My brother, Evan, lives in the Seattle area, so of course he attended PAX. Nick, Eddy and I might have gone, except we were busily working on a Smooth Few Films mystery project. Maybe next year? Anyways, enjoy his extremely detailed report on the con! He only had to fight off a bit of the flu to bring it our way.
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I think I understand what a journalist must feel like at times: There was so much going on that I just want the chance to tell people about it all, because you could go through the entire show for all three days and still not run out of things to see.
Splinter Cell: Conviction
What it is: That latest in the Splinter Cell series from Ubisoft.
What was shown at PAX: Ubisoft had an hour-long demonstration in the main hall for both Splinter Cell and Assassin’s Creed II. A Splinter Cell booth on the exhibition floor repeatedly showed the same demo.
What I saw: An Ubisoft guy walked us through what appears to be Sam Fisher’s first mission in the new game, and explained some of the decisions around the new mechanics. Storywise, in Conviction Sam Fisher has gone solo to try to get revenge on the man who killed his daughter – but soon gets caught back up in intrigue, as the mission ends with troopers breaking into the room to take Sam into custody and bring him in out of the cold.
Notable:
- The Ubisoft designer colorfully explained that although Conviction is a stealth game, they wanted Fisher to be stealthy like a panther, not stealthy like a wuss who has to hide from everything or get the shit kicked out of him. The designer said, “Well, what if we made it so stealth doesn’t f***ing suck?” Rather than hiding because getting caught out of cover makes you lose, you hide because hiding itself is fun and makes you win. At least, that’s Ubisoft’s hope.
- Part of that hope is the new “Mark and Execute” system. You can pick out targets beforehand while sneaking (“Mark”), then jump out of cover and press a button to have Fisher quickly and automatically drop his targets (“Execute”). I noticed an icon displayed at the lower-left hand corner of the screen as this was demoed – it appears that you get a limited number of “marks” that you can queue up at a time, as there were two icons in a gauge, and the icons changed color and shape as the mark/execute cycle was performed. When Fisher changed weapons the number of icons changed to three, so it looks like the number of targets you can mark and execute at a time depends on your weapon.
- At one point, Fisher snuck up to a door, and small, unobtrusive icons appeared showing that he could either use a tool to look underneath the door crack or open the door normally. It was a nice bit of polish no doubt meant to remind players of their options without breaking the flow of the game.
