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Splinter Cell Interview Pt 4
Part 4 of our exclusive interview with Splinter Cell Conviction's Creative Director, Max Beland.
Written by Jon Denton, 14 March 2010
JD: It's more of a personal story than the other games, which felt a bit more procedural. Is that fair?
MB: I think what's interesting is that as developers we're getting older, we're maturing, and we are starting to think about those things. You played the flashback with Sarah the three year old? It's not a surprise that there is a three year old in the game, I have a three year old son, and the dialogue in there... it's funny, I was reading on the forums, that part got released on the web and there was a lot of people were talking about that scene and people liked it and I was happy, then one guy said 'oh the writing's bad, Sam would never say that?' The guy who wrote straight after said 'no, that's how you talk to kids. I like it because we are maturing and we are ready to tell stories that are more personal. Yes it's great to write a story about a geopolitical threat against the United States blah blah blah, but I don't live that. I can think about it and it's still a subject I find very interesting, but it's hard to put a part of me in it, versus having a personal side to Sam is interesting because it shows that he's not just a robot that's listening to orders and killing people, and moving forward..so that's interesting and since E3 people have been talking about it and he's really connecting with people... so fuck yeah, and it's cool how he did have a daughter and she did get killed in double agent so what happened..
You're supposed to die before your kids die, so before Sam was all Mr 'I'm in control' so that must have fucked him up so bad, so that was a real trigger point for us on the story to work on
JD: That creates pathos, right? In too many games you're expected to care, the amount of games I've played where some key character dies three quarters of the way through and you're like 'I don't give a fuck, he was just a bunch of polygons' because there's no pathos, all I've been doing is shooting dudes for eight hours...
MB: Exactly. Emotions in games is a hard one..
JD: Have you played Heavy Rain?
360Zine Issue 41
For our latest Splinter Cell Conviction coverage, click here to download 360Zine Issue 41 for free.MB: I've played the demo.
JD: It does a lot well
MB: I want to play it. I want to play it completely so I have a full understanding of everything the guys did, but yeah I'll have to play it. We were talking about it last night at dinner. I don't like games where I have a choice that - I call it the 'blind' choice - and that's how the part of Heavy Rain I played, which is basically like 'pick a hand, and either you get 500 bucks or we slap you in the face'. They're both the same so I don't know. To me, when you're the investigator, the PI, and you're in the room with the prostitute and you leave the money on the table. Yeah it's a choice but I don't know what that's going to cause. I guess I need to put myself in it, so I have to role play it, would I put money down if she asked me, but what I find is that then I'm just trying to role play a character and I don't know if that's the right way or the wrong way to play. So I'm uncomfortable when I'm faced with that. I think it's cool, it seems to do a lot of things like if you've done something then two hours later the repercussions are still going to be there. At the same time, though, as a player, I'm not going to see those paths that I don't pick. I'm not going to see that, I'm not going to play the game six times to see all the different endings, so I'll see. It's going to be interesting.
JD: Back to Conviction. Was coop part of the package from day one?
MB: Coop was started a bit later, actually. The coop team stated in January of 2009 so the guys had a year. I'm super happy because they fucking delivered a 6 hour prequel story that includes new gameplay systems plus the whole deniable ops game modes that we have playable in single player and coop and split screen. I was talking about the strength of Ubisoft and it shows our ability to create a team and make them work on content super-fast. They had a year.
JD: I was amazed when I found out that it had its own story and that tied in with the game
MB: I was talking before 'why make things simple?' For the coop we did full story and prequel to the single player and some characters are in both. It's not like a full overlap of everything, but it's still, we could have kept things simpler. I'm super happy, I'm excited I think, I hope you play to the end of coop, there's a super nice ending there that I'm super proud of, and you'll understand other things in single playe because of it, so it's nice, it's fun to create a world that is coherent with in itself so I'm happy with coop.
My number one hope is people see Conviction for what it is and not what they expect the result to be , because we did change what it is, and I'm super stressed because I know that ... I read the forums, and some people on the forums... I get the impression they would have just liked us to make Chaos Theory 2, change nothing to the gameplay, new story and that's it. I hope people understand that we didn't just make a me-too game, we did take a lot of risks we did change the gameplay. I think we redefined what stealth is, I think it works and I'm excited to see some of the things we've done influence other games. The way we did stealth, the way we did projected movies... the projected text. I was super happy at E3 when we came out with the projected movies it was like us putting the flag on the moon, we're first. In the months before we were like 'oh shit are we going to be the first to do it', I really wanted to be the first. Once we did, I'm excited. There's a lot of ideas we didn't implement which we're including later, but for now, I'm super-happy.
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