Despite some reports to the contrary, the remake of 2002 classic Splinter Cell has not been cancelled, but it is going to be a while before it’s out.
There are an awful lot of video game remakes around at the moment and for every welcome surprise, like Silent Hill 2, you get a bizarrely unnecessary waste of space like Until Dawn.
You can sense a backlash stirring against the concept, as ever more inconsequential games get the treatment, but the truth is the great majority of remakes are very well done and, importantly, very successful.
A remake of 2002’s Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell certainly seems like it would be popular but after being announced in 2021 very little has been said or seen of it. Ubisoft still hasn’t revealed any new information, but an insider suggests that progress is continuing… just not very quickly.
In the past, Ubisoft has released a few pieces of concept art and a job listing has described how the team is, ‘rewriting and updating the story for a modern day audience.’
As ever, job ads reveal far more than the publisher ever would in public, with another description stating that the remake will feature, ‘modernised stealth gameplay, while preserving what’s at the heart of the Splinter Cell experience.’
Although these descriptions are official, in the sense that Ubisoft wrote them, they didn’t do so with the thought that anyone but job applicants would see them (a strange delusion which afflicts most publishers).
As a result of the lack of public comments about the game, and the apparent lack of progress, rumours have circulated that the remake has been cancelled, but that is supposedly not the case.
The usually reliable Insider Gaming claims that the game is still in development, under the codename North, and is using Ubisoft’s Snowdrop Engine – which has previously been utilised in the likes of XDefiant and Star Wars Outlaws.
Unfortunately, that’s all they’ve said, beyond the noncommittal suggestion that the game could be released in 2026.
The remake is no doubt being used as a means to judge whether a brand new entry would be well received, which is hard to say given how few stealth games are being made nowadays.
The Splinter Cell franchise was highly successful during the 2000s, with six mainline games and a portable spin-off. It’s popularity, and that of stealth games in general, began to drop off in the 2010s and the last entry was Blacklist in 2013.
Protagonist Sam Fisher has popped up in various other games since then, but it seems fair to say that the character and franchise has faded from the popular consciousness.
By coincidence, contemporary Metal Gear Solid 3 also has a remake coming up and its success will be a useful indication of whether people still have the patience for full-on stealth games. If it is a failure, then that may influence Ubisoft to institute more drastic changes to Splinter Cell.
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