The Splinter Cell Series

Other Video Games
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Whoops, I bought Conviction because I got it under 5€. Played through it in 5 hours so it’s one euro per hour, not sure if that was worth the money even with the discount.

I knew what I was getting though and it’s not a Splinter Cell game. Being the Absolution of this series, it’s still not that terrible but shouldn’t be a part of the franchise at all. There is some stealth, yes, and a limited amount of gadgets but the stealthy sections are scarce and it’s required only once. I still tried to be a shadow as much as possible and dodge the enemies the best I could, but mostly I had to kill everyone. Fisher is here at his most lethal too because no real non-lethal pacifications exist, though most hand-to-hand takedowns seem to be just knockouts but sometimes Fisher decides to shoot them and I can’t really control that. The interrogations were fun, though rather limited.

The game worked well enough, I just had to change the compatibility mode because it wouldn’t launch otherwise. The controls felt a bit weird at first but they weren’t too bad to learn, except that the running had to be toggled which was stupid and clunky especially when you had to leave a cover while in combat. The campaign is so short that I couldn’t recommend the game to anyone even as a non-SC game. I don’t know about the multiplayer but nowadays there’s no reason to play it either.

If I had to choose the best mission, that would be Third Echelon HQ. It had the most stealth and even lasers you had to dodge, though the last section was total rampage for story-related reasons.

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Lol, I actually reinstalled it over a month back to replay it and see if it´s still as terrible as the first time around. And I still haven´t done so… :joy: Anyways, I can only agree with everything you wrote. I mean, how could I not.

Despite its title and the characters involved, it is not. It´s more of a Bourne/24 hybrid with an absolute garbage of a plot. I´ve said it before and I´ll say it again, but aside from the obvious gameplay transgressions, Conviction´s greatest offence is the way it treats the main characters (and their relationships) and utterly fucks up the lore of the franchise. Leading to:

Amen. I still find it funny how the fifth games in both franchises turned out to be the black sheep. But for all its faults, Absolution is still a better Hitman game than Conviction is a SC game.

Yeah, 3E HQ is easily the best mission in the campaign, not that there´s any competition really. I mean whoever came up with the idea of including that Gulf War shoot´em up ought´ve been marked and executed on spot…

People actually seem to give the MP (co-op) more praise, so maybe it´s worth it? I´ve never played it either. Also, I´ve seen some people praising the Deniable Ops mode as well. Have to admit I didn´t even notice it was in the game back when I played it, so I´m not exactly sure what it entails.

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even though i despise absolution, i quite liked conviction. :man_shrugging:t4: would’ve preferred the prototype though; that looked tasty.

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Dang, completely forgot to reply to these :sweat_smile:

Oh from me as well, for both SC/CT and FC2, I was just surprised to see his name associated with such radically different (from those games) games.

I do have to admit I had absolutely no interest in Legion from the very start, mainly due to the aesthetic/art style of the game being completely against my taste, so I didn´t read/know that much about its supposed concept and had absolutely no expectations towards it :grimacing:

From my current understanding, it´s supposed to be a “game as a service” kind of installment, one where they will essentially pile up stuff on the base thing over the years. I guess… There´s not much info about it atm.

Ok, Conviction doesn´t at least have the poor taste choices of Absolution, that much I´ll give it. I mean, it would be immensely weird if it did… But I still have more fun playing that than Conviction (I guess I´m just too sensitive to the lore and gameplay decisions they made :man_shrugging: )

Oh yeah, that looked very interesting, but still more of a Bourne/24 thing than SC. I guess I´d need to know what kind of story they had in mind for it to be able to judge whether it would´ve been better.

I mean, the whole Bourne/24 rogue agent stylization wasn´t necessarily a bad thing, considering they had been sort of laying groundwork for it since PT, but got fucked up with the pisspoor story and bullshit lore-related decisions (e.g. making Lambert´s death canonical, turning 3E into the villains (led by an almost cartoonishly villainous character), and turning Grim into a cold, manipulative bitch who has no problem killing someone; plus the idea of using Sarah´s death as a plot device, although that one falls on DA).

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fair enough. i love a good pig mask. :smile:

it’s such a shame they dropped the more specific character specialisations; it really undermined the whole system.

ah, okay. i haven’t played an ac since 4 and i never finished it.

exploitation influenced sc sounds like hell.

i liked the speedy stealth murder. while it isn’t very sc, i value games where you can kind of choreograph combat scenarios - max payne, superhot, mirror’s edge, etc. - and it has that flavour to it. it’s a beast of a john wick game.

i think it had a good influence on blacklist too, much in the same way absolution had a positive influence on woa, even though that game is dog shit. DOG SHIT, I SAY!!!

sure, but i quite liked that. one thing you can say about sc is that, after pt, they were always trying to shake things up, one way or another. even though it doesn’t always land, i value that about the series.

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It had indeed and in Blacklist you can play in that “panther” style without it being forced. If only Conviction had similar choices.

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I´m just gonna say on that note that one of the things that Ubisoft unfortunately carried over from the AC series to Conviction+Blacklist was granting Fisher the climbing skills, speed and agility of a coked-up baboon…

Oh definitely. That Absolution/WOA comparison is apt. Introducing that speedy stealth murder style is one thing I can certainly give the game credit for, but like Beldingford mentions, it definitely landed better with Blacklist where it´s one of several playstyle options rather than the one you´re permanently forced/locked into.

Don´t get me wrong, so did I. As much as I love the classic SC games, the fact is that the series needed “shaking up” in some way at that point. I just wish they had done so without so many idiotic decisions, whether the lore/character ones that I mentioned, or gameplay ones (from the obvious lack of gadgets and non-lethal playstyle options to the removal of things like NPC interrogations, hacking, environmental storytelling, etc.). Blacklist did a significantly better job at it of course, but still unfortunately carried over many of Conviction´s faults on both fronts.

On a side note, this actually just reminded me how much I hated Maxime Béland (and pretty much anyone from the dev team) for how many times they used and emphasized the word ´Panther´ in all the marketing for Conviction. Was a bad omen :joy:

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It looks like the servers for Blacklist are being shut down.

If there is anyone who wants to go through the MP and Co-op to get the achievements on Xbox, send me a message.

https://www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/help/gameplay/article/decommissioning-of-online-services-september-2022/000102396

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F. Played the co-op campaign with my friend two months ago and it was alright.

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Question for our local SC afficionados. Does anyone here have experience with (successfully) re-enabling EAX in the old SC games?

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You can give DSOAL a try

Here’s a list with all compatible games

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Bollocks, completely forgot to reply :sweat_smile:

Have you ever tried DSOAL yourself by any chance? The process seems a little more complicated than I´d like…

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Nope, I haven’t. I think you just have to drag and drop into the game’s directory so it shouldn’t be too much of a hassle. Ignore the part about compiling since it already is :slight_smile:

More simple instructions found here

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Ah ok, neat, thanks. I might try tinkering with it then when I feel like it :thinking:

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Don’t mention it and good luck! :wink:

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I have replayed this game series countless times at this point and it’s my second favourite after Hitman.

Though I still think Chaos Theory has the coolest atmosphere out of any game, period. The Amon Tobin + Jesper Kyd soundtracks and the soulful care put into developing the gameplay just make it a very unique experience.

One hot take I do have, is that I prefer Conviction over Blacklist. Now hear me out, I used to hate Conviction with a passion because it omitted so many of the iconic things from the original games. And the plot was really convoluted, it took me many replays before I could actually just grasp what the point of it was.
But, eventually I started to sort of warm up to the game on a vicarious level with Sam. He had gone through three years of mental anguish and had become sort of a living, vicious corpse of his former prime self.

I really hated how the game kept steering the player into going guns blazing action, but funnily enough, every time you had survived through one of those, Sam would quietly quip something like “That… could have gone smoother” or “Almost bit off more than I could chew.” Just from hearing that subtle scorn for so long, I was ultimately pushed to not mow everyone down as soon as I got myself detected. I would retreat, wait for the enemy to lose track of me, then hunt them down silently one by one. And when I got good at it, not getting detected at all, Sam would then say something like “Still got it.”

So yeah, through some strange compulsion of perseverance, I no longer hate Conviction. It’s definitely not what defines a Splinter Cell game, but I think it has some core fragments of it.

Now when it comes to Blacklist, I think its gameplay is far more fleshed out and interesting than Conviction, but it is the characters and story that I found incredibly insipid in it. The idea of some elite terrorist organization putting the US into near total panic and anarchy is certainly promising, yet the execution feels like really mediocre copying of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series. I’m not even kidding - there’s a part in MW2 where you use a Predator drone to fire what the character Soap refers to as “AGM missiles”, which is a goof because AGM stands for air-to-ground missile. So the “missiles” at the end is just ignorantly redundant. In Blacklist, at the end of the Special Missions HQ in Iran, Grim says the exact same line as Soap: “AGM missiles online.”

Couple that with the incessant military lingo that you would rarely hear in previous Splinter Cell games, and the Fourth Echelon “team” always trying to sound super serious while having constant high school drama moments… all of that gives me eye-roll galore more than anything. Ridiculously enough, I honestly found Kobin to be the most likeable character, everyone else just seems bland. Especially Sam. Though I’m guessing the new voice actor might be the main reason behind that.

Anyway, sorry for the rant, but I hope I’ve managed to argue my opinion solidly enough why I think Conviction is better. At least, from the perspective of the general vibe from both games, I suppose. :laughing:

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You get an automatic thumbs up from me for mentioning Kyd´s contribution to the music. People (rightfully) gloat over Tobin´s music in CT, but almost always forget/omit/don´t know that Kyd composed a chunk of it (a trend possibly only overshadowed by MGS fans glorifiying Harry Gregson-Williams for that series´ music). Would´ve been nice if he had done a SC soundtrack solo.

Your take on Conviction is certainly interesting. The whole post actually gave me the impetus to go replay it after several years, see if my perception of it will change in any way or not, so I´ll post my feelings here when I´m done with that.

Not too optimistic about it though, because while I could overlook its mishaps in the gameplay department as a temporary setback caused by the trends of the period, it´s precisely the characters and story that make my blood boil. I hate the complete change of Grim´s character and the decision to make Lambert´s death canonical (it makes absolutely no sense), let alone the whole “Sarah´s fake death was his/their idea because idiotic reasons”. Conviction´s plot is dumb, convoluted, and nonsensical in so many ways, I´m actually afraid to play it now, lol.

Aye, agreed. The character interactions are just bad.

Oh on that I agree. I really like Kobin in this one (him and Sadiq). He´s got the most personality and was just about the only character I cared about. Nice change from the boilerplate mini-villain he was in Con. Coste is cool too, but has barely any screen time.

But yeah, in general, I don´t like the characters in Blacklist either. Fisher is a dick, Grim is a bitch (courtesy of Conviction), Charlie is the stereotypical annoying hacker character (now compare that to the absolutely-not-stereotypical and actually cool hacker character that Grim was in the original trilogy), and Briggs is the most run-of-the-mill spec-ops character out there, who genuinely (and this ties nicely into your post) feels like a leftover from a CoD game. Ironically, the fact that Sam and Grim are so different personality-wise and have different VAs actually helps me ignore that difference. It makes Blacklist feel like it´s just some paralel SC universe where characters have the same names but different personalities.

Hehe, neat observation there. Definitely didn´t notice that (then again, I only played through Blacklist once, so I basically don´t remember any particular bits of dialogue). But yeah, we all know that for all its qualities, the CoD series also had a detrimental effect on the game industry in general. Blacklist also still displays the bad influences from 24, another carryover from Conviction. And I´m saying that as someone who actually really enjoyed 24 specifically for its convoluted B-movie style plots - something which I however never wanted to see in SC.

Anyways, the decision to replay Conviction also got me digging through videos on YT again. Still a shame we didn´t get hobo Fisher with Hitmanesque mechanics (seriously though, they had cool ideas there, I wish they´d actually implement them in some game). The interesting bit in this video are the loading screens near the end. Haven´t seen those before (Airport!!!) and it makes me wonder what the original story concept for Conviction actually was… (the fact that there was meant to be a WH mission anyway probably means some kind of government conspiracy was involved either way)

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Today marks the 20th anniversary of (one of) the greatest stealth game(s) and franchise(s) of all time. Not really sure Ubisoft will release so much as a mention about it, so… Happy Birthday Sam!!! :birthday: :partying_face: :tada: :sparkler: :piñata: Thanks for all the years of satisfying sneaking :ninja:

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Oh wow, first time hearing that the animations for the 1st SC were made by hands, always though it was mocapped since they looked so smooth. Shame that even after all these years, you still can’t buy Pandora Tomorrow digitally, it was the first one I played and finished. It was actually the 1st pure stealth game I ever played :slightly_smiling_face:

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The animations were super smooth and still look great. They did an amazing job on that game.

Yeah, Pandora´s absence in digital distribution is a shame. I wonder why it is… I know the broken lighting effects are usually cited as the reason, but I don´t really buy that. There´s a community fix for it, and frankly, graphical issues have never prevented a game being sold digitally :joy: (not to mention SC1´s effects also don´t work by default, and yet the game is available) Could it perhaps be a Sony Ericsson licencing thing? :grin:

Pandora was actually my first contact with the series as well. The demo, to be precise (probably why I love the train mission so much, lol). Couldn´t play the full game on my PC then because the GPU didn´t support the effects, so I played the hell out of SC1 for years :grin:

I don´t quite recall if it was my first pure stealth game though… Pretty sure I had played H2SA before that :thinking:

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