The guy on the right has a daughter too, Sam. Did you ever think about that?
For me, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory was about being Sam Fisher, Modern American Ninja, and fighting the battle for his soul as he walked the line between hero and monster. The game kept careful records of how you dealt with guards; you could sneak by, incapacitate them, or kill them, but violence reduced your score. Most enemies could be interrogated for more information by grabbing them from behind and making vague threats. You had separate buttons for lethal and non-lethal melee attacks, extremely limited ammo (you could have up to three clips for your assault rifle on each mission), and a wide variety of less-lethal projectiles to experiment with.
I felt like a real hero. I could work hard to avoid killing people as I achieved my objectives, and the game not only enabled that, it supported it. You’re the kind of person who prevents wars, stops trouble, and does so with the lightest touch possible. You could be an unstoppable assassin, but you aren’t. You’re better than that. You know you’re a hero because you go out of your way to do no evil. I would kill in self-defense, and then feel regret afterwards, wondering if Sam’s surrender would have been more ethical than killing innocent soldiers and grunts. I was given the luxury of thinking like that, whether I was up against naive South American revolutionaries, conscripted North Korean soldiers, or US veterans turned civilian contractors.
It hasn’t stayed that way. With Splinter Cell: Conviction, some people have talked about the inability to move bodies as indicative of the series’ turn toward action over stealth; personally, I’m more disturbed by the inability to complete the game without a huge body count. You can sneak through some areas, but others are unabashed action sequences in which you must systematically kill everyone in the room. Or a whole series of rooms. Or basically kill everyone in a multistory office building. They don’t count your kills and deduct them from your score anymore; quite on the contrary, they give you special tools so you can kill more people faster.
In Splinter Cell: Conviction, I wade through the corpses of my fallen enemies, and interrogate people by smashing their faces into concrete. I don’t feel like a good person. I’m not Batman, Dark Knight, doing what has to be done to protect the people from evil. I’m John Rambo, the empty male power fantasy. It’s kind of sad; like Rambo before him, Sam Fisher has been transformed over time into an empty, unstoppable killing machine.
The battle over Sam’s soul used to be mine to fight. But this time, the writers decided the outcome for me. He lost. He slid down the slippery slope and became a butcher.
So much for conviction.
Yes I feel exactly the same! I played the old Splinter Cell games with minimal bodycount and that felt real and responsible. After reading about the gameplay in Conviction I knew that the developers are now making games that are not for me anymore.
Kinda sad. I liked Sam back in the day.
The previous games feeling real and responsible is a great way of putting it. By making the game more bloody, they had to justify it by making the common enemies more heartless and evil. As a result, the world feels less real. In Chaos Theory, I sometimes felt bad for my enemies. In Conviction, I didn’t believe they existed.
Absolutely in agreement.
I feel you.
I haven’t been reading your blog much so I don’t know if you’ve talked about it earlier (I will fix that with RSS + Thunderbird :P) but it’s disappointing when, even though there might be alternatives, it’s just so much easier to apply the worst kind of violence and be done with whatever problem.
And I’m not talking just about action games. Look at civilization, for example. It apparently presents you with other alternatives other than utterly smashing every other civilization but, that comes so easily and without penalties that you just realize nothing else is worth it. You want to be a good guy but it’s really counterproductive.
Many poor games advocate violence as, if not the only method, the most effective one to achieve ANY goal.
Good post; I was nodding as I read.
I’ve not played Chaos Theory, but I remember spending days and days immersed in Double Agent. The environments were atmospheric, the missions challenging, and it felt like the player had choice, or as a commenter puts it, was “responsible”. You could kill people, but you knew that if you did, it wasn’t ideal, and would lead to problems – moving bodies, alerting guards, etc. I’ll play it again, one day (I wish I had it on the 360, but the Playstation 2 version will have to do).
I only played Conviction for about a day and quickly tired of it, for the reasons you note, the choices, but also for the weak mission design. And of course, the two things stem, I imagine, from the same thing: poor decisions at the game’s inception, and a lack of reflection on flaws and weaknesses during its production.