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Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory retrospective

LESS T_T

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Retrospect from Creative Director of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory: http://www.clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2015/03/ten-years-down.html

I realized earlier today that it's been ten years since Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory shipped.

Obviously, a lot has changed in that time, but I'm not going to wax nostalgic about that. I thought instead I would regale you a never before made public tale of what that game meant to me.

Chaos Theory was a hell of a project. I began as the Lead Level Designer and the Scriptwriter, which meant from the start I was doing two serious, full time jobs. I had to get the level design team queued up to deliver 12 maps that were of much higher and much more uniform quality than those in the original game, and I had to make sure we had a story and script that worked all the way through. I also had to get a commitment from that entire team that - come hell or high water - we would not cut a single level. This was doubling down on both the team, and on quality - it meant everyone on the level design side was bought in, but it also meant I could work with confidence on a script that would not later be hobbled by having to move or cut levels.

At the same time, there was a lot of stuff to fix in terms of the global vision of the game. The original Splinter Cell had been a big hit, but it was not without its serious faults. Punishing 'Game Over' gating and brutal trial-and-error gameplay that we should have fixed in the original needed some challenging and innovative solutions if Splinter Cell was to be moved forward.

Development was hard. Sometime around Alpha, mandate came down from Ubi that all internal projects needed to have a Creative Director. Mathieu Ferland - the Producer - asked me to do the job. I said no. I was not convinced that it was not just a bullshit management position and I was worried that I already had two jobs. But after a few discussions with friends and family and the team, a week or so later I changed my mind and became Creative Director, Lead Level Designer and Writer for the game. If you watch the credits, you'll see that three of the first five names in the credits are me. The other two were Mathieu Ferland, and the Art Director, The Chinh Ngo. Anyway, these responsibilities came with a heavy price, though. I spent most of the 24 months of Chaos Theory's development working 80 hours a week.

About six months after I became Creative Director, when the game was around Beta, my good friend Dave (who had been an AI programmer on the original Splinter Cell, and who is currently one of the founders of Tiger Style) came to Montreal to visit. He stayed with us, and he slept in our spare room for a week or ten days. That week I took 'time off' - by which I mean I left work at 6pm or so every night so we could have dinner and hang out. It was fun - I've been told. I don't really remember.

I went to GDC in March of 2005, while the game was in the distribution process, and I gave a talk about the narrative structure of the game. Of course, I also got to hang out with Dave under far less stressful circumstances. Over dinner one night, we got to talking about the time he'd last been in Montreal. During that discussion, I kept correcting him about what we'd done the last time he was in Montreal, but we kept disagreeing about the details and the timing. Over the course of the meal, we realized that I actually had no memory of his trip to Montreal six months previously, and that I was recalling a previous visit he'd made about a year or so before that. Dave had spent a week living in my house. I had curtailed my work week down from 70-80 hours to a normal 40 in order to spend time with him. We had eaten great meals, gone to great bars, seen movies, played games, and talked about our careers and the industry and our pasts and our futures, and all of it was simply fucking gone. I could not remember any of it.

To be clear - I do not mean I didn't remember what we did or what we talked about. I mean that I literally had no memory of the events. To me it was like it never happened. It was like he never visited. There was just an empty space in my brain that had been overwritten by the stress and anxiety of Splinter Cell. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory gave me brain damage.

Once we realized that the incongruities in our conversation were the result of a legitimate failing of my memory, Dave helped me trying to find a handle. We talked about it over dinner, and then on and off over time. I spoke with my wife about it (she, of course, had full recollection), and eventually, I was able to pin a few minor pieces of my memories to the cork board of my brain and piece together a kind of past.

Over time, I was able to slowly reconstruct some significant part of that lost week. I remember a few meals and a few conversations in a few bars. I remember my friend being in my house. I remember us drinking coffee together and smoking cigarettes.

Writing it all down, now, I have to confess I have mixed feelings about it. I am really, truly proud of what we accomplished with Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. It stands the test of time as one of the best games ever made. At the same time, the personal cost for making it was real and serious. It's not about forgotten beers in some bar on St Laurent. It's about brain damage and the loss of life. To this day, I am still not sure what the right equation is there. I'm still not sure if it was worth it. I'm still not sure if I would do it again if I had the chance.

Anyway, here's something you've never seen before:

 

Rivmusique

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Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
:what:

Creating games with challenging and interesting gameplay is literally and actually hazardous to an artist's health. This is why shorter/simpler games like gone home/depression quest/dear esther are the future, it's really the only way the industry can survive. Yet silly gamer boys want things to stay the same, just so they can have their 'gameplay' smh #gamersareover .
 

Unkillable Cat

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Creating games with challenging and interesting gameplay is literally and actually hazardous to an artist's health. This is why shorter/simpler games like gone home/depression quest/dear esther are the future, it's really the only way the industry can survive. Yet silly gamer boys want things to stay the same, just so they can have their 'gameplay' smh #gamersareover.

Really?

You could have named pretty much ANY game from the indie scene, any one of the thousands of 'small' titles that out there, and still made your point.

But you chose to name three of the most obnoxious titles out there. A dollhouse simulator, incoherent ramblings in parser format and a walking book.

Not to mention that the developers behind two of those titles have experienced 'heightened levels of stress' (to put it mildly) for releasing their games, which goes a long way towards defeating your point.
 

LESS T_T

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Retrospect from Creative Director of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory: http://www.clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2015/03/ten-years-down.html

"Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory gave me brain damage."

Follow-up: http://www.clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2015/03/anti-irreplaceable.html

[...on reactions to the previous post and quality of life issues...]

Back in 2001, just before I left Vancouver to go to Ubisoft and start my career in games a friend of mine gave me a bit of advice. He told me (I'm paraphrasing), "If you want to be successful in a big company, the way to do that is to make yourself irreplaceable." That's what I did almost from the minute my feet hit the ground in Montreal. I just started working like a machine. I stuck my nose in everything and I tried to pick up every loose task I could. By the time the original Splinter Cell had shipped I had gone from being a rookie level designer who had never worked on a game before to being a level designer, game designer and scriptwriter on a 92 Metacritic blockbuster that sold over five million copies (that was a lot in 2002). My level had been the one to represent the game at E3. My other level was the one on the demo disk in Official XBox Magazine. My other level was the first one in the game. I was irreplaceable.

When the core Splinter Team left Ubi to go found EA Montreal, it was obvious that I would take the Lead Level Design job and write the script. Who else would you ask to do that? I became the Creative Director not long after that, and yeah - no question I was irreplaceable again.

You know the rest of the story from the previous post. But here's the part I didn't talk about:

After Chaos Theory, I was pretty seriously burned out. I said at the time that I never wanted to make another Splinter Cell again - because frankly, I'm pretty sure I can't do it better, so what would be the point? So I decided to go and work on Far Cry 2. And at the same time as I made that decision, I also considered that advice my friend had given me about making myself irreplaceable. I realized that while it had technically 'worked', it was totally unsustainable and would not end well. I decided I needed a new strategy, and what seemed a straightfoward alternate strategy at the time was to just 'do the opposite'.

I decided to go into Far Cry 2 with the explicit goal of 'replacing myself'. What that meant, concretely, was finding a better Lead Level Designer than me, and finding a better writer than me so that I would only have one job, and then - perhaps even more important - working to build as many of the creative leaders as I could so that maybe one day, I could have no jobs. Presumably this would lead to me being at the top of some kind of pyramid scheme where I got to sit on a beach and drink mojitos and play videogames for the rest of my life - but I didn't really think it through that far.

Anyway - that's exactly what I set out to do. I brought in a Lead Level Designer who unquestionably was better at it than I was. I evolved the role of 'writing' into the role of Narrative Design, and brought in a Narrative Designer who was better than I was, and then I spent the next three years having them tell me how stupid I was and it was great.

Far Cry 2 was hard as hell. In a lot of ways, it was harder than Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. There are things that that game changed in me that will never go back to the way they were before. Maybe I'll write about those when Far Cry 2 turns ten. But all that said, for the most part, I worked 40-50 hour weeks for almost the entire development of Far Cry 2. I didn't suffer real damage in the way I did on Chaos Theory. Yes, there were people who worked a lot longer and harder hours that. On several occasions I tried to order people to leave the building, and I remember asking the Producer how we could force people to go home. Some of the reasons those people were working so hard had to do with bad planning and management. Some of it had to do with scope creep. Some of it was because they were super engaged. I'm sure their reasons are as complex as mine were, and I won't try to diminish them through simplificiation. It's complicated. It's hard.

Today, the Lead Level Designer, the Narrative Designer and the Art Director from Far Cry 2 are all Creative Directors on different projects. Far Cry 2, in my opinion, is a better and more important game that Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. I won't try to take too much credit for that, but I do suspect that if I had continued to position myself as irreplacable, I would not have made it through at all. The project would have crashed and burned, the game would have been taken over by another creative lead and likely rebooteed. Likely many of the people who developed themselves through the course of that production would have been derailed and might not be doing as well professionally as they are today.

So there you have it - those are my thoughts on the complexities of quality of life in the game industry and that's my one and only strategy for not getting snuffed out: replace yourself. It's not a magic bullet, but that's all I've got.

(It just so happens I feel the same approach applies to designer authorship - but that's another topic.)
 

Silva

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Man, the guy talks that he had brain damage because of the stress of creating a game under harsh circumstances, and you nutshits react with sarcasm.

And man, the guy is the lead designer behind Chaos Theory and Far Cry 2. Two of the best "mainstream" games ever. I think a little more respect is in order.
 

Zewp

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Man, the guy talks that he had brain damage because of the stress of creating a game under harsh circumstances, and you nutshits react with sarcasm.

And man, the guy is the lead designer behind Chaos Theory and Far Cry 2. Two of the best "mainstream" games ever. I think a little more respect is in order.

Far Cry 2 was one of the best mainstream games ever made? That's news to me.

Chaos Theory I can agree with, though.
 
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it's not brain damage, it's just some stress induced amnesia. it's not that he can't make new reminiscences anymore.

attention whore.
 

Volrath

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Man, the guy talks that he had brain damage because of the stress of creating a game under harsh circumstances, and you nutshits react with sarcasm.

And man, the guy is the lead designer behind Chaos Theory and Far Cry 2. Two of the best "mainstream" games ever. I think a little more respect is in order.
Lol.
 

gromit

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He's right, though. If you put the good faith in, the game's a pretty good FPS with strong tactics and unique abstractions. A good base->mission->base run can generate fantastic stories in the way precious few games allow.

A straight sequel with an expanded faction system would have fixed a couple of my pressing criticisms: that there's no friendlies, and no factional map-play. I don't hate the game for what it didn't have, but it's an obvious omission. Not some stupid *CA-CHINK* unlocked, now friendly and safe forever bullshit; that's what the safehouses are for. Just an ebb and flow on the map that you can influence a little... through provisions or support or something, not killing everyone on the spot. It would add another consideration to mission selection, navigation, and loyalty at the same time.

Instead, we got no sequels for a very long time, apparently because a bunch of lunatics deliberately engaged checkpoints while systematically combing the map for diamonds. So when we finally got them, they were full of anal missions, borderline-minigames, easy travelins' and MMO nonsense.

Alternate-universe Far Cry 3 is fucking mind-blowing and you all know it, even if there still isn't ever a "real" sequel to Far Cry.
 
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bussinrounds

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Man, the guy talks that he had brain damage because of the stress of creating a game under harsh circumstances, and you nutshits react with sarcasm.

And man, the guy is the lead designer behind Chaos Theory and Far Cry 2. Two of the best "mainstream" games ever. I think a little more respect is in order.
Lol.
Yea, Farcry 2 was dogshit Silva. You must be thinking of something else.
 

sser

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Technically they created more than 12 levels. The game also had a separate co-op mode and an amazing spies vs. mercenaries multiplayer aspect. One of my all-time favorite games.





Far Cry 2 not so much.
 

Menckenstein

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Far Cry 2 is such a piece of irredeemable shit, it is the worst non-budget title in have ever had the misfortune of playing and I hope a demon-possessed, rapethirsty circular saw visits the families of everyone who had a hand in making sure that it was so terrible. Fuck anyone who liked it I will perform trepanation on you with my dick and an ice pick. Fuck all things ever. Fuck.


Yeah I didn't care for Far Cry 2 much.
 
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Erzherzog

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Technically they created more than 12 levels. The game also had a separate co-op mode and an amazing spies vs. mercenaries multiplayer aspect. One of my all-time favorite games.

I believe the co-op was by a different studio, but yeah those were quality too.

Chaos Theory has been the last great AAA title I feel. Didn't try to throw in half baked concepts from other genres, just tried to be a well polished stealth romp and succeeded, if only more big budget titles strived for so little, we might actually get good games.
 

Silva

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Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a moment Icewater.

Far Cry 1 = boring shit
Far Cry 2 = hardcore shit
Far Cry 3 = popamole shit
Far Cry 4 = idem above

If you had to pick one or be shot dead, which shit would you pick ? Be honest.
 
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Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a moment Icewater.

Far Cry 1 = boring shit
Far Cry 2 = hardcore shit
Far Cry 3 = popamole shit
Far Cry 4 = idem above

If you had to pick one or be shot dead, which shit would you pick ? Be honest.

Why would you think this would make anyone pick Far Cry 2? It's hardcore you say? Fine, so be it, let's pretend "hardcore" is not a stupid meaningless word. What good is "hardcore" when it's completely unfun tedium? I'd rather go popamole than that. Oh, and I would pick Blood Dragon. Far Cry 1 has its charms but nowadays I'd just play Crysis/Warhead instead.
 

Zewp

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FC2 is the last one I'd pick. Shoving pencils into your eyes is more fun than FC2.
 

LESS T_T

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:necro:

Clint Hocking has returned to Ubisoft, but this time Toronto studio: http://www.clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2015/08/week-452.html

Just over five years ago I left Ubisoft in Montreal and set out in search of new challenges and to find my own fortune making awesomer games. I have been very fortunate over this time to live and work in both San Francisco and Seattle; two very different and unique game development hubs that have consistently produced many of the best games in the world. I met a lot of new people, and I worked at a range of different companies on a few different projects, each with their own unique cultures and approaches. I have done some interesting and challenging work and I have learned a lot.

But, as the five year mark approached, and I realized I had not shipped a game in seven years, I started to become anxious and depressed. I am not a patient person, by nature. I was on my third visa, and had still not managed to secure a greencard. It turns out that being an ex-pat is not as glamourous as Hemingway would have you believe - and I was definitely following his prescribed dosage of mojitos - so that was not the issue.

In the end, for me at least, five years is just too long to be rootless. As a result, I decided at the beginning of the summer to return to Canada. At first I was not sure where I would land - whether I would return to Montreal and the development community I came of age within, or whether I would continue my adventure elsewhere in Canada.

After a number of discussions, the opportunity I was most excited about was to return to Ubisoft - but this time in Toronto. I know most of the people who were involved in founding the studio personally, and almost all of them are still here. I've watched them grow from afar, and managed to keep up with their war stories at various industry events over the years (usually over mojitos). It wasn't hard for them to convince me to come and talk about what we could do together.

From the moment I set foot in the door here, it was like a reunion. I couldn't walk ten meters without seeing a familiar face, if not a close friend. But it was more than just familiar faces. It almost felt genetic. Interviewing with people I had never even met and getting drawn into discussions about process and design... it made me realize how much my own design and development thinking had been shaped by the culture here, and perhaps - just maybe - how even some tiny fragment of my own thinking had managed to work its way into Ubisoft's approach as well.

So it's weird to say it - given that I am living in a different city, and working in a different studio, with mostly different people who I have never worked with before, but... it's good to be back.

There's a short interview up on the Ubisoft Blog here.

He's working on something, but not a new Splinter Cell.
 

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