A service game could even have seen the light of day
It’s hard to imagine that veterans of the narrative game genre could one day work on a spy game like Splinter Cellbut that’s what Bloomberg reveals to us in this article. The trio mentioned above joined Ubisoft in 2017, within the publisher’s San Francisco offices. Their goal was then to allow the license Splinter Cell to return to the forefront. Herman says:
“ I was excited to take part in this project and contribute to its revival, as it had been dormant for some time. We thought we could tell a great story and create something that fans would love. »
But complications came to jeopardize this plan. Bloomberg reports that at the time, Ubisoft was obsessed with having many service gamesand management put pressure on Herman’s team to transform this Splinter Cell into a game that could be monetized over several years. Herman says he tried, wanting to ensure that the narrative part of the title adapts well to this economic model:
“ We tried. We said to ourselves: “Let’s create a narrative service game”. We were trying to give meaning to this idea, and we created lots of interesting prototypes. »
Nothing worked though, but Ubisoft’s interest would only have diminished over time, the publisher looking for another model to follow until arriving at XDefiant :
“ The first six months, it was exciting to work on it, because we thought we could create something really great. And then we realize that everything that was important to us no longer matters to them. This is common in the video game world. »
The following year, this small team founded AdHoc and launched into the design of Dispatch. Since then, Ubisoft has failed to revive the license Splinter Cell despite a remake in progress, and the company is at its worst, especially because titles like XDefiant have failed. There is undoubtedly a lesson for the industry here, but it will once again go unnoticed.