Thursday 5-Jan-2006 3:27 PM Double Agent's co-producer Julien Gerighty gives us the lowdown on Sam Fisher's latest escapade Sam Fisher gone bad? How did this happen? It only seems like yesterday he was saving the world again in Chaos Theory and now just one year on (in both game and real terms) Fisher's gone over to the dark side and become a common criminal with tatts and a shaved head. Say it isn't so....
Well actually we now know it isn't so, because the clue's in the title see, with Fisher becoming a Double Agent to infiltrate an apparently small time criminal organisation known as John Brown's Army which has designs on a scale far larger than anyone can imagine.
Much of Splinter Cell 4's details are still being kept veiled (something about protecting the innocent) but we decided it was high time that we caught up with the guys making the game to find out more. So we tracked down Julien Gerighty, co-producer on the Xbox 360 version of the game, to find out the skinny on Sam's latest adventure. Although he was comparitively tight lipped (even under extensive 'persuasion') we nevertheless managed to extract some interesting information including why Sam hasn't really become a bank robbing psycho, and why Uwe Boll should never direct the Splinter Cell movie.
How have you managed to turn around a sequel so quickly after Chaos Theory?
Julien Gerighty: We had two teams working in parallel, basically one team, the SC4 team has been in production for a long long time, basically before Chaos Theory was even finished. That allowed us to keep everything really fresh, and introduce a lot of new ideas and new concepts and technology each time we release a SC game.
We notice that Sam Fisher has been put in jail. How did he get in there?
Julien Gerighty: Basically it's a time of crisis in his life. Sam's daughter has just died, and Sam has ended up depressed and empty and has been approached by his agency to become an undercover operative. So he's given a background story, which is that he's robbed a bank and killed some people. He's now in jail and teams up with one of the terrorist inmates Jamie Washington, but his real agenda is to infiltrate this criminal organisation, the John Brown Army, and the story carries on from there.
So Sam hasn't turned into a bank-robbing, killing psycho, he's still Sam Fisher but he's maybe a bit more personally exposed than he's ever been before. This isn't a guy who's lonely and depressed and thinking about himself all the time, he's very focused on his mission, he's definitely got more personal convictions than he's ever had.
Why is the terrorist organization called John Brown Army?
Julien Gerighty: John Brown is actually a historical figure who rallied against the government. That's the story behind that. It actually comes from a band known at the Masters of Reality. That's the only reason they're called that - for the record!
Will we ever see Sam's trademark goggles and stealth suit again?
Julien Gerighty: Yeah oh yeah, it's a part that's in the game, but it's not a 100 percent of the game. There are some stealth sections in the game but goggles, suits? Not in prison. However, other levels push that concept forward and there's some interesting twists on the stealth and new challenges.
What new gameplay features can we expect this time around?
Julien Gerighty: Well on 360 you'll obviously have gameplay based on larger areas. We have some massive areas where you swim, climb up and get onto a supertanker in the middle of the night. Gameplay will actually be more influenced by weather as well and you'll actually have to use weather conditions to your advantage. The weather conditions are actually quite intricately linked with the gameplay on the 360 version of the game. We have achieved a lot with shadows and lighting and we've had to develop new ways of making the hardware work with the gameplay.
What feedback or criticisms of Chaos Theory have you focused on while developing Splinter Cell 4?
Julien Gerighty: Trial and error. The difficulty and the elite nature of the online part. These are all things that we definitely considered. The difficulty level is a very big influence on how you play the game and the Elite difficulty level will really challenge even the best Splinter Cell players we've seen.
Sam's left the Third Echelon - does this mean that we won't be getting our hands on any high-tech weaponry and gadgets in Splinter Cell 4?
Julien Gerighty: Now he's part of a terrorist group, if he had a bunch of gadgets and gizmos, the terrorists would be very suspicious and want to know where he got that gear from. Sam will be doing a lot more and using the environment a lot more. Of course there are gadgets but they take a long time to acquire. We have upgrades to some equipment and I can't reveal too much, but I will give you one. Because of the dual nature of Sam's mission, if you do well with the Agency they will lend you satellite support, to show enemies' locations during the mission. If you play with more a terrorist orientation, you'll do without that support but then slightly different elements will come into play.
What kind of locations and environments will we see in the game?
Julien Gerighty: Well we're taking Sam Fisher from the base of the terrorist cell in New Orleans to New York, to Washington and abroad to places like Kinshasa and Shanghai. We'll have massive buildings, he'll be going everywhere from underwater, to streets on fire in the middle of a war. We really did think hard about the locations, the type of environments and what kind of events could happen in those locations rather than just thinking how many we've got. There's the Chinese New Year celebrations with massive fireworks and there'll be a lot of things going on around you that bring a lot more reality to those events.
What kind of graphical improvements can we expect over Chaos Theory?
Julien Gerighty: Again it's not technology for technology's sake. If we can use the technology to heighten the sense of realism in what you see, then we've done our job well. We're really pushing the shading and lighting effects, the special effects, we're basically doing much much more with the hardware.
You've obviously put quite a lot of work into the story this time around. How much deeper is the story telling compared to the previous games?
Julien Gerighty: Well I think the previous games had great stories, but were based on assembling pieces of the puzzle and putting them slowly together. So for example in Pandora Tomorrow, you had to do mission one to find out what mission two was about. This time we've got real Hollywood guys working on it and we've got some really really good stuff written by these guys. I can't really go into all the details right now as we don't want to give too much away, but involves a huge threat against the government of the United States on American soil, but the actual threat isn't pinpointed until quite late in the game. But Sam's the guy who tracks it down and collects and assembles the information to discover what the actual cell and the real threat is.
Does the story have any ties with the future Splinter Cell movie?
Julien Gerighty: You know, the movie in the works has been Hollywood coming to Ubisoft and saying we want to make a movie based on Splinter Cell. But we're kind of protective about it and we don't want Uwe Boll coming along and making a movie out of it. It's a question of picking and choosing who we're working with. I don't think it will have anything to do with Splinter Cell 4. Maybe the people who are making the movie will take inspiration from it, but the game wasn't envisioned that way at all.
Does the series' classic hide-and-seek multiplayer or co-op mode feature in Splinter Cell 4?
Julien Gerighty: For Xbox 360 we can't really talk about it right now, but for current-gen incarnations we wanted the multiplayer direction to be all about accessibility. Accessibility is our buzz word, obviously it'll have stealth elements but again, we don't want to give away too much right now.
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