In his article, “Analysis: Splinter Cell: Conviction and Moral Quandaries,” which I caught over at Gamasutra, journalist Fraser McMillan wrestles with the bloody new direction that Sam Fisher has taken in the newest Splinter Cell game. I know what he’s talking about. Sam Fisher has become either callous or outright bloodthirsty.
Back in the series’ third installment (my favorite), Chaos Theory, Sam Fisher was met time and again with the choice of whether or not to kill the thugs, mercenaries, and other armed guards he encountered on his missions. As I wrote about years ago in an article for The Escapist, “Magic Words,” Chaos Theory is constantly providing you with human context for the AI characters that Sam Fisher is up against. It uses dialogue to turn pixels into character sketches — the enemy yields, the enemy argues, the enemy pleads for its life — and the effect is a constant quandary: do you kill this enemy that you could neutralize just as well non-lethally?
Killing was often easier, often faster, but it wasn’t necessarily Sam Fisher’s way. Sam Fisher was about subtlety and precision, about getting things done through guile and stealth that other, lesser agents would do through brute force alone.
Or, at least, my Sam Fisher was. The many choices you make throughout Chaos Theory are rather like a character-creation routine, sort of like a feature-length version of the character-creation decisions you make early on in Fallout 3 to define your character. My Sam Fisher, in Chaos Theory, grabbed guys into sleeper holds, interrogated them, and then knocked them out. Your Sam Fisher might have silenced enemies with a suppressed pistol shot to the head. Over time, all those kill/spare switch-flips add up to describe a complex character, dangerous but perhaps merciful, wryly superior and with a grim sense of humor. Or they might add up to be just a flat, murderous operative. We were personifying Sam with each pull of the trigger.
And the trigger was key. In Chaos Theory, when you grabbed a dude to interrogate him, you had two choices at the end of it: Kill or Knock Out. (Notice how Let Him Go was not an option.) Push one button and this talkative thug died. Push another and he lived. Whatever you pressed added another pencil stroke to Sam Fisher’s character sketch.
Sam Fisher: Killer
I was only able to play about a little bit of Conviction, plus the demo, before my Xbox died (the same day the game came in), but even in just a level or so of play it was clear that the character we control in this new game is different from the one I built through play back in Chaos Theory. Now, when Sam ends up near an enemy, the only options that come up on screen are kill options. (You can use enemies as human shields, but that just draws out their death.) The mark-and-execute ability that I wrote about before always results in death. When you end up hanging outside an open window near a vulnerable enemy, the button doesn’t say Neutralize, it says “Press B to Kill.”
This is a degree of murderousness that I’m not altogether comfortable with. The game seems to try to make it clear that these are all terrible people who would kill me if given the chance, but the Sam Fisher I constructed back in Chaos Theory, and sort of managed to maintain intellectually through the intervening Double Agent, wasn’t the kind who was out to Kill — it was, if anything, an unfortunate means to a vital end. The Sam Fisher of Conviction feels like he’s seeing the world through a red, psychopathic haze. The screen, like some indoctrination device, is constantly telling me: Kill. Kill. Kill. It’s a little unnerving.
I’ll grant that the story is set to turn Sam into a kind of antihero, and suggests that avenging the death of his daughter (with a big asterisk) explains why he’s become so callous. I worry that the game creators think this also exonerates him, as though one murder justifies countless others. For a game that seems influenced by the Bourne movies, it sure didn’t pay attention to what they were saying about murder.
If the goal is to create a struggle between me and the character, they’ve done a great job. I’m invested in Sam Fisher, but asking me to tactically plan and authorize his revenge killings sort of strains my relationship with him. Now, that’s fair game — we don’t have to like characters to watch their stories unfold, after all — but it’s taxing. And, troubling to me, I don’t think this meta-experiential notion of taxing the player’s relationship with the main character is what the designers were after. I think they wanted to turn Sam into a merciless badass — into a panther, as producer Maxime Beland said — and they didn’t care how many crudely sketched mercenary thugs died along the way.
But my Sam Fisher would have cared. Their Sam Fisher has displaced mine.
To be clear, this is an impression formed after just a few hours of gameplay — and I present it as such. You can be sure I’ll be back with another opinion once I’ve finished the game. My Xbox just returned from the shop today.
Indeed, the displacement of my Sam Fisher was probably inevitable, given how many different Sam Fishers were possible based on the choices made in Chaos Theory and Double Agent. By narrowing in on the specific motives and feelings of this post-traumatized Sam Fisher (a dramatic choice I approve of, narratively), they had to move away from some of the other possible Fishers rendered during play in previous games. I certainly don’t deny the creators the right to push Fisher’s character forward. I’m simply reporting my lament as I see it.
For me, it’s a struggle about intellectualizing the change. Did my Sam Fisher become this callous killer, or was my Sam Fisher (and my play style) rejected by the designers as some kind of value judgment? It’s wonderfully complicated.
Fascinating. Contrast this to Batman: Arkham Asylum. I attribute part of its success is its adherence to Batman’s ethos: he never kills. He doesn’t even allow people to die. Taking out opponents boils down to silent or stealth takedowns and straight-up fights. He’s kinda the anti-Sam Fisher, at least the one you describe from Conviction.
This trickles down to gameplay changes you may not even notice, like never needing to loot enemy bodies for ammo and power-ups – because you’re Batman, and you already have all the goodies you need for the time being.
Fighting ten goons? No problem! The goons have guns? Yeah, then Batman sneaks around and takes them out silently, one by one, as the survivors slowly start to panic.
Even boss fights show Batman outsmarting his opponents rather than just outgunning them. They are puzzles to unravel rather than targets to mow down.
All of this adds up to a game experience that makes you *feel* like you’re Batman. And what could be cooler than that?
Great contrast, there, Matthew. Arkham Asylum did a great job of using the character to define the gameplay, as you say.
My review of that game always includes this sentence: Press the blue button to be Batman.
Just press one button and your avatar does that swoop-down-and-kick-a-dude move that affirms that you are, indeed, the Batman. It made it easy to feel like Batman, without making it necessarily easy to breeze through the game.
And, to be fair, Conviction makes it very easy to be the Sam Fisher they’re describing through the game mechanics. As I said in the earlier post, Fisher’s better at being Fisher than we are, so a single button press can take out three targets, but the question to my mind is: Do I want to be this Sam Fisher? It stresses my relationship to the avatar, in valid and interesting ways.
I’m afraid I missed the boat on all of the Splinter Cell games so far. I played Rainbow Six, back in the day, but the first Splinter Cell came out when I didn’t have the time or attention to play it, and I’ve never gotten back to it. As such, I can’t judge Sam Fisher’s character in any of the games.
However, I think one of the underlying points here is: what makes Sam Fisher Sam Fisher? Put another way: what makes Sam Fisher *different* from James Bond, Jason Bourne, or the protagonists of the Assassin’s Creed games? Capability to be a bad-ass isn’t good enough, as it’s something they all share. Batman is in a category of his own, right out of the gate, due to his ethos and the approach that ethos necessitates.
But if you begin to take *how* they’re bad-asses out of the equation, you’re often left with character, and, minus color (James Bond is British and suave!), there seems like a lot less distinction.
I suspect the day Sam Fisher becomes just another murder machine like most FPS protagonists, the Splinter Cell franchise dies…or at least becomes indistinguishable from the other murder-machine franchises in the console market.
*SPOILERS FOR SC: DOUBLE AGENT and CONVICTION BELOW*
I think Sam becoming a psychopath is actually a bit of story development. In fact, they _specifically_ mention his growing dehumanization in the opening cutscene.
Look at what he’s gone through: Between Chaos Theory and Double Agent, his daughter — his only living relative, and according to manual bios, his primary reason for doing what he does — was killed by a drunk driver. Then, in DA, he has his identity stripped away and he has to spend several months (or years?) in federal prison in order to establish his cover. Then, as a player, throughout DA, you are forced to make tough choices regarding the balance between Sam’s cover and doing the right thing. Assassinations of friendly operatives, detonations on civilian targets, and finally choosing whether or not to shoot Lambert.
And in the end, it doesn’t even matter — if you don’t kill Lambert, he dies anyway, and everyone just accepts that Sam did it. So, as the opening cutscene to Conviction says, he’s lost his daughter and his best friend, and that’s all that was keeping him human. Really, if Sam HADN’T become a bit unhinged, it would’ve been inappropriate and unbelievable.
Later in Conviction, in situations where casualties must be avoided, the “kill” button becomes a “knock out” button, such as if your enemies are police officers. And finally, if you’d been able to play the game through, you’d know that at the end, Sam gets a chance to redeem his humanity.
Like you, I played Sam as merciful, leaving enemies unconscious rather than dead whenever possible. But I think in the context of the transformation of the character between the end of CT and the start of Conviction, Ubisoft has made the right storytelling choices.
Well, to be fair, I have every intention of playing the game through now that my Xbox is repaired. You should have pointed out that you were going to spoil both Double Agent and Conviction, I think. I’ll edit your comment to warn folks.
So, as I reaffirmed in my comment above, this is the lament of someone who’s uncomfortable with the Sam Fisher he’s given to play (and the celebration of his violence) at the start of the game. If that meta-suspense turns out to be mined by Conviction in actual play, so much the better. I’m talking about the experience of being in the midst of the game, which has its place, I think.
As you say, it’s not out of Sam’s trajectory to have become a callous badass given the state of affairs in Sam’s life. (Perhaps it’s more of a commentary on Double Agent than Conviction, really — DA didn’t leave much of an impression on me, and I never felt the urge to replay it as I have Chaos Theory.) Even if the issue now is the fact that the opening of Conviction has me doubting my trust in the ability of the franchise to keep Sam Fisher nuanced and complicated — it’s a high-wire act, to be sure — that’s worth the discussion.
To be clear, I trust writers like Rich Dansky and the crew at Ubisoft to make a ripping good game, and if anyone can pull of this high-wire act, it’s them. But, right now, I’m down here fretting as Fisher steps out onto that wavering cable.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to have spoilers for Conviction. I figured that a mention of the opening cutscene, some mission mechanics, and a vague reference to the end didn’t count as spoilers. I’ll be more cautious in future.
No worries, Mr. Toque. I just want to be better safe, etc.
With each hour of play, Conviction becomes more unexpected, more distant from the core territory of a stealth game, and more aggressively about the character of Sam Fisher. It’s pretty fascinating.
For non-CCP NDA reasons, I can’t talk about this, but core gameplay as character creation is something I’m very interested in.
BTW, have you asked Rich Dansky about this?
I’m waiting until I finish the game before I go pestering Rich. I’d have finished it straight away if my Xbox hadn’t died, and now I won’t be able to devote real time to play until later this week. Which is the long way of saying, no, I haven’t.
I just re-read my comment, and I came across as a bit of a jerk. Wow. Sorry. I had a brutal stomach flu yesterday.
Anyway, I hope that the differences in character are supported by gameplay!
I tend to personalize characters in the video games that I play. I’ve often got a side-story or extra dialogue going on in my head during the “grind” times of any RPG I play. My choice of party is usually contingent on how I see the party cohesiveness and I won’t always opt for the “Best” armor or weapons if the game gives me a visual change. I like the idea of certain characters staying in the theme I’ve got for them in my head. It gives meaning to the sections of the game that don’t have it built in, and I often enjoy that play time more. So I hate it when a game takes that choice away. It is one of the reasons I hated FF13 so much. There was NO room for me to build in any type of dialogue for my characters. It made me sad to have such cookie cutter gateways into the game world. Sure there are elements of a game experience that are never going to be customizable, but to see a series that provided that sort of gameplay suddenly take it away is disappointing.