17-Aug-2006 Series producer Mathieu Ferland takes a wander down Sam Fisher memory lane... Sam Fisher has saved the world more than a few times now, but we regard his biggest and best adventure so far as last year's Chaos Theory, which saw the superspy stuck in the middle of a massive global information war. Before Sam gets a new hairdo and goes all bad in Double Agent, we managed to get an audience with series producer Mathieu Ferland, who gave us the lowdown on the making of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory - and more importantly, his attempts at finding girlfriends for two members of the development team... Here's his top eight insights into the theory of Chaos...
1) SETTING GOALS: "While Pandora Tomorrow's teams in Shanghai and Annecy (France) were dedicated to creating a new type of multiplayer experience, the Montreal team were already working on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. Our basic intention for the game was to provide the best quality in every element of its design - those that have real meaning to gamers. To achieve this, we read a lot of fan forums and conducted research to clarify what elements gamers most appreciated and to discover what content is less popular. From these observations and based on our own instinct, we identified many features to focus on in Chaos Theory, and our mindset and main objective was to include them all so we could make the best Splinter Cell ever.
"Basically, gamers wanted more open environments and free objectives: they wanted to create their own experience. Implementing this was such a challenge in a game like Splinter Cell because it deeply affected many gameplay elements, and so forced us to think of all possibilities and make things work whatever the player did. We wanted to improve the general tension in the game based on proximity and provide contextual cool situations to deal with, but also to equip the player with appropriate skills and tools, like Sam's knife and close-combat abilities."
2) WRESTLING WITH TECHNOLOGY: "Pushing technology is always a risk because being the first to do something implies that you might use primitive tools to develop content, as well as investing a lot of money in R&D. We wanted to provide a real next-gen feeling on current generation hardware. The technology had been developed early enough in development to switch to production quite efficiently. However, it was a real challenge because tools to produce such quality visuals were not totally optimised at the time. More importantly, we realised that creating such high levels of detail was time consuming and very costly for the project. Still, we wanted every level to be different and every zone to be unique. We'd never have reached such quality were it not for the massively motivated efforts of the whole team."
3) FAN FEEDBACK: "We referred to fan feedback a lot - it was a major consideration for Chaos Theory, but as mentioned we also needed to trust our developer instinct experience. For example, the knife was the most wanted weapon by fans and it was a perfect fit with our intention to enhance tension based on proximity. With this in mind, the decision was easy to take and it was one of the first elements we added to Chaos Theory."
4) ADDING AND SUBTRACTING: "There were a few restrictions we needed to take into account when considering new weapons or gadgets. Globally, we were more restricted by animations than by actual gadgets. Considering the new systems and gameplay possibilities, we had to make choices with the player's weapons and abilities. For example, the 'SWAT turn' was removed in Chaos Theory, but we tried to design the game so that players didn't feel the need to do it - and they didn't miss it as a result. We did increase the gadget and weapon possibilities though, especially for fire-fight situations such as the shotgun and sniper rifle. We were able to keep most of our original weapon list, but we had to 'organise' them appropriately in different weapon's attachments to keep the controls simple."
5) BUG-HUNTING: "Considering the ambition and complexity of Chaos Theory development, it was a lot of work - bloody hard work too. In fact, the team had to fix more bugs than in any other Ubisoft game ever: more than 50,000! Bugs or quality issues were mostly coming from the non-linear navigation. There was often a new context found by the QA team that we needed to deal with. Moreover, because of the high quality of the graphics, we needed to match many other elements like sound effects, animation, interactive objects or simply to improve collision detection, otherwise we could have seen a quality gap between the elements making up the game. Unfortunately, some of these gaps were unpredictable, since many parts of the game were put together late in development."
6) PLAYING CUPID: "During development, we decided that we'd help find a girlfriend for two of the team leads working on Chaos Theory. This was a good challenge since they'd been spending most of their time in the office, and therefore hadn't seen much of the real world. However, by the time the game had been completed, the team ended up with a 50% success rating in our challenge. I could tell you what happened after that, but I reckon I'll leave that for another time..."
7) MISSED FEATURES: "There are some things we would have liked to have included in Chaos Theory if we'd had more time. Just as an example, we wanted to have more special features for the top alert level; when AI is in the highest level of stress, looking for you and firing at you. The AI was supposed to build barricades and use it as cover while shooting, stuff like that. We had to give up this feature though, for both technical reasons and time. Still, we were satisfied with the results on AI. Also, I wish we could have developed more co-op missions in the game, but I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out because they proved to be very popular with gamers."
8) CO-OP MODE: "The technology in Chaos Theory was highly improved over the previous Splinter Cell, and we needed to make everything online compatible in order to develop a type of experience we had in mind for a long time: a true co-operative experience. In Chaos Theory, we wanted to add an extra dimension to the game by adding the ability to play with a partner using the core solo mechanics. The pace of Splinter Cell, with its large number of slow animations and tactics was a perfect match for a nice co-operative experience, especially with the nice third-person camera angles. I really do think there's a lot of potential for co-op games in the videogames market, as long as you can match the interest with core gameplay mechanics."
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