Time Extend
Dipping back into the surprisingly influential Splinter Cell: Conviction
Good hunters use the whole animal. That’s what we’re told apocryphally, at least – that the greatest tribute the killer can pay the beast, short of not killing it in the first place, is to waste nothing from snout to hoof. If that’s true, then Ubisoft is an excellent hunter, and Splinter Cell: Conviction its most honoured prize. There’s no part of the 2010 Clancy thriller that hasn’t been reused by the company in some way since. To Watch Dogs, Ubisoft gave the low cover that turns stealth into a line-of-sight maze game; to
The Division, the button prompt that sends a protagonist rushing from one piece of cover to the next in a single, dirt-hugging animation; to Ghost Recon Wildlands, the mark-and-execute command that drops multiple targets simultaneously; and to
Assassin’s Creed Unity, the silhouette that conveys your last known position, a translucent on-screen chess piece to factor into your plans.
That’s before you take into account all the games made beyond Ubisoft’s borders.
Conviction’s mechanics have travelled outward from Montreal, penetrating the walls of game studios all over the world, like the sonic pulses of Sam Fisher’s sonar goggles. As a result, though Splinter Cell has been dormant for nearly eight years, its mechanics feel very much in vogue.
Any game historian can tell you, however, that there is no such thing as an origin point, only older and older influences. For Conviction, the key progenitor was Rainbow Six: Vegas, which game director Maxime Béland had led a few years prior. Updating a hardcore tactical shooter for the age of Gears Of War had been no easy task, but Béland split the difference, building Vegas around a cover system that pinned the protagonist to the nearest wall with a squeeze of the left trigger. When Béland moved on to Conviction, the cover key came too. It kept its prominent button mapping, and became central to the experience: this was to be the first-ever cover sneaker. Rather than bullets, players would be dodging sightlines, putting thick plaster between themselves and the searching eyes of private military murderers.
For players, the change from previous
Splinter Cells was apparent immediately. The series had always given players options for how they approached a room full of goons, but an option is no use if you don’t know you have it. Conviction was first to present a clear and obvious buffet of piled tyres, pianos, wine racks, countertops and, yes, overhead pipes – all discrete choices in planning your approach, visible at a glance.
Returning to a game that’s been stripped for parts by the mainstream is no temporal leap at all. It’s as familiar as picking up a knife and fork, fingers reporting to their usual positions without a thought. Oddly enough, the only anachronism among Conviction’s mechanics is Splinter Cell’s bread and butter: light and shadow. Afterwards, the stealth genre moved away from darkness as a measure of visibility toward pure line-of-sight. Even direct Thief descendants such as Dishonored and Deus Ex: Human Revolution would embrace
Conviction’s focus on cover – the latter also filching the wall-hugging Vegas trigger for good measure. Yet Conviction itself couldn’t quite let go of bursting light bulbs.
Béland and team settled for dressing their fuddy-duddy darkness mechanic as youthfully as possible, scrapping the light meter in favour of a colour-drain effect. When Fisher is in shadow, he sees things in black and white, just like his bosses in the US national security establishment.
Many will remember Conviction for its brusque sense of visual style. Mission objectives are projected in stark sans serif onto walls, as if Fisher’s handler is setting up slides in the bushes behind him. Sometimes, moments from his past will play out on the projector in Paul Greengrass shakycam. And during key scenes, Ubisoft Montreal even spells out Fisher’s feelings in capital letters: MISTRUST, HOPE, ANGER.
It’s patronising, perhaps, but this brash and immediate form of storytelling was welcome at the time. The previous Splinter Cell game, Double Agent, had left a complicated mess in its wake, filling Third Echelon’s morgue with key characters. To its credit, Conviction wastes no time in stepping over the bodies – dealing briefly with one death, retconning another – and pushing
WHEN A GUARD CORRECTLY GUESSES
YOUR POSITION WHEN WONDERING
ALOUD, YOUR HEART BEATS FASTER
forward. It doesn’t do for a techno-thriller to get bogged down in canon.
There’s a lot of Bourne, and the strippedback spy films that followed in Matt Damon’s wake, in Conviction. Its Sam Fisher, usually resplendent in a matte-black diving suit, is now a fugitive sporting a tatty green sweater. The government-issued snake camera he once fed under doors is replaced by a car mirror, smashed from an SUV in Malta. It’s an improvisational aesthetic that matches Conviction’s stealth, which encourages you to roll with the punches.
Being spotted in classic Splinter Cell was a cause of frustration, a prompt to reload and try the sequence from scratch. But the ‘last known position’ silhouette, which jumps from Fisher’s skin when seen, as if the ghost has been scared out of him, turns that failure into something of tactical use. Conviction rewards you with upgrade points for messing with enemies in pursuit of your false image; for hitting them over the head from behind, or slotting them from across the room.
The punchy, no-nonsense feel gets literal in interrogations, the first of which is set in a grimy bathroom, ripped straight from the black-and-white opening of Casino Royale, a fellow Bourne homage. These are marquee scenes in which Fisher smashes heads through sinks and dangles victims from windows in pursuit of information, which he gets, in keeping with the technothriller genre’s tacit endorsement of torture.
The interrogations have only become more uncomfortable with Béland’s recent resignation from Ubisoft, after accusations of inappropriate workplace behaviour – including the alleged choking of a female colleague at a work party. One early moment in Conviction finds Fisher’s handler, Anna Grímsdóttir, goading him into striking her in order to fake a violent escape. “Make it look good,” Grim says. “Hit me. Do what you have to do.” Fuming over an apparent betrayal, Fisher gets in an extra hit beyond the point necessary to sell the cover story.
It’s a male gaze that steers the shaky cameras of Conviction. Enemies refer to Grim as the Ice Queen, and provoke Fisher by calling his daughter a whore. During one flashback, in which thieves break into his house and threaten to wait for the “hot lady” to get home, you’re ordered to PROTECT YOUR FAMILY. The women in Fisher’s life are often simply an excuse for violence.
Grim is the partial exception, given agency in the story – command over a secret agency, to be precise – but little interesting to say beyond exposition. That’s a shame, since Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory’s best writing played the generational gap between Fisher and Grim for laughs. While the former was sleeping in a Baghdadi ditch during the Gulf War, the latter was in tenth grade. Both, they joke, had a bad year.
Conviction trades on that history, if a tad too straightforwardly – sending Fisher back to Iraq in flashback for an explosive shootout
along the Highway of Death in Diwaniya. It’s a long way from the crowd-blending mechanics Ubisoft Montreal originally had planned for Conviction, though echoes of social stealth are suggested by a couple of daylight levels stuffed with civilians. One, set at a county fair beneath the Washington Monument, finds Fisher tailing a bald target who wears a black suit and a tie that touches his waist. Beating up Agent 47 is either a tribute or taunt to IO Interactive – exactly which is a matter for interpretation.
Amid the experimentation, it’s voice actor Michael Ironside who anchors Conviction, his dry baritone rendering this a Splinter Cell game beyond any doubt. Though you’re free to tackle most encounters with a mixture of stealth and action, Ironside will grade your performance according to his old-school principles. “Getting a little cocky,” he might mutter under his breath in self-recrimination. Or, if you’ve snuck by unseen: “I still got it”.
Conviction became somewhat notorious on release for its AI barks – not those from Fisher himself, but the yells of his opponents. Some are still effective: when a guard correctly guesses your position when wondering aloud, your heart beats a little faster. Less successful are those that reference previous events with unnatural specificity. “Didn’t like the rides at the Monument fair, Fisher?” screams a guard at a secret lab. “Preferred dying with the geeks?”
It wasn’t just the dialogue that turned out to be controversial, either. While wellreviewed, it proved a reinvention too far for many stealth fans, who balked at the helicopter chases and Gears-lite cover shooting. In a genre that celebrates smarts over brawn, combat ineptitude is considered a plus, and Fisher had become too competent in a firefight. Some suggested that Splinter Cell’s new direction was a concession to the mainstream, making room for the kind of impatience Chaos Theory’s designers would never have tolerated. Conviction’s follow-up, Blacklist, walked back some of that aggression, fitting its maps with air ducts for Fisher to crawl through.
Yet, for a short game with a mixed reputation, Conviction has been surprisingly influential. It’s rarely given credit, but perhaps its natural place is in the darkness it wasn’t ready to leave behind. As antagonist Colonel Tom Reed puts it: “The man on stage is the man with the least cover.”