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Splinter Cell: Blacklist actor change due to performance capture

Ubisoft chose a new voice actor for Sam Fisher because Splinter Cell: Blacklist is the first in the series to rely so heavily on motion-captured performances.

Creative director Maxime Béland told IGN that for past games, Ubisoft used three different performances to capture the whole of Sam Fisher - a voice actor, a facial animator and a motion capture artist.

"On Blacklist we knew that we wanted to raise the bar of our scripted events, of our cinematics, and to do that we knew we had to go to performance capture," he said.

"The difference between motion capture and performance capture is that with performance capture, you're capturing everything at the same time.

"So we had one actor doing the body, the voice and the face. We have a camera that's recording all the facial animations so right there, because you're capturing a true actor's performance, and the level of quality is raised instantly."

Béland said that Ubisoft faced the problem of needing someone who could do "not only the voice but also had the physicality that Sam Fisher has".

"That's why we had to go with an actor that was able to do that, so we found Eric Johnson," he concluded.

Johnson replaces Michael Ironside, who had voiced Sam in all other games.

Splinter Cell: Blacklist is coming to PC, PlayStation 3, Wii U and Xbox 360 on August 20 in North America and August 22 in Europe.

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Splinter Cell: Blacklist

PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii U, PC

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Brenna Hillier avatar

Brenna Hillier

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Based in Australia and having come from a lengthy career in the Aussie games media, Brenna worked as VG247's remote Deputy Editor for several years, covering news and events from the other side of the planet to the rest of the team. After leaving VG247, Brenna retired from games media and crossed over to development, working as a writer on several video games.

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