Splinter Cell: Blacklist wants to force choices between 'wrong and wrong-er'

Splinter Cell: Blacklist creative director Maxime Beland talks about giving moral choice to the player to reflect real world events, but not tying it to a gameplay system.

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Moral ambiguity is everywhere in video games these days, from the war epic Spec Ops: The Line to the upcoming dystopic thriller The Last of Us. Clearly developers are trying to make for a more thoughtful brand of mass murder, and Splinter Cell: Blacklist is no exception. Ubisoft creative director Maxime Beland talked about how the choices won't be black-and-white in Sam Fisher's next outing.

"We love the idea of putting the player in those situations that [real soldiers] are going through," Beland told Game Informer. "It's not a question sometimes of doing the right thing or the wrong thing. Sometimes it's I need to do the wrong or the wrong-er. What do I do? There's no good option. So for us, the interrogations are a bit of that. We want to put the player into situations that are like the one we're showing at E3; the guy just told you everything you needed to know. You're done. You're good. You're Sam Fischer. This guy is finished. Are you going to kill him?"

He says the key to showing morality in a game is to make sure it isn't attached to a gameplay system itself. "If we told you, if you're the good guy, you're gonna to get this, and if you're the bad guy, you're gonna get that, you're not thinking 'what am I doing here?' In those moments, what I like is when you play them and you talk to your friend about it after, you say 'I did this. What do you think?' That's the kind of discussion we want. And I think it's cool to make people reflect on it and hopefully grow as humans a little bit. Because we've got some guys everywhere in the world that are making those decisions every day for us."

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From The Chatty
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    July 17, 2012 1:00 PM

    Steve Watts posted a new article, Splinter Cell: Blacklist wants to force choices between 'wrong and wrong-er'.

    Splinter Cell: Blacklist creative director Maxime Beland talks about giving moral choice to the player to reflect real world events, but not tying it to a gameplay system.

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      July 17, 2012 1:10 PM

      Hmmm...sounds cool. I'm still trying to get past no Ironside. I'll get there because I'm a fan, but boy will I miss that voice!

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        July 17, 2012 1:32 PM

        Wait what? He's not Sam Fisher? Fuck that.

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      July 17, 2012 1:13 PM

      Having a choice between grey and bad wasn't very satisfying in Invisible War.

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      July 17, 2012 1:15 PM

      Every time a company says this, the choices end up being near meaningless and have no real impact on the story

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      July 17, 2012 7:31 PM

      WTF?!! Is that Fisher holding an AK???

      Back then you couldn't even pick up a gun like AK cus it's not a stealth weapon, it's an action weapon.

      Fuck it, god help me and bring on the imps.

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        July 17, 2012 7:31 PM

        Fuck "action stealth."

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        July 17, 2012 8:28 PM

        [deleted]

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          July 18, 2012 6:44 AM

          Conviction let you use action non-stealth weapons but I still played with only the silenced pistol and loved every minute it.

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            July 18, 2012 6:50 AM

            Same here.

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            July 18, 2012 7:03 AM

            i'm iffy about trying Conviction. i'm playing Double Agent now and while it's not terrible, it's just not as fun as Chao Theory was for me.

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