Splinter Cell: Conviction ‘became a rescue job’

Splinter Cell: Conviction became a rescue job after a trouble development, Blacklist’s creative director Maxime Béland has claimed.

Conviction was an action-oriented reboot of the popular stealth series, but many fans were upset with some of the changes.

"I’m not going to go into the whole story," Béland told Joystiq.

"But Conviction was kind of a rescue job for me."

He and another producer were "brought in because it wasn’t going well. We changed the direction and kind of shipped the game in two years. So Conviction is very sweet and sour for me."

The result of all this is that Béland feels he has a better grasp of what drew customers to Splinter Cell

"We have these three player profiles, player archetypes in our heads," he said.

"We have the ghost player, that doesn’t want to kill or get detected. We’ve got our action/tank/killer player on the other end of the spectrum, that just wants to throw frag grenades, blind fire, shoot people in the head. And then in the middle, we have what we call the panther."

"So we’re building the game with those three archetypes in mind."

This means changing mechanics to allow players to customize their loadouts to suit these playstyles.

"You’re really going to be able to mix and match different parts of suits to make your own Sam," said Béland.