Ramagamma fucked around with this message at 11:58 on Feb 20, 2013

• We're back to a more traditional mission structure, even if you happen to be onboard the SSV NormandyPaladin and can walk around the mission hub and do Mass Effect-ish things. You go to actually infiltrate places now and seemingly get placed in levels where no one will see you coming rather than being forced to wade through dozens of guards expecting you to come through the front door (unless you want to).
  
• It looks like the developers know they need to try to hit that Chaos Theory sweet spot even if they are working up from what they had in Conviction. They've piled on (and learned) quite a lot of features, some new or reintroduced from older games.
  
• Ghost/Panther/Assault support adding to the fact that people on the dev team have to advocate a certain playstyle means that maps, gadgets, weapons, equipment and everything will be tuned so you can do things like play it almost as if were Chaos Theory or Conviction or ... Call of Duty: Splinter Cell edition I guess.
  
• The directors of the game give me some confidence they know how to make a proper stealth game and know what being a ghost entails rather than appropriating the phrase (From Rock Paper Shotgun):
  
  

  Patrick Redding, (Game Director for Blacklist) on balancing games being cinematic and interactive posted:

  Splinter Cell always featured fairly linear environments, but as the series progressed it started opening up the levels to different player approaches, letting you tackle the objectives in different order and experiment with how that altered the conditions in each section as you completed everything. That meant you weren’t just playing cat-and-mouse with an individual guard in a corridor, but with the entire security apparatus of the map.
  
  Something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently: When stealth games had their “golden age” from Thief and MGS to roughly the first Splinter, it felt like they hit a sweet spot between player accessibility and production values that were possible for that generation of tech. It was okay for the game’s metaphor to be a bit gamey if it was readable and affordant and rewarded exploration.
  
  Somewhere along the line it became too expensive to make games like that because the world needed to be “cinematic” and that’s antithetical to very high levels of interactivity. It became too expensive to create a fully-realized AI that might never know the player was there or a section of the world that the player might never see.

  
  

  Patrick Redding, (Game Director for Blacklist) on the state of the gamespace in stealth games posted:

  In classic SC, the relative vulnerability of the player meant that even a small number of patrollers were a source of tension and a serious threat if the player was detected. Once we expanded the player abilities to include faster movement and accessible weapon play, we needed to reconcile the older AI model with something more action-friendly.
  
  When the player enters a new area of the game, they are by default undetected. As Nels [of Mark of the Ninja] referenced in his first letter, the world and everyone in it is oblivious to this trespasser; and at least in our case, unaware of what the player intends to do to them. By default, the initial state of the world and its AI needs to provide challenge and tension for the traditional “ghost” player, who wants to complete their game objectives while leaving no trace. But from that position, players can reorient tactically towards the complete elimination of the enemy while still remaining undetected. That means the AI behaviour needs to dynamically create windows of opportunity for the player to strike from their hiding place (shadows/cover/concealment) and vanish leaving bodies in their wake. The AI has to flow back and forth between these two roles without seeming predictable.

  
  
  
• Michael Ironside may not be voicing Sam Fisher anymore, but it looks like he might be doing narrating (ala Ron Pearlman for Fallout game bookends) and it seems like he still has some say over Sam Fisher not becoming another generic military black ops soldier who spits out jingoistic nonsense. (i.e. probably consulting)
  

• Perfectionist difficulty screams 'appeasement' like it was for Hitman: Absolution and might just be an unbalanced mess and disables mechanics that just makes the game frustrating rather than legitimately challenging.
  
• There doesn't seem to be any indication they'll include some of the black humour they had in CT and the earlier games and just play everything straight because terrorists and American Lives At Stake.
  
• There will be things like mandatory shoot-your-way-through-bad-guys segments or Uncharted-move-forward-away-from-the-explosion sequences that might get overplayed in every mission rather than sparingly. Fortunately there also seem to be forced stealth/ghost segments, so maybe they know what they're doing?
  

Stanman fucked around with this message at 08:51 on Mar 11, 2013

Stanman fucked around with this message at 08:56 on Mar 11, 2013

Sober fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Mar 13, 2013