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Story by Stephany Nunneley

Sat, Feb 27, 2010 | 20:08 GMT

Splinter Cell: Conviction delays were good for development, says Ubisoft

Ubisoft’s Patrick Redding has said that one of the reasons Splinter Cell: Conviction was delayed so many times was to fix a few things with the AI and to add things to the game from its “laundry list”.

Speaking with CVG at X10, the game’s designer said that the latest delay also helped the team tweak the game’s difficulty progression.

“In some ways it [the delay] was the best possible scenario for us because we were angling towards our original release date in February,” said Redding. “You know, as is always the case, you develop this kind of laundry list and think: ‘Aw man if only we had an extra bit of polish time to really go after that and that and that, plus all the usual debugging, that’d be wonderful’.

“So I mean a lot of it has been fixing issues with the AI, adding different challenge levels, giving the player the right level of difficulty at first.

“I mean, you know, that’s a delicate path because you push back too far and the player’s like: ‘Ah man you guys are cheating me, I’m invincible’ and other times they end up looking dumb. That for us was a really delicate part of the process because of course you have a mix of scripted events in the game, obviously regarding the story, but then also a huge amount of the AI is really emergent.

“It’s ultra-systemic you know – they’re going on patrols, they’re trying to flank the player, they’re using all of the various tools that we’ve given the player like the LKP as a way of determining where the player is.

That’s a really delicate complex and potentially fragile system to try to tune and balance so we’ve been really putting a lot of time into that”.

Game’s out April 13 and 16 in the US and UK for PC and Xbox 360.

Three new videos for it were posted earlier. Go have a watch.

3 Posted in: Action, Hot, PC, Ubisoft, Xbox 360
Tags: patrick redding, splinter cell, splinter cell conviction