SDCC 2009: Splinter Cell Conviction Preview
Posted by Jeffrey Harris on 08.02.2009
SDCC '09 First Look: Ubisoft invites 411mania to the Omni hotel for a night of drinks, haircuts, backpacks, and vengeful execution.
Last Friday of SDCC, the folks at Ubisoft invited us to visit them at the Omni Hotel Art Gallery for the Ubisoft convention party. Besides an open bar, a makeshift, old fashioned barbershop was set up in the room to give attendees special haircuts. In addition, Ubisoft gave out one of the cooler giveaways at the convention. In the new Splinter Cell Conviction Game, Sam Fisher carries around and uses a one strap backpack very similar to this one:
Keep in mind gamers. Wearing this backpack does not imbue you with the badass powers and mad skillz of Sam Fisher. It is super cool though.
The presentation set up for Conviction was a video demo presentation only as the producers of the game ran through the early stages. Basically the idea of conviction to make the game play and story as fluid and progressive as possible. What they've done here is incorporate the heavy story elements of Splinter Cell into a more active characteristic of the game play. So cut scenes and flashbacks occur as a sort of mental projection while you are already knee deep into the gameplay.
In this game, Sam Fisher (Michael Ironside back again) has gone off the deep end after the murder of his daughter. Driven by vengeance, Fisher is no longer affiliated with any organization and now is on a quest to kill his daughter's murderer which is where the beginning of the game takes you. Fisher beats up and interrogates a thug and continues his search in Malta. The environments and graphics look fantastic. Much like Uncharted 2: Among Thieves' approach, the game play is much more cinematic this time around. There's no load time and the game play virtually never stops.
Some other cool features is there is a type of pre-set mode you can use the better you get at your stealth kills. So you can look into a room and pick out where and who you are going to shoot your weapon. You can bust into a room guns blazing, or you can peak under the crack of a door with a broken piece of a mirror. Sort of as an evolution to classic MGS, the better you are at stealth, the bigger the rewards. There's a feature that leaves basically a ghost/shadow image which represents the last place you were seen by your enemies, so if you pull the move off, that's where your enemies will look so you can get the drop on them. There was an amazing sequence where you are in a room full of thugs, so you scale up a pipe on the ceiling out of sight. You use your pre-set mode and take out a chandelier which crashed down on the enemies below. Nice. At the end of the demo preview, Fisher is about to get some well deserved retribution over his daughter's killer, but he's ambushed and taken captive. INTRIGUE!
Splinter Cell Conviction lands on the Xbox 360 and PC some time in 2010.
