Ubisoft’s creative director drunkenly tweets that a new Splinter Cell game is coming, but we’re not sure how seriously we should take him.
Fans of Splinter Cell have been dealing with disappointment for years. The last time anyone saw Sam Fisher was in a tiny cameo in Ghost Recon: Wildlands where he helps the Recon boys get inside a narco base to steal some data (as Fisher is wont to do). Since then, nada.
The last REAL Splinter Cell game was Blacklist, which came out all the way back in 2013. Now, we’re not saying 2013 was a bad year, but games have progressed quite a ways since those innocent times.
Sadly, Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed franchise shares a lot of the same core gameplay elements as Splinter Cell does, but sells a lot better. You can’t really blame Ubisoft for following what people are willing to pay for.
That said, Ubi’s got a soft spot in their heart for Sam. CEO Yves Guillemot has been fielding questions on where the heck is Sam for years now, always throwing out platitudes like, “It's just we have quite a lot on our plate at the moment."
But rumors about of a new Splinter Cell being in development. And now we might have finally gotten our first confirmation, albeit in a slightly unusual way.
Ubisoft creative director Julian Gerighty tweeted out yesterday, point blank, that a new Splinter Cell is coming. "Working on the next #SplinterCell with @danhaynow and @romcamor in #Lyon. Can’t wait for #E3."
Several pictures of Julian with full glasses of wine would sort of lead you to think that these might be drunk-tweets along the same lines as an ex-boyfriend shouting to the world that he’s doing fine without you, thank you very much. But then in a subsequent tweet, Julian said that he “may be in trouble” and to not retweet the original tweet.
Generally speaking, it’s a lot easier to just delete the original tweet than ask people to stop retweeting. So either Julian doesn’t know how Twitter works, or he’s leaving that tweet up there for a reason.
Ubisoft, however, is remaining tight-lipped. In a statement to PC Gamer, a Ubisoft spokesperson passed his tweets off as just Julian “having fun.”
So who do we believe? We’re not sure. But we’ll probably find out at this year’s E3, which is less than a month away.