VideoGamesDaily: Hi Patrick, good to chat. How many Splinter Cell games have you worked on?

Patrick Redding: This is my first Splinter Cell. Before this I was working on the Far Cry series, I was narrative designer on Far Cry 2.

VGD: How would you characterise the evolution of co-op in Splinter Cell? Which features have gone out of fashion, and which have retained their appeal?

Redding: I see this co-op as fitting within a trend or a tendency that I think is emerging – actually it emerged a long time ago, but I think it’s just moved into the mainstream – which is that before, co-op was a relatively hardcore gaming paradigm for people.

It tended to be the thing that people who were PC tactical shooter gamers were really obsessing over, or that sports gamers were really obsessing over, and I think now what we have is a generational shift, where the core of the mass market are people who both want to have a deep story, memorable moments and all of the drama and meaning and investment that we typically have always had in single player games, and they also want to be able to share it with their friends.

They don’t want it to be a solitary experience, they want to be able either to sit on the couch with their girlfriend and play, or be on Xbox Live with their best friends and play, and feel that something is unfolding according to some design intention, and they’re getting a chance to experience that but it doesn’t have to be that alone.

That was what motivated us to move in the direction we did. I think when we looked at what single player was trying to do with Conviction, it’s a more internal story, it’s less about the outside world going to hell in a hand basket and there’s one man who can go in and save the day, and it’s a lot more about Sam’s personal hell, and what he’s doing to get out of it, or go deeper into it depending on how you look at it, and how situations are being manipulated by outside forces who have their own agendas, and how he reacts to that.

And I think that informs a lot of the game design choices we made, it informs the whole dynamic of this slightly more active mode of stealth, and the offensive qualities that come out of that: being able to strike at enemies with impunity, that sort of thing. And I think when we looked at co-op we thought, ‘we have to do the same thing’: there has to be a story there for the reasons I gave, but there has to be an extension of what the Splinter Cell universe is now.

Because it’s clearly something different, it’s not just the ‘political crisis implicating eight different countries’ of the week, there’s something a lot more intimate, personal and traumatic going on there for the characters and we needed to work out a way to apply that in a scenario that is really a lot more like traditional Splinter Cell in some ways – your handler is whispering in your ear, telling you what your rules of engagement are, and you have to go on this mission where you’re allowed to do some things with gadgets. Well, that’s not going to work, it’s got to be something more than that.

And so that’s where we got these ideas – let’s make it a prequel, let’s tie it in directly with single player, and let’s have the events of co-op have some meaning for what’s going on in single player, but also this idea, almost antithetical to the notion of co-op, of having two player characters who actually don’t like each other or trust each other. This idea that one is an American – that’s inevitable, it’s Splinter Cell – but one isn’t, he’s a Russian working for the rival agency, and it’s only because of some political expediency that their bosses have ordered them to work together.

So these are guys who are used to working alone, and now not only are they forced to take on a partner but it’s not like Murtaugh and Riggs in Lethal Weapon – these guys don’t know if they can trust each other to watch each others back, they don’t know if there’s some hidden agenda, they just don’t know.

And what I like about that is that their relationship is evolving at the same time that the players’ ability to play together is evolving. So at the same time that Archer and Kestrel are going from solo operatives to learning how to trust each other, work together, be tactical together and achieve more challenging objectives, the players are also learning how to master these skills which maybe they’ve started to learn in single player, but now they’re extending those skills and combining them in different ways that they haven’t seen in single player because there’s a team mate.

So I think it works because you hear the relationship evolve, you hear the dialogue between them shift, from one mission to the next – even the systemic dialogue is different, where they’re less cold and impersonal to each other, then they move into a more sarcastic mode, then they tease each other a little bit, and by the end they kind of respect and like each other.

Redding: You’re not the only one!

VGD: Did the decision to remove that have anything to do with the new focus on story, on the partnership of Archer and Kestrel?

Redding: The best way to look at it, even aside from story, is that the fantasy here is that you have these extremely elite, highly trained, incredibly effective and ruthless agents that are kind of let off the leash, whether you’re talking about Sam or Archer and Kestrel. Because the stakes are so high that they’re kind of willing to let them move in a much more aggressive and ultimately violent way.

The concern is if we wanted that same feeling in multiplayer, and then said ‘OK, it’s going to be adversarial, it’s going to be asymmetrical and you’re going to have Mercs who are basically equivalent to the dudes you’re murdering in large numbers in single player, and then you’ve got the spies… I don’t see that going any way other than badly.

And I don’t mean to say that there isn’t a possibility of exploring that, right now perhaps I lack the imagination to see it immediately, but I think beyond that we made a decision that this is something new, we haven’t tried it this way before, and rather than choosing the riskiest possible implementation of it, where we just say ‘great, Spies versus Mercs again, but you can Mark & Execute your opponent, you can fool them with Last Known Position’ – that would have been interesting but unbelievably difficult to pull off, compared to what we tried to do.

And I think it was a good move, a smart move on our part, to play to our strengths, especially on the first implementation of this, to try to come up with a multiplayer mode that really works well with those gameplay pillars, those gameplay mechanics of M&E, LKP and the rest, and then once we see how that works then there’s all sorts of interesting possibilities, then we can really assess and say ‘OK, now, assuming we wanted to go down that avenue what would it look like?’

But I think if we tried to go out the gates with it, I just think right now those same players that were mad it hadn’t been included would be cursing our names for trying to make it work and failing!

VGD: So perhaps we’ll see it in DLC form?

Redding: Well, DLC is a huge can of worms that I’m not going to try and launch into now. We’re going to introduce some interesting stuff with DLC, but I think that in the bigger picture we’re always going to be looking to find ways to expand on the ideas in co-op and multiplayer, because I really feel like that’s becoming our core group, our core audience. Yes, there will still be people who want to play a single player story mode, but I just think more and more it’s shifting towards people wanting to have the experience with their friends as well.

VGD: Patrick, thanks for your thoughts.

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