14 DAY TRIAL // French publisher Ubisoft has quite a lot of high-quality franchises in its portfolio, but one that hasn't been on the radar of many fans is its Splinter Cell stealth series. After receiving a lot of iterations, the franchise has seemingly gone undercover, as the Splinter Cell Conviction title was announced but no further details were released.
The game was set to appear a few years ago, but then Ubisoft came forward with a statement and revealed that it would be delayed, as the team considered that they needed to revamp it from the ground up. After quite some time, at this year's E3 conference, the game was formally unveiled and received a fall release date.
Yesterday though, the French company made the announcement that four of its biggest titles slated to hit this holiday season would be delayed and pushed back into 2010. Sadly, among them was Splinter Cell Conviction.
This piece of news made a lot of fans quite sad and worried about whether or not the title would receive yet another revamp and remain in hiatus for at least a year. Not so, according to a Ubisoft community manager, who posted on the game's forum under the name UbiRazz.
“Splinter Cell Conviction is a very important game for us. We want to ensure it's a game that long-term fans and gamers new to the series equally enjoy when they play it. Previous Splinter Cell games have set the bar very high when it comes to quality and enjoyment, we are firmly focused on continuing this with Conviction.”
He then added, “After demonstrating the new vision for the game at E3 2009 we won many awards and received a lot of interest from fans and press alike. In order to live up to our own ambitions and your expectations, we strongly feel that giving our teams that extra time will allow us to present a game to you that will fulfill that potential. Due to this, we have decided to move the release date into Q1 2010. This extra time will ensure Splinter Cell Conviction becomes every bit the fantastic experience we want it to be. Just so you know: there won't be any major changes or additions to what you saw at E3 but there may be minor tweaks/balancing.”
Overall, it seems that Sam Fisher will be back soon enough, in the first quarter of 2010. Until then, we need to satisfy our stealth needs with other titles.