Conviction creative director: Previous Splinter Cells too hard, made Sam into a "grandmother"

Executing a perfect drop-down kill followed by a series of neck-snaps nearly loud enough to wake the (newly) dead? Awesome. The 146 attempts it took you to get it just right? Not so much.

Fortunately, if Splinter Cell Conviction creative director Max Beland's reassuring words are anything to go by, Sam Fisher's days of plodding trial-and-error are long gone.

"What was coming up all the time was, 'Man, that game's hard. I played the first map and I stopped. It was too difficult.' So we had a clear player fantasy that we wanted to continue to deliver, but it was clear that we weren't delivering it properly or well enough since people were not sticking to it," he told Industry Gamers.

"They were not finishing the games we were making and the sales were stagnating. If you look at the sales of Splinter Cell 1 versus Splinter Cell 4, they go a little bit down. So, our fantasy was good but we needed to approach it differently. What we decided to do was change how we thought about the stealth genre in general."

So, after having a quick four year think on it, the team's finally ready to show off the fruits of its labors. Beland explained:

"We're going to make stealth something you want to use. We want you to be a predator, not a grandmother. Being a grandmother before kind of forced you to be stealth. You need to hide in the shadows because if you're seen, they shoot you and you're dead. But what if we make the shadows something that's interesting and makes you powerful and you use as a tactical tool against your enemies? So that's how we're able to approach our franchise differently while staying true to the values."

More through the link.