SPLINTER CELL: CHAOS THEORY

How missed opportunities and difficult conditions forged a stealth classic

- BY PAUL WEEDON

THE MAKING OF... Chaos Theory might be the third Splinter Cell game, but for Clint Hocking and the team at Ubisoft Montreal - returning to the series they'd originated after Pandora Tomorrow was handled by sister studios in Milan and Shanghai - it represented a second chance. “Development on the first game had been very difficult,” Hocking says today. “Many of us who went on to work on Chaos Theory felt we could have done much, much better.”

As Hocking himself points out, “the core game experience did not change significantly” from 2002's Splinter Cell. That meant the Montreal team had something to build on, with “additive improvements”, but also to push against. “It made it very clear to us what was working and what needed to be fixed,” Hocking says. “Our common goal became simply to deliver - to an exceptionally high degree of quality and polish - all the promises we felt we'd failed to deliver in the first game.”

One of those things was the game's approach to failure. Splinter Cell features an infamous mission in which NSA agent Sam Fisher is tasked with recording a conversation in an elevator; if the conversation is missed, it's game over, try again. “Most of these things only ended up in the original because we had failed as designers and developers to anticipate how the game would actually play,” Hocking says. “By the time we encountered the problem, we had no plan and no time to address it except by forcing a mission failure, but we knew what the answer should have been.”

It's something that