I replayed Conviction recently, and here are my thoughts on the game after a second time through.
Alternate titles:
HoboSamFisherPanther as Jack Bauer in (almost)24: The Gameyes the game almost entirely takes place within 24 or so hours after the opening levels- If this were an Arkham game and Batman were bloodthirsty and wasn't a wuss about shooting a gun
- Conviction is to Splinter Cell as Absolution is to Hitman
- Stealth can still be fun even if you viciously murder everyone and occasionally get spotted
Unmarked spoilers ahead, but if you cared enough about Splinter Cell, you would've already played this game or read the plot somewhere, and if you didn't care, you won't care anyway. Anyone caught in between take heed.
The single player story is something you want to play through once and be done with it. Sam Fisher comes out of hiding because he hears some rumours about his daughter's death in the previous game (Double Agent) and pretty much just sees red the entire course of the game. It turns out this was to lure him out force him to help an old friend, Grim, in preventing your old employers from assassinating the president and playing kingmaker. It never really feels like a traditional Splinter Cell game other than you are Sam Fisher, there is a voice in your ear and there is stealth involved.
If you've followed Hitman: Absolution, it essentially runs in the same vein as Conviction. Splinter Cell: Conviction was not a traditional Splinter Cell game, but a game staring Sam Fisher. Hitman: Absolution was a game staring Agent 47 rather than being much of a Hitman game. In a way, old fans might slip back into the familiar patterns from older games, but the game was something more of a personal, rather than a professional story. So instead of trying to strike a good balance between being cinematic and having a large breadth of interactivity, it felt more like the mechanics of previous games were forced into a narrative that didn't mesh well with what the previous games offered. It happens to be ironic or poetic in a way, since Chaos Theory/Blood Money also happened to be the games in their respective series where they seemed to finally understand what their fans wanted, struck the right balance between interactive and cinematic and accessible.
Alright, so they ruined ghosting but that was because the story informed the game's tone, so most of the encounters reflected that. Everyone knows Sam is coming for them except for a handful of moments, so you can't actually actively ghost through environments where people are literally expecting you at any second and curse you out at every opportunity you can get. If you look on youtube, you can find plenty of people trying to 100% stealth the game, but this usually involves cheating the AI (using plenty of flashbangs or shooting bullets as distractions) and and to avoid actively being detected before they have a chance to see you (also using plenty of flashbangs), and when the game requires it, you have to kill everyone to continue. Occasionally you will see some legit sneakiness, but the actual concept of being a ghost is not long-lived while playing the story mode. There literally have been times where I try to be inconspicuous but it seems like after a certain time limit, the guards stop doing their song and dance and 'turn on' and start to chatter about how they know I'm here even if I haven't even shown up even as a dot on someone's periphery. The guards don't really patrol in any sense of the word and are more actively searching for you; i.e. they are almost always in a certain state of alertness.
In my first run of the game, I didn't take much care in using most of the gadgets (in fact, I was rarely a gadget guy even though that was the whole crux of the series), but if you shift your focus on the fact that you're pretty much stuck having to kill guards to proceed rather than finding some insane method to get past certain guard combinations (short of making a youtube video of it), this game/most encounters can be seen as a predator room/sequence from Batman: Arkham Asylum/City except you can shoot dudes in the face and blow them up with your almost entirely explosive arsenal of gadgets. The game felt much more fun when I used explosive sticky cameras to lure guards towards another environmental explosive and then detonate, or flashbang/emp a group then take a hostage or use it to sneak away. Yes, I even used Mark and Execute to not only track guard positions but also to do some 'play the game for me' laziness. In all honesty though, Mark and Execute was hardly the most offensive thing in the game and I don't really mind that it will be included in the next game. If you don't like it, don't use it. There are equally creative methods to coax stubborn enemies out of their spots without being detected if you have the patience.
So black and white while hidden was a terrible idea and even the director of the game admit it. It definitely wasn't great the second time through because it ruined all that work they put into the game by taking all the colour out of the world because you were skulking in the shadows. If anything, it occasionally made it hard to know the context of your surroundings other than knowing that unless you are in a guard's face, you're safe. At least they let you turn off night vision if you needed to. Here it definitely felt forced on you. Other than that though, I did enjoy the projected text as a way to show objectives or other information without cutting away too often.
Deniable Ops felt like something the series was missing. I thoroughly enjoyed terrorist hunts in other Tom Clancy games (yes I even played it Lone Wolf back in the days of Raven Shield/Athena Sword) so I was happy that it finally made a debut in Conviction and did it in the way I felt best represented the concept. In the other games (other than GR which I didn't play much of), the enemies kind of stood in place and waited for you 99% of the time even if you went in loud guns a blazin'. Here, you have semi-random guard placements, patrols and some actual interesting areas that they place you in and just let you tackle it. None of that crap where enemies are instantly alerted to your presence unless you play sloppily. I really only played Hunter mode (which is just murder anyone, detection adds more enemies) and it felt good to just stalk everyone and kill silently, and there is an Infiltration mode where it is the same but getting detected is a fail. There are actual options, like trading out armour for ammo for gadget space before you start a mission, depending on what you want to do. Also, the missing ghosting in the story? You can ghost to your heart's content in Deniable Ops! (Though a real ghost would never kill everyone, I guess). As someone who enjoyed the hell out of what was offered in Chaos Theory, Deniable Ops was the closest it's come to that game in Conviction form.
So why I'm sort of optimistic about Splinter Cell: Blacklist
- 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 said:
Patrick Redding said: - 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)
But why I'm a bit iffy on Splinter Cell: Blacklist
- 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 (trial-and-error or otherwise).
- 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?
