Volume 2 Issue 5 November 2006 Grand Theft Auto - Hardcore Gamer

we wanted the prettier graphics and more beautiful
environments! As a result, the pressure to
produce something next-gen has been huge for
everyone on the team, at all levels. It forced us
to rework some parts of the game that we would
have otherwise accepted.”
So how did the team approach the task of maximizing
the technical aspects of Double Agent?
“Here’s a little secret,” confesses Roy. “We
didn’t set a quality benchmark per se. We went
in telling everybody, ‘Okay, we’re making a
next-gen game’. We left the denition of ‘nextgen’
as broad as possible, so that people could
internalize it, and apply it in their own, individual
ways. Every time we nished something,
we looked at it thinking, ‘Okay, now how do we
make it better?’ It’s been a tough process for
some, as it can be frustrating to always work
at something and not simply accept it as good
enough. The fact that there were no Xbox 360
games out there when we started out has helped
this, because there were no existing examples
of what was a truly ‘next-gen’ game out there.
When Xbox 360 games started coming out, we
quickly realized we would have to depend on
our own standards for the rest of the project...
up until the very end, we’ve been looking at everything
and wondering how to make it better.”
Optimizing a game for the next generation can
mean subtle changes just as well as it means the
obvious high-res textures and boosted polygon
counts. Take Double Agent’s music, for example.
By utilizing the multi-core processing and huge
memory allocation of the Xbox 360, the music
team has managed to create something more
than just pleasant background noise. There are
no musical tracks in Double Agent per se; rather,
there are multiple streams of music that are directly
tied to the gameplay situation.
Here’s an example. The music on a particular
level demonstrated at Shanghai featured twelve
separate layers of instrumentation. Layers rise
into the level’s music as the tension of a given
scene rises, then fade away as tension dissipates.
As Sam approaches an enemy, a rhythmic
drum line steadily builds to a crescendo. If
Sam turns away, the drum line fades into the
atmospheric sounds that accompany the game’s
stealth sequences. The idea that music should
be used as a gameplay element that creates
true immersion is unheard of outside the world
of rhythm games. In Double Agent, Ubisoft’s
Shanghai team may have set a new benchmark
for use of audio in video games.
In today’s mass market, it is ultimately the consumer
that determines how successful a game
is, regardless of the developer’s ambitions.
What does Ubisoft do to try and please existing
fans while continually reaching for new ones
with every project? “It’s gonna sound like I’m
sucking up when I say this, but it’s 100% true: we
design the games for the consumer,” says Roy.
“It’s actually a big corporate value at Ubisoft, to
approach game production with the consumer in
mind. It means respecting the hardcore fans of
the series, because they’re the ones who have
been loyal for so long, and they usually know
your games better than you. It also means not
‘talking down’ to the mass market audience,
but rather to try and understand how they play,
what they enjoy. We listen to consumers from
36_PREVIEW_UNDER COVER: THE NEXT GENERATION OF SPLINTER CELL
day one, when we brainstorm on our new game
concepts, and we go back to the consumers at
the end, when we want to know if our game is
as fun and as challenging as it should be. One
of the most rewarding experiences in game design
is actually to sit next to a videogame player,
put a pad in his hands, and watch him play your
game for the rst time.”
Splinter Cell: Double Agent is hoping to take
gamers into the next generation of stealth action
while meeting all the objectives of a successful
game franchise. Only time will tell how
Double Agent will fare at the retail level, any
publisher’s nal benchmark for success. Longtime
Splinter Cell fans have good reason to be
excited, though. Double Agent gives us a whole
new Sam Fisher and a whole new world of stealth
action to explore.
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