Splinter Cell: DOUBLE AGENT (Preview)

I CAME TO SHANGHAI TO SEE THE LATEST FANCY HIDE-AND seek
espionage game, but I sure won’t be slipping under anyone’s radar: Texas tall in my trusty cowboy boots and shamelessly flashing a big, dumb American grin everywhere I go, I stick out like the neon signs that paint the purple skyline of this Chinese New York City. It’s easy for Fei and Lan, my new best friends, to pick me out of the sea of people surging down Nanjing Road.
“Hello.” Lan, twirling her umbrella like a natural southern belle, matches my pace. “Where are you from?”
“California…the U.S.” “‘Hotel California.’” Fei leans into view, beaming his big, toothy smile. “I
love that song.”
We laugh (though for different reasons) and continue our stroll down the boulevard together, falling quickly into the universal conversation of cultural strangers: What do you like to eat? The couple invites me to join them for a “traditional Chinese tea ceremony” which, on paper,
already sounds like a scam. It doesn’t cross my mind, though, and when they pass me a menu in the oriental-kitsch-covered teahouse, I don’t bother to look at the prices. We sample tea after tea. Fei is kind enough to translate the stories and instructions of our hostess, while Lan demonstrates a fine level of tea connoisseurship—sniffing the dry leaves, observing the subtle color of each freshly poured cup, and slurping the extract like an expert Italian espresso drinker. We have a blast…until the bill comes: 15,000 RMB—almost $200. I’ve been had. >

>>”WE WANT TO CREATE SOMEONE WHO’S...NOT JUST A GUY WITH GOGGLES.”

DON’T BE A SUCKER
Shanghai is a town full of hucksters, hustlers, and con men, from
the bootleg merchants pushing fake Prada bags on the street
corners to folks like Fei and Lan who prey on stupid tourists like
me. So I make sure to keep an eye out for Julian Gerighty, coproducer of
the newest version of the Splinter Cell series, Double Agent. Gerighty’s
a slick character: half French, half British, all Shanghai salesman. But
he’s not out to con me—he just wants to make sure I understand all the
work he and his team have put into Double Agent. At my visit to Ubisoft’s
downtown studio, it’s clear that “emotion” is his buzzword of the day.
Gerighty repeats it like a mantra—like a politician hitting talking points.
“We’re a French company, so we’re very conceptual and emotion heavy,” he says. For this, the fourth game in the popular stealth-action series, he and his team envision a “super, super emotional experience.”
Emotional experiences rank high on the lists of today’s gamemakers, who often claim that they can evoke intense feelings on new, expensive hardware.
But few games, however shiny and “realistic,” manage to push our buttons the way movies and books do. They just don’t tell stories as well.
Gerighty loads up a level from Double Agent. The scene: a dank New Orleans basement where a man kneels chained against the wall. Sam Fisher, Splinter Cell’s (now balding) superspy, has been charged with infiltrating a homegrown terrorist organization. To prove his terrorist credentials, Sam must shoot the bound man in cold blood. Unfortunately,
that man is Sam’s best friend.
“There’s an innocent guy in front of you,” says Gerighty. “He’s on his knees. He’s gagged. Somebody hands you a gun. The terrorist leader says, ‘You want to join our group? Take him out.’ What would you do if he was your best friend? What if you knew that 3,000 lives were on the line? These are the sort of questions we want to ask people.” But Sam, controlled by a Double Agent team member, doesn’t ask any questions.

He just trains his weapon on the man’s face. The camera zooms in— we can see the man’s red eyes pleading with Sam not to shoot. We can hear his gagged, desperate yelps. Sam pulls the trigger. It’s disturbing. It’s creepy. It definitely pushes buttons. By playing to the strength of gaming—the audience’s ability to play a part in the story—the scene sidesteps the usual pitfalls of bad scriptwriting and voice acting. It just gives you the real, raw moment. This is something
the series tried before, with less success, in Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow. “We had this whole mission where a female agent guided you through the streets of Jerusalem,” says Gerighty. “At the end of the mission, [Sam’s commander] Lambert gets on the intercom and says,
‘Kill her. Don’t ask any questions, just kill her.’ When we playtested it, 95 percent of the people just went ‘pop.’ We discovered that Sam Fisher was seen more as a soldier who was following orders all the time. We want to break that by giving Sam less of a soldier attitude during the game. You’re not the good soldier that you were before.” In fact, Sam Fisher, the quiet guy in the black stretch pants, seems a totally different person here—darker, older, and more world-weary. As Double Agent begins, Sam’s daughter, “his only connection to humanity”
according to Gerighty, dies in a car accident. This triggers Sam’s sudden veer into antihero territory. But aside from the brooding attitude, the most obvious change is the absence of Sam’s iconic nightvision goggles—at least for a few levels.

“What we want to do is [to] show people that Sam Fisher exists as a character, not just as equipment,” says Gerighty. “We want to create someone who’s not just a guy with a five o’ clock shadow, not just a guy with goggles. We want to give it some depth, to give it some dimension that hasn’t been in the game so far. If we didn’t do something, we’d be stuck in the same
Lara Croft shorts and tight top.”

MORAL NO-MAN'S LAND
That’s how we end up in this New Orleans dungeon with formerly unassailable good guy Sam Fisher murdering his best friend in cold blood. Double Agent features several such uncomfortable moments of sticky moral judgment. It’s a subject that Gerighty seems particularly nervous about; he’s careful to point out that Sam isn’t choosing between good and evil, that
he won’t be taking a detour into the morality of, say, Grand Theft
Auto. “None of the decisions are black or white,” says Gerighty. “So
there’s no real right or wrong.”
I find that hard to believe when the team boots up another level:
Kinshasa, a miserable place in real life, located in the unstable African
country ironically called the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It’s a
big departure from the dark, empty office parks Splinter Cell is known
for. The streets are alive with soldiers and rebels fighting a bloody civil
war that—if the A.I. works out—will unfold differently every time you
play it. The African sun blazes above Sam’s head. Not only can you
(and any enemy not distracted by the war in the streets) see Sam in
the harsh light of day, but you can also see the sweat dripping down
his skin. The level of realism makes it especially gruesome when Sam
sneaks past a group of rebel prisoners lined up against a wall for
execution. “You can save them, but you risk being exposed,” says
Gerighty. Sam does the easy thing—standing by while the three men
are shot, one by one. The final man scurries up the wall in vain before
rifle fire drags him back down to the ground.
I wonder aloud if the game has anything to say about the real-life atrocities that—as we sit on plush couches playing videogames on Ubisoft’s massive HDTV—are happening in the real Congo,
thousands of miles away. The ongoing war there has caused the greatest number of casualties in any conflict since World War II.
Gerighty’s defenses kick in. “We’re not trying to make a political statement,” he says. “We really
just want to make a piece of entertainment.” Then is it appropriate to use a miserable real-life war as a playground for simple entertainment? “We want to stay believable,” Gerighty replies. “We can’t set a civil war just anywhere. Kinshasa was chosen because a Hollywood scriptwriter
and an ex-Mossad agent [both consultants on Double Agent] decided that it’s an area that is likely to have a summit of worldwide terrorists, a place which is war-torn…a place which is falling to pieces.”
It’s all about realism—that fanatical religion of the modern game developer. To the credit of Gerighty and his team, Double Agent’s version of Kinshasa is filled with the realistic horrors of war.
Sam narrowly avoids a mortar blast but arrives just in time to witness its victim consumed by flames and convulsing on the ground. Elsewhere, a grenade blows the legs off a soldier. His blood pools in the dusty street.
I want Sam to be a hero—to save the prisoners before they’re executed, to do something about the horrors in the streets of Kinshasa…but that will be my call when I play the game. These kinds of choices fall into the player’s hands in Double Agent as part of a larger openness in the game’s design—one that extends from huge, branching levels to crucial moments in the story. “If you thought that Chaos Theory [the previous game in the series] gave you a lot of choices, this game is much more open,” says Gerighty. Sam’s actions—your actions—have consequences.
Depending on the choices you make as you play through Double Agent, the final third of the game (and the game’s ending) changes substantially. But according to Gerighty, none of these paths lead Sam Fisher, hero, to become Sam Fisher, villain. “We can’t turn him into a bad
guy overnight,” he says. “It’s not like you come out completely clean, but you’ll never be the most wanted terrorist in America.” >

THE HIVE MIND
I wake up at 4 a.m., jet-lagged, in my room on the 65th floor of the Shanghai Grand Hyatt, the highest hotel in the world. After a bout of tossing and turning, I give up on sleep
and pull back the curtains to reveal a panoramic view of Pudong,
Shanghai’s towering business district. Skyscrapers shoot up from
the ground for miles and miles. Red aircraft warning beacons blink
on the arms of a dozen giant construction cranes erecting ever-taller,
ultramodern buildings. It takes me a few moments to realize that the
cranes are running. Welding sparks flash in the night. Concrete trucks
stream in and out of construction sites. This rapidly expanding city is
being built constantly, all day and all night.
The 130-man team working on Double Agent in Shanghai seems to
share this work ethic, plugging away at the game’s E3 demo on Labor Day while most of the city’s workers enjoy the day off. Splinter Cell is known for high production values, and it’s obvious that this has less to do with technology or a big budget than with the obsessive dedication of the people involved. They sweat the details. Where you or I might simply see Sam Fisher, superspy, creep across a desert battlefield, they see the watery coating of sweat on Sam’s skin, painstakingly created for just this level; the special lighting effect that lets sunbeams realistically bounce off surfaces; the soldier and rebel character models, all created from scratch, each character different in size and weight, each wearing a costume that was put together in real life on a mannequin and photographed with a superhigh-res camera. Some team members’ duties consist entirely of making facial expressions look natural and making sure Sam’s sneaking animation feels just right. When I talk to lead character designer Jean-Michel Tari, the guy who, among other things, dresses up the aforementioned dummy, I can’t help empathizing with him. He speaks anxiously about his work, trying to explain—in 15 minutes—all of the elaborate details he’s cramming into the game’s characters. It’s as if this guy, who toils away on the things players never consciously notice, finally has an opportunity to point out his hard work. But you have to wonder where this style of massive production is going.

Does spending so much effort on the tiniest of details really take us somewhere new? “I think that people really take pleasure from
seeing details,” says Gerighty. “It’s the attention to detail that makes something feel high quality. If you cut corners, you’re going to have something that just feels cheap.” Double Agent certainly doesn’t look cheap—it practically slides off the screen with a thick veneer of polish.
But obsessing over lighting effects and smooth animation won’t create a compelling game. “The main focus on this game is not the visual detail,” says Gerighty. “It’s the emotions we can attain with those elements.” Here we go again. “Everything is done with a high level of visual fidelity to create this tangible world. If it’s just an arms race to be the best eye candy around, that’s not going to last. But if the emotions are there, it’s going to last.”

"THE MAIN FOCUS IS NOT VISUAL DETAIL. IT’S THE EMOTIONS WE CAN ATTAIN WITH [IT].”



MULTIPLAYER FOR DUMMIES
Opening up without dumbing down

Splinter Cell Chaos Theory’s co-op mode, wherein you
and a friend join forces for a set of online team missions,
gets officially scrapped in Double Agent. It’s a
shame, but you can console yourself with the knowledge that
Splinter Cell’s competitive online mode, Spies vs. Mercenaries,
now receives all the attention. SVM is a high-tension game of
cat and mouse, limited to six players and split between two teams: the spies and mercs for which the game is named. On the spy side, players sneak, Sam Fisher–style, into enemy territory
using high-tech gizmos and the cover of darkness. On the merc side, players hunt down the infiltrating spies with flashlights and heavy firepower, their advantage handicapped by a narrow, first-person field of vision. It’s a nervy, slow-burning, highly original game, but one that comes with an off-putting learning curve. Veteran players are known for their merciless treatment of newcomers. “The community that plays [SVM] are some of the hardest-core people out there,” says coproducer Julian Gerighty. “When you play it and you’re not an expert, you get destroyed. We wanted to open that up.” But how do you open the game to new players without dumbing it down and driving away the pros?
BOTS
Instead of taking a blind leap into a ring full of heavyweights, why not spend a little time hitting the punching bag? Double Agent lets you to train offline against A.I.-controlled opponents,
giving you a chance to explore each level’s nooks and crannies.
EXFILTRATION
A simple, easy-to-read map shows you where you and your teammates are in the level, marking the location of your objectives as well. However, it’s more than simply meeting objectives.
The tension jacks up while you make your escape.
GHOSTS
SVM maps feature secret routes, fences to jump over, and air ducts to crawl through. For the first hour new players log in, ghost characters pop up. They highlight important parts of the
map, showing you exactly what you can do at each junction.
HACKING TOOL
Spies get an upgrade thanks to this handy little device. It turns off the lights in any room at the flick of a button—and if you can aim it long enough at an unsuspecting merc, you can

MULTIPLAYER WILL BE MORE
NEWBIE-FRIENDLY WITHOUT
DRIVING AWAY THE PROS.

THEY NAILED THE LOOK OF SHANGHAI’S GRAND HYATT.

CHINESE NEW YEAR
“The Girl from Ipanema” sambas through the air in Cloud
Nine, an eagle’s nest of a bar on the 88th floor of the
Grand Hyatt. If you listen carefully, you can hear conversations
in Chinese, French, Japanese, and English among the
sounds of rattling ice and glass. I’m enjoying my last night in luxury,
with a stiff Kentucky bourbon and the view of old Shanghai
just across the Huangpu River. Shanghai was the first Chinese
city to open its doors to the West; before the Communist revolution,
French, British, and American nationals exerted a huge
influence on the city, one I can see in the Western-style buildings
that line the riverside. But just outside my window, I spot a
Western influence of another era: Sam Fisher, nearly invisible in
his sneaking suit. He hugs the windows as he makes his way to
the other side of the building. In the distance, a giant fireworks
display signifies that it’s Chinese New Year. Rockets arc across
the night and explode, revealing miniature details in the city
below. Cloud Nine patrons looking out at the display catch a surprise
glimpse of the crazy man outside. One particularly drunk
patron rises from his table as if he’s seen a ghost…or perhaps a
sake-induced hallucination.
Technically, Double Agent isn’t allowed to call this level the “Shanghai Grand Hyatt,” presumably because the Chinese government is so vigilant in its enforcement of copyrights. But the team definitely nailed the look of this unusual piece of architecture: Cloud Nine’s riveted iron beams and swanky atmosphere are pitch perfect. The hotel’s atrium, a wide-open cylinder shot straight through the floors of the hotel above, sets up a nice scene as Sam rappels down
to the cocktail lounge below. Meticulous realism may not be the most exciting thing going on in games, but it’s hard to not appreciate the concreteness of the world Double Agent creates. I lose track of Sam, who’s slipped away into some dark corridor. Perhaps he’s up in my room poisoning the minibar. Or maybe he’s waiting patiently in my closet. It’s hard to tell, in this world halfway between reality and fantasy, what he’s up to. Keep an eye out./

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