Splinter Cell: Game Design Theory

I’m finally playing Splinter Cell Chaos Theory.

Chaos Theory has fabulous production values (even if the visual design—aside from Sam Fisher’s signature goggles—is typically forgettable.) The game's biggest triumph is the sheer number of context sensitive animations. They don’t add much gameplay, but they do succeed in making Sam’s actions feel unusually purposeful. The way he switches to a tip toe creep when skulking near an enemy or the way his head automatically turns towards his prey. Not only have the developers made the animations fluid and expressive, they’ve made the *transitions* between animations smooth. This is key to making a character feel life like.

Any schmoe can mocap an animation and stick it on a character model. But to make sure said animation, at any given moment, can be interrupted by another animation and not seem artificial… that’s the secret sauce. Chaos Theory does this as well as any game I can remember. The real show stopper is how Sam stops in mid-creep when you let up on the move button. At literally any point in his creep animation you can just stop, and instead of reverting to his squatting stance Sam just freezes in mid step, wavering ever-so-slightly. This creates a marvelous sense of tension when closing in on an oblivious enemy. It looks like Sam is holding his breath, internally battling to keep his balance in that exact position, lest any movement give him away. It’s a wonderfully realized aspect of Sam’s character, making him seem both more human and more comical. One could imagine a similar physical gesture in a Chaplin or Keaton film. In an artform where movement is everything, characters are defined by how they move. This is what the makers of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus know better than anyone, and a bit of that knowledge is on display in Chaos Theory.

Otherwise, Chaos Theory is not terribly amazing. What Splinter Cell really delivers on is sheer production value and polish. It’s a great looking game and a great playing game. Everything it attempts it realizes effectively. This is why, I suppose, some people consider it the pinnacle of the stealth genre: it has virtually no flaws. But it has virtually no ambition either. Splinter Cell, as a series, brings almost nothing original to the table. It’s a patchwork of features and mechanics swiped from other stealth games. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it does basically mean that polish is about the only thing that sets Splinter Cell apart from the competition.

I do not prefer innovation alone, just as I do not prefer polish alone. But I tend to favor innovation over polish provided the innovative game contains at least a basic level of polish and its mechanics are not totally broken. I suppose this is why I prefer Hitman to Splinter Cell as far as what the Western world as to offer the stealth genre. The Hitman games are not graphical powerhouses, but they manage to not look shabby while innovating in non-linear gameplay far beyond what Splinter Cell even tries to achieve. The simulatory aspects of Hitman are robust and, for me, encompass all the tension that Splinter Cell has to offer within a larger framework of persistent, realtime world dynamics. In Blood Money there’s a mission where, in order to assassinate an opera singer onstage during a live performance, you have to wait and snipe him at the *exact* moment he is shot by a fake gun as part of the opera. This is not an event that starts and stops as the result of a cinematic or because you cross some invisible line that triggers it. The mission lasts for the duration of the opera, and the rest is sheer clockwork. To me that’s compelling in ways most stealth games don’t approach, and even if the realtime aspect makes it more frustrating than the bite size “one hallway, one problem” design of Splinter Cell, I’m willing to put up with it because of how fresh the experience feels.

There’s nothing wrong with Splinter Cell, but it is not the best the West has to offer. Many like to compare Splinter Cell to Metal Gear because of the military theme, but Metal Gear is such a different creature, operating under a such wildly different design logic, that comparing them doesn’t feel very useful in the end. Hitman is the only other high profile stealth series that seems to have the realism-oriented and simulatory (i.e. Western) design goals as Splinter Cell. Out of those two I think Hitman trumps it in terms of ambition, and the hit it takes in production value is negligible. Since Thief has faded away (thanks to Thief III’s failure to reinvent itself) there hasn’t been much left to carry the torch. Hitman fills this need as well as any as far as I’m concerned. It’s pushing the genre, not just its own IP, forward.

In short, I doubt a Splinter Cell game will come out that I won’t play. But I also doubt there will ever be a Splinter Cell game I’ll truly love. I need something a little more unpredictable to really stoke my passion.