We recently had a chance to sit down and chat with Clint Hocking, creative director, scriptwriter, and lead level designer for Ubisoft's upcoming Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell® Chaos Theory™. Here's what Clint had to tell us.
Xbox.com: Both the original Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell® and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell® Pandora Tomorrow™ boasted an almost claustrophobic level design, as Sam often found himself in tight and narrow spaces, or with limited options for escaping once detected. This helped to increase the tension, but it also made for a less open experience. Chaos Theory seems to be offering a more open-ended experience with a lot of different options available to achieve just one goal. Why the change in design?
Hocking: We felt it was important to allow the player a lot more freedom in the way they approach the challenges of the game. Previous titles in the series offered very designer-directed gameplay. A lot of effort was put in on the design side to ensure the player tackled specific gameplay challenges in specific ways. In some cases, we went so far as to force a Game Over if you didn't perform a gameplay sequence exactly the way we wanted. For example, in Splinter Cell, there was a sequence where the player was absolutely forced to use his thermal vision to get key codes off of keypad locks by reading the heat signature of the fingerprints of the guard passing through the area. This was incredibly difficult and was frustrating for a lot of players. We've matured a lot since then, and we realized that this kind of gameplay is cool when you do it, but not nearly as cool when you're forced to do it. We decided to take the approach of allowing the player to use any and all the tools at his disposal to come up with his own plans to get past a challenge. Now, if you need to get through some keypad-locked doors, you have a wide array of options. You can interrogate a guard for the code, you can get the code from an e-mail message, you can follow a guard through quickly before the door closes behind him, you can wait for him to pass and use your thermal, or you can even hack the keypad and risk setting off an alarm if you fail. None of these approaches is the 'right' one. They are all valid. It's up to the player to decide what the best way is, and the best way will be different for every player and every play style. As for the concern about tension … we knew it was important, and so we focused on finding other, better ways to maintain the tension aside from hanging the designers' 'Sword of Damocles' over the player's shoulder. If you want to grab the guard and interrogate him, the 'Closer than Ever' system and the new dynamic camera make getting close to NPCs an extremely tense and exciting experience. Getting close enough to sneak through the door before it closes is the same. The hacking minigame is cool, and the tension comes from the threat of messing it up and setting off an alarm, so it's all still there. The game is even more tense than before, but it's not punishing.
Xbox.com: Weather and the effect it has on the environment and A.I. is being introduced full force in Chaos Theory. Even the logo for the game is dripping with raindrops. Can you discuss the basic tenants of the weather system? For example, is it random, scripted, does it change the way you need to think about traversing the environment, will heavy rain help damp out the sound you make?
Hocking: The weather system is emblematic of one of the core design philosophies behind the game. We wanted rich procedural systems that made the game more organic, visceral, and realistic. It is both scripted and random, which is to say that, on the large scale—when it starts, what its maximum and minimum intensity is—that's all scripted. For example, in the Lighthouse mission there is a hard trigger in the world that will cause a storm to start. The intensity of the storm is defined by a min and a max, but other than that it's random. On the low level, it is procedural. The weather system ties into all aspects of the game and impacts graphics, audio, and gameplay. As the environment gets wetter, puddles of water will form in real time, and these can be used to conduct electricity from sticky shockers, allowing you to incapacitate multiple guards. The sound of the rain will create ambient masking noise that will cover up some of the noise you make so the enemy doesn't hear you. Lightning, on the other hand, can light you up momentarily and cause you to be seen … but as a trade-off, the thunder than follows can be very loud, and can mask the sounds of gunshots. Additional graphical touches include having an array assigned to fabric, flags, or curtains that might be flapping in the wind, making them blow in the breeze more realistically.
Xbox.com:Chaos Theory is now taking advantage of the Normal Mapping technique, and we can see the immediate benefits just in screenshots, let alone video ofChaos Theory in motion. Can you explain to the layman what Normal Mapping is, and what it allows you to do?
Hocking: Previous Splinter Cell engines uses 'per triangle' lighting, meaning that each triangle in a mesh would check how much light it was receiving and average that light across the entire triangle to determine how bright it should look on screen. Chaos Theory uses a 'per pixel' lighting engine that supports Normal Mapping. Normal Mapping essentially assigns an 'angle' to every pixel in a texture and tells that pixel whether it is receiving more or less light than the pixel next to it. Imagine that each letter in this block of text is a pixel in a texture. Instead of every letter being flat on the page (or monitor) each letter is assigned a 'facing'—some might be facing right, or left, or up, or down at any angle, and thus, if there is a light on the far right of the page or monitor, the letters that are assigned a right facing will receive light from that source, but letters that are assigned a left facing will be drawn in shadow. This allows us to create amazingly high levels of detail and richness in surfaces both in the world and on the characters. It makes flat surfaces appear rough, and gives them a much more realistic look.
Xbox.com: The original Splinter Celloffered downloadable content in the form of new single-player missions; Pandora Tomorrow offered us new multiplayer maps. What sort of downloadable content support can we expect withChaos Theory? Will it primarily support one of the game types (single-player, co-op, or adversarial), or all three?
Hocking: We haven't announced any official plans for downloadable content, but we've always tried our best to support our games with additional content, new maps, or other cool stuff available online, or through discs in the specialty press. The downloadable maps for Splinter Cell were amazingly popular.
Xbox.com: The E3 demo didn't feature Michael Ironside's voice as Sam Fisher. Can we expect his return?
Hocking: The E3 voice track was a temp track. Michael Ironside has returned, and he's done an amazing job. There was about four to five times the amount of script for Michael to record this time, because of the huge number of interrogations and the amount of branching possible in the script that supports our non-linear level design. Michael did a fantastic job, and brought a huge amount of depth and personality to Sam.
Xbox.com: The script/story/dialogue in theSplinter Cell series has always been top notch. Do you consult much with the namesake of the series (Tom Clancy) or are these all original ideas from Ubisoft internally?
Hocking: The script, story, and dialogue are completely original, created by the dev team, and approved internally by Ubisoft editorial. We work hard to maintain the realistic techno-thriller themes that are associated with the Clancy name, but the creative is all ours.
Xbox.com: What's your position on Chaos Theory?
Hocking: I am the creative director, scriptwriter, and lead level designer. As creative director, my job is to act as 'custodian' of the vision of the game and work with the other creative leads to ensure everyone is working toward the same creative goals, as well as to interface with editorial and ensure that their creative concerns are answered in all aspects of the game. As scriptwriter, I was responsible for writing the entire script for the game … over 100,000 words of it, including all in-game dialogue and all of the game's pre-rendered cinematic scripts that happen between missions. As lead LD, I worked with the level design team to oversee the conception and implementation of all of the gameplay and design of all of the missions. I worked exhaustively with each level designer to ensure that every step of gameplay in every single level is as good as we could possibly make it.
Xbox.com: Your bio mentions that you work on both level design and the script for the game; which of the two is more important?
Hocking: Can't have one without the other.Splinter Cell titles have always tried very hard to unite the story and the gameplay, and Chaos Theory takes this even further. In Chaos Theory, the story in the missions is completely interactive. You will never lose camera control during the gameplay and be forced to watch an in-game cinematic. If you see something happening—no matter how important it might be to the script—you will be able to interfere with it. One of our challenges was ensuring we would be able to handle all of the possible permutations of the story when we left it open to player interference. If you want to spy on the secret meeting between the villains, you can, but if you want to storm the room and stop the secret meeting, you can do that too … though usually running into a room full of armed mercenaries is a one-way ticket to the morgue, and it makes it very hard (but never impossible) to complete your mission. So, in that sense, for me at least, working on the script and the levels was essentially the same. The two are so intertwined in Chaos Theory that they are essentially inseparable.
Xbox.com: We know that the co-op missions tell their own unique story, but will they also be given cinematics in the same vein as the single-player to help drive the narrative?
Hocking: Because of the online nature of the co-op mode, we elected not to create pre-rendered cinematics for these missions. Players don't necessarily want to watch a 60-second cinematic when they are starting a mission online. Also, because the replayability in the co-op mode is very high, we felt that players would definitely be playing each co-op mission many, many times, and seeing the same cinematic over and over again would eventually get boring. That said, the co-op does have its own story, but it runs along a parallel branch to the single-player story. The single-player cinematics provide all of the necessary back-story to what is going on in co-op, and the references between the single-player and co-op experience make the co-op story very rich. One of the single-player missions even takes place at the same time as one of the co-op missions, only a few kilometers apart, and Sam is in direct contact with the co-op team during their simultaneous operations. Sam has a special objective in that mission to assist the co-op players remotely, and the co-op team also has an objective in their mission that helps Sam.
Xbox.com: Level design for a stealth game seems very challenging, but then level design for the adversarial with two different gameplay options to design around (first-person for the mercs and third-person for the spies) seems really tough, and designing whole missions with two spies in mind for the co-op play would seem like a daunting task. Have you been involved in any of those, and, if so, which is the most challenging?
Hocking: Designing the co-op and the single each had their own specific challenges. The single is very, very tightly attached to a dynamic, living story that takes place during the actual gameplay, and this was tremendously challenging to accomplish to the high level of quality we wanted. For the co-op, there were an enormous number of technical challenges. In the end, I would say that both aspects of the production and design had their own unique ambitions and all of the imaginable challenges that come with them.
Xbox.com: Finally, what has been the most challenging aspect of working on Chaos Theory for you personally?
Hocking: The scope of the game made the production extremely challenging. With 11 single-player missions, four co-op missions, and 11 adversarial missions, all the new features, the addition of non-linear gameplay, a brand-new rendering engine, and over 150 people on the project … at times there were so many things happening so quickly it was actually frightening. When I tried to describe the production to my fiancé once, I told her that making this game was like trying to build a house with a tornado. There was so much raw power and speed, but at the same time, it was very difficult to control. It was intimidating, and there was a constant fear that a very tiny error might go undetected and we'd lose control of the tornado, and poof, the whole house would blow apart into a million pieces. The trick was making sure that when the house was almost ready, we were able to put the tornado back in the box and then just finish the detail work and be done … but the timing was critical … it's not easy to put a tornado in a can, and you can't let it out again once you do … I think we managed to hit that one perfectly, and I'm thankful in the end that Ubi and editorial let us delay the game, because it allowed us to use the raw power of the tornado to full effect and it still gave us the time to make sure the light fixtures and faucets were all set correctly, and the shingling and shutters were snug, and the whole house had a great paint job and beautiful landscaping. If anything, you could say the most challenging aspect of working onChaos Theory was the chaos part. I'm glad that the theory behind it all was sound.
Xbox.com: Sounds like you built an amazing game—we can't wait to play it! Thanks Clint, and thanks to all the folks at Ubisoft Montreal as well.
