Back around 2018, an E3 leak claimed that Ubisoft was planning on announcing a new Splinter Cell game. That turned out to be entirely false, but the publisher was indeed working on a revival of the stealth-action franchise at one point, although it was quickly cancelled in a pivot towards ‘live service' games.
This week, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier published a new interview with AdHoc Studios co-founder, Nick Herman, covering his journey from Ubisoft to founding his new studio and releasing the new hit-game Dispatch. In this interview, Herman reveals that around 2017, when he took on a role at Ubisoft's San Francisco studio, he and a small team had worked on a new Splinter Cell game for several months:
Herman had the following to say about his time working on Splinter Cell:
“I was so excited to be a part of this and help revitalize it, because it’s been dormant for a while, and we thought we could tell a great story and do something the fans would love”.
However, it is claimed that the game was cancelled very early on, as Ubisoft had begun asking its studios to focus on ‘Games as a service', otherwise known as live-service games. The group struggled to come up with an idea that would stick and ultimately, Herman left Ubisoft to start up AdHoc Studios, which just released its first hit game, Dispatch, which prominently features Breaking Bad co-star, Aaron Paul in a lead acting role.
Eventually, Ubisoft San Francisco hired a new leader, Mark Rubin, and began working on XDefiant. While the game garnered some hype during its beta testing phase, players had issues with the title at launch and ultimately, Ubisoft shut the game down and closed the San Francisco studio.
While some have taken this interview to mean that Splinter Cell was cancelled specifically for XDefiant, that was not the case. The Splinter Cell project had a short-lived life in 2017 and was cancelled to focus on live-service multiplayer games. However, XDefiant didn't come to be until after 2019, at least two years after the short-lived Splinter Cell project.
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KitGuru Says: There is a serious lack of stealth-action games on the current market. Ubisoft has the perfect IP to fill that gap. Hopefully at some point in the next couple of years, it capitalises on that opportunity.
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Former Ubisoft studio lead confirms Splinter Cell project was cancelled in 2017 first appeared on
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