A brand new report reveals that Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell franchise was set to get a brand-new entry, earlier than the corporate shifted the challenge to benefit from the Video games as a Service mannequin to spawn the ill-fated XDefiant. Followers of Sam Fisher and the Splinter Cell collection are on a seemingly limitless anticipate a brand new recreation within the franchise, particularly with the continued growth struggles of the remake.
With the final mainline entry, Splinter Cell Blacklist, launching in 2013, followers of the franchise have needed to accept cameos with lead character Sam Fisher showing in video games like Ghost Recon: Wildlands, Rainbow Six: Siege, and even getting a Netflix animated collection. Ubisoft continued to handle questions concerning the franchise at main tradeshow occasions, however nothing concrete had actually materialized till an introduced remake of the very Splinter Cell game was announced back in 2021. Whereas followers proceed to attend for information on the remake, it appears they had been nearer than they realized to an precise new entry within the widespread stealth collection.
A New Splinter Cell Sport Nearly Occurred
The brand new report comes from business insider Jason Schreier in an article detailing how the current hit Dispatch got here to be. When speaking with members of AdHoc Studio, Co-Founder Nick Herman and former builders of Telltale Video games joined with Ubisoft’s San Francisco workplace again in 2017 to work on a then secret challenge, which was finally deliberate to be a brand new entry within the Splinter Cell franchise. Herman admitted his pleasure about engaged on the collection, which to that time had largely been left dormant, and felt that the workforce couldn’t solely inform an awesome story, however do one thing with it that longtime followers would love.
Nevertheless, the sensation would not final lengthy as, simply months later, Ubisoft grew to become extremely within the Games-as-a-Service model, which permits firms to monetize video games for months and typically years after launch, like Future 2, Fortnite, and different online-style video games. Whereas the workforce began prototyping a story GaaS recreation, Ubisoft seemingly determined to pivot off Splinter Cell completely in an effort to make one thing aggressive to a web based shooter like Name of Responsibility.
Extra time, the work took form and finally grew to become XDefiant, a web based multiplayer shooter that collected fictional characters from lots of Ubisoft’s huge franchises like The Division, Rainbow Six, Watch_Dogs, Ghost Recon, Far Cry, Murderer’s Creed and even the aforementioned Splinter Cell. The ill-fated challenge rocketed out to an enormous participant base in Might 2024, changing into the quickest Ubisoft title to hit 1 million distinctive gamers, however momentum shortly slowed down and xDefiant ultimately ended development in December of that very same yr.
Sadly, information hasn’t been any higher for the Splinter Cell collection because the beforehand introduced remake has largely been lacking in motion. Along with its prolonged growth cycle, the Splinter Cell remake game director Andy Schmoll departed the challenge. What’s alarming is that Schmoll finally changed former recreation director David Grivel, who left the challenge someday in 2022. The dearth of stories from Ubisoft in addition to all these workers departures are little question leaving many followers involved concerning the challenge total.
Supply: Bloomberg
