.jpg){kind=link}
While Splinter Cell protagonist Sam Fisher has appeared in multiple Ubisoft games in recent years, the franchise itself hasn"t seen a new entry appear since 2013"s Blacklist. However, a new report reveals that Ubisoft did have plans to bring back the franchise with a brand-new installment before the project turned into something else entirely.
Speaking to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, AdHoc Studio co-founder Nick Herman revealed how his journey at Ubisoft came to an end before spinning up the new studio that recently shipped the hugely well-received Dispatch.
Nick Herman, Dennis Lenart, and Pierre Shorette had joined Ubisoft back in 2017 after developing Tales from the Borderlands under Telltale. At the new studio, Ubisoft had put the trio to work under an unannounced project, which has now been revealed to have been a brand-new Splinter Cell game.
"I was so excited to be a part of this and help revitalize it, because it’s been dormant for a while," says Herman. "And we thought we could tell a great story and do something the fans would love."
However, after only a few months of working on it, Ubisoft executives had stepped in to pressure the team to transform the experience into a "games as a service" project. This had reportedly been the time when the company had wanted to pivot most of its games into live service titles.
However, despite Herman and the team"s efforts to make a live service Splinter Cell game, it hadn"t come together. "We tried," adds Herman. "Let’s make a narrative GAAS game. We were trying to make that make sense, and a lot of cool prototypes were made."
By the time that the developer trio left the company in 2018, Ubisoft had reportedly lost interest in Splinter Cell and wanted to chase Call of Duty instead. Eventually, the Splinter Cell project had become xDefiant. The free-to-play class-based shooter launched in 2024 and shut down only six months later, with developer Ubisoft San Francisco also closing its doors later in the year.
Ubisoft has a remake of the original Splinter Cell in development, but it does not have a release date yet.
Update: Fixed title typo error.