third Echelon, but even more stressful.” There’s definitely something bleakly comedic about how dizzyingly stupid the canon Double Agent plot is, as it dives really off the deep end in its closing stages. As the stakes predictably escalate to world-threatening (as they always fucking do), Lambert decides to infiltrate the terrorist HQ to talk to Sam, fucks it up and dies as a result. Me again: “let’s not lose sight of the fact Ubisoft thinks it’s perfectly reasonable for a high-ranking director in a top-secret security service to bunk off and bungle an infiltration into an existential threat’s secret base. Oh my, how fucking far we have come. Double Agent ends with Sam saving the fucking world, yet again, and ending up on the run - no matter what! All your careful balancing and maintenance of trust is for nothing. The ending outcomes are all the same”. This emphasis on Sam as a central character in an amateurishly bad story leads to a hugely unsatisfactory ending. What this set in motion, with Sam effectively painted into a corner, is development hell for Splinter Cell: Conviction. The game wobbles between a nonsensical-sounding idea of a hobo Sam on the run in Washington, which might have been open world but eventually wasn’t, then ends up turning into a shockingly brutal murder simulator. In my self-published five-part Sci-Fi epic Maximum Bellend: What Happens When You Put An Abusive Asshole In Charge Of A Franchise, I find Conviction’s worst traits are exemplified in one pivotal level: “Sam infiltrates the Third Echelon HQ and finds out some piece of incredibly important plot intrigue, at which point DJ Shadow’s Building Steam With a Grain of Salt plays and Sam is so angered by this that he magically gets infinite mark-and-execute powers. So as the tune plays out, you’re killing the whole way as teams of lesser stealth assassins repeatedly bungle their colossal advantages because the game wants you to kill them all. The hyperbole here is ridiculous. In reality, each one of those teams would represent colossal investments in military careers, specialist training, specialised equipment, and yet in the game, they exist solely for Sam to kill. He can’t evade them, as they have the same magical sonar that Sam uses. To survive, you must slaughter. The stealth sim is dead, long live hyperbolic murder.” Bear in mind that Pandora Tomorrow has Lambert ordering you to kill a civilian informant and that this is a shocking moment where you have to act fast, a shattering contrast to the stealthy infiltration level that leads up to it. It leverages Sam’s potential to kill, and his professional restraint to avoid such mess, with the need to act as an instrument of the state when ordered to. It’s a great moment of moral drama with real impact. In Conviction, Sam’s popping melons from the tutorial to the ending. To reiterate on Conviction’s sheer glee in the lethal, “It is Ubisoft at its most punitively violent, its most inhumane. Sam’s forced kills on certain maps outnumber the total kills from Conviction’s predecessors combined - even if you go bonkers in their ‘kill if you want’ sections. There are simply no non-lethal options for neutralising enemies, no way to hide bodies. It’s the one with the sociopathic power fantasy. The one that wanted you to kill for pleasure.”
Between Double Agent’s reframing of the game around Sam as a narrative focus and Conviction’s corruption and moral degradation of the stealth mandate, Blacklist had to tread a path that accommodated both errors in judgement while under the cosh of people who eventually had to leave Ubisoft because of abuse scandals2. This perhaps explains the dark sociopathy that infected Splinter Cell’s fairly virtuous heart. But the real error, post-Chaos Theory, was in not retiring Sam Fisher. Ubisoft makes the all-too-common blunder of thinking the character is the core value of the universe. The Ripley effect. In my forthcoming book James Cameron Fucked Up Everything: How Surface Coolness Dumbed The Action Movie Into Irrelevance, I write that in Alien, Ellen Ripley is the fortunate one. Through her determination and guile, she luckily survives the Nostromo to escape at the end. The only thing she saves is Jones, the cat. All her crewmates are dead. According to how Hollywood would code a hero, she’s mostly a failure but this is what gave Alien such mystique. A grittier sense of the real. Prior to the film Sigourney Weaver was relatively unknown, but Alien made her a star. Now, when James Cameron came to make Aliens, amongst several creative choices that incidentally destroy the original’s mystique is bringing Ellen Ripley along for the ride to LV426. It actually makes zero sense. Ripley knows just a little bit more than fuck all about the alien. What she knows she can relate in about five minutes of chat. Which is what she is shown doing in the corporate meeting. Why Burke would want her to come along on a military mission to investigate the colony is mystifying. As with a lot of Cameron’s work, it’s best not to question anything beyond the surface. The reality is that Ripley has to tag along because it’s the sequel and Sigourney Weaver, post Ghostbusters, is a recognisable and bankable star. That’s the reason. It’s commercial, not creative. But what it does is affix Ripley to the series. And thus, she becomes inextricable, leading to the car-crash of Alien 3 and the slapstick Wheedon mashup of Alien Resurrection, a film so deliciously decadent and playfully stupid that it’s precisely what the series deserves for clinging to Ripley. In the games it extends even further - I don’t think there was any reason for Alien: Isolation to feature another fucking Ripley, it just used her because its an Alien game so obviously it must have a Ripley. This is despite the fact that most of the prior Aliens vs Predator games were great and didn’t require a single Ripley to be so. The problem is one of heroic creep, where the bonding of character/characters to central events in a universe leads to increasingly implausible entries. For a particularly relevant example to Splinter Cell, see Jack Bauer, who ends up saving the world (in 24-hour stints) way too many times to fucking count. There’s also the teeny core crew of The Expanse, who regularly end up at the centre of the solar system’s biggest geopolitical and existential dramas for no reason other than because they’re the core crew of the show. Luckily, they’re mostly really interesting characters. But Sam Fisher is not, and hence for Splinter Cell, the Ripley Effect is ruinous. He saves the world six fucking times. All while over 40. It’s ridiculous. It’s my belief that after Chaos Theory, Ubisoft had a choice - character or world. They chose character and, ultimately, doomed the series. And hence why I think the remake is similarly doomed. Aside from that sociopathic love of killing and cruelty, Ubisoft has a real penchant for repeating mistakes until they’re series features3.
What should Splinter Cell be, then? Well, Ghost Recon: Breakpoint almost gets it. It flies so close to nailing an open-world Splinter Cell with its Echelon character class that you could consider it unofficially a continuation. But of course, it doesn’t have any non-lethal enemy mitigations. Yet it so easily could have, if Ubisoft had cared to give a shit. Much has been made of Fisher’s similarity to Metal Gear Solid’s Snake, though the lack of genius in Fisher’s creation is obvious when you see how Kojima gleefully played with hero archetypes and deliberately nonsensical timelines to give a unified player avatar that is actually a succession of individuals, some of whom are enemies to each other. That kind of creative richness is what makes Kojima stand out so far beyond the amorphous blob of producers, directors and writers that contributed to the blandified, confused creative shitness of the Splinter Cell canon. It’s no surprise that a company like Ubisoft, which systematically fumbled two fine spec-ops IPs, would take the laziest possible option when it came to doing another Splinter Cell. It’s OK to retire Sam Fisher, Ubi. Just make him the new manager and put someone else on the ground. By Blacklist, Sam was canonically fifty seven years old and still shimmying up pipes like a teenager. Fucking ludicrous. Blacklist was Splinter Cell: The Saturday Morning Cartoon with its ageless boss of his own secret agent club, where he’s also the main secret agent, the fucking magic flying plane HQ and that sequence where Sam, and only Sam, saves it from crashing by running around doing QTEs. It then got worse thanks to unwelcome bookends for certain story missions, or the stunning whiplash of demanding the utmost stealth to infiltrate an Iranian military building followed by a sequence where you rain missiles down on Tehran’s highway at rush hour. After that shit, the series deserved to die, even though I generally loved the gameplay when it was good.
My hottest take is that Splinter Cell’s real failing was in turning away from stark simulation. Where previous entries cared about where you walked because of the sound it made, post-Chaos Theory it streamlined itself too flatly, too easily into a slick game about killing thanks to Conviction. Even Blacklist’s vague gesturing towards a three-class Sam Fisher failed to adequately incentivise the ghostly non-lethal and, in fact, frequently made a mockery of it with forced murder sequences and story beats that end up with everyone knowing you’re there anyway. Ultimately, that is the Splinter Cell that should remain in the grave. Not rebuilt under new management, with a new lick of paint and with more concessions to frictionless play. Where the path is obvious via Ghost Recon: Breakpoint’s potential to combine a broad and beautiful open world with well-constructed, tight stealth-challenge installations, we see Ubisoft failing in every respect to capitalise on what its good at, and leaning back on the glories of the past to try and rejuvenate a concept that died eleven years ago. There was always a fundamental absurdity to Metal Gear Solid that Kojima revelled in, that he consciously exploited to wonderful effect. For Splinter Cell, the absurdity was simply ignored. Regarding those signature three circles that give away Sam’s position no matter how dark it is, Fisher’s original designer Martin Caya had this to say: “Never mind that it realistically didnʼt make a lick of sense in a stealth game. I just thought it was fucking cool.” And thus, perhaps, we arrive at a defining statement for the series as a whole. In my upcoming 500,000 word pamphlet series Far Cry: A Legacy Of Shameless Exploitation And Murder, I lay out a case for damning Far Cry 2 as a game that disgustingly exploits real-world horrors to provide a Disneyland for murder, for the trivialisation of civil war. Its treatment of malaria is particularly acute in its flippant minimisation. A disease that killed 480,000 African children in 2020 is reduced to a visual filter and a bit of a wobble, easily and rapidly cleared with a jab. Fuck you, Ubisoft. Nonetheless, the modern narrative is that Far Cry 2 is a classic, a venerated great. As much as Ubisoft refuses to treat its source material with the respect it deserves, we give Ubisoft a free ride as long as we had fun. And yet, Ubisoft maintains a sinister, coercive presence. In the same podcast episode where Simon Parkin praises Far Cry 2’s virtues to its designer Clint Hocking, Parkin reveals that an Ubisoft PR was on the call the whole time. Not interfering, but there. It’s hard to see it as anything other than a policing measure, an intimidatory method to ensure neither Parkin or Hocking strayed too close to truths that Ubisoft is yet to fully admit, or deviate from the agreed narrative of post-scandal excision and earnest soul-searching, lest the PR step in and stop the episode in its tracks. And perhaps that’s the real Sam Fisher legacy, bleeding into real life. The enforcement of a corporate image from the shadows. As for my dream sequel? Give me a crashed helicopter in enemy territory, a captured and incapacitated Sam Fisher and let me be the protégé, stealthily tracing the route of my tutor, our equipment and secret materials through a military infrastructure in some far off, isolated republic where those in command have no idea of the value of what’s fallen into their laps. Let me explore, let me discover, let me snaffle, let me and the series graduate to something really fresh. Let Splinter Cell be something more vital and more valuable than a mere glossy retread.
[21]
Revisionist. I of course mean revisionist.
Even though according to reports on the the Internet, one of them apparently had a spouse that was high up in Ubisoft HR, so nobody felt comfortable raising complaints about their ongoing abusive behaviour. You know, the one that resigned without saying a single word, or offering a single apology. The one accused of the non-consensual sexualised strangulation of a co-worker at the Far Cry 4 launch party. That one. I don’t mean the Chief Creative Officer that resigned without a single word or apology after being accused of years of the worst abuse in the company. The person with complete creative control over every Ubisoft project, which may explain all that dark narcissism and sociopathy. The person who seemingly was close to the CEO but not so close that the CEO had any idea of what was going on. Wilfully ignoring it or too negligent to notice? You decide!
One day, I will publish the huge number of words I’ve written about how fucking terrible Far Cry is. But rest assured, it’s all about the settings, the stories and the lack of options. I generally enjoy the action, even if I did get genuinely bored of Far Cry 6 and stopped playing.