Okay, I've played the game's co-op campaign with my friend, and personally I think it's a great experience. I NEVER felt like a spy in Double Agent or any of the other games. I spent more time trying and re-trying than I spent playing, and it was almost never fun. I'd be sneaking through a base and then a guard would flick a light on and shoot me in the face. Cue restart of whole mission, and a long loading screen. NOT FUN. I specifically remember some guards that would pseudo-spawn in when i went to certain areas. Enter area near tent: Guard comes out; Wait 15 minutes after re-loading for guard to appear: No guard; Walk past, thinking it's safe then: SUPRISE! GUARD!. Now in Conviction, this is okay; just jump into shadow, or shoot the guard, or melee-kill him, or flashbang, or whatever comes to mind. In Double Agent, that guard always meant alert being raised, instant death, or a detection-game over. Now call me impatient, call me not-in-the-spirit-of-stealth, but when I set up a cunning infiltration plan only for it to be royally screwed over, I'd much rather be able to fix my fuckups on the fly rather than re-loading and trying to perfectly re-create 30 minutes of progress. I also hated the method of doing things in Double Agent, and it made me want to drop stealth games altogether. Opening a door in Double Agent, or any Splinter Cell game before Conviction, became a complex and flow-breaking ordeal. Walk up to door, Press A, HOLD A, Now you have three options. Option 1: Smash door open REALLY LOUDLY (Like any good spy would), Option 2: Open door while making normal door-opening sounds, or Option 3: Open door silently, as fast or as slow as you want. That means that just to open ONE door requires 3 button presses (technically 4 if you did option 3, because you have to press the stick forward to make him move forward and push the door with him. I suppose if you wanted to only open the door halfway and leave it there, this would be a welcome design choice). That's A, then D-pad right (or left) twice while holding A. And pulling out your emp+pistol/assault rifle was fun too. Point Sam in the right direction, hit X, wait for him to comprehend the action, give the game a second to switch camera angles, wait for him to pull out his pistol, aim, then you can shoot an enemy in the head to kill him, or in the body to lose the game. Everything just took so long to do I got bored while doing it. Stashing bodies is the best example of how I felt about the games. Hiding bodies is realistic, but it's complicated and time-consuming and instead of making you feel good about being undetected, it makes you feel bad about killing someone in the name of secrecy. I feel that ditching the overly complicated door-opening mechanics and overall retarded controls were a step in the right direction for Splinter Cell. Now most actions require a contextual button press and take little time. Now instead of getting shot while trying to navigate a menu to open a door, one press automatically chooses the 'open the door quietly' option and another button chooses 'make lots of noise, get detected quickly, and destroy the door'. Now I can kill a guard, disappear into shadows, and use the other guard's confusion to take them out or escape. If my plan to sneak through the room fails, I can hide, re-evaluate, and continue playing, rather than having to restart. I get that many people feel that the faster pace ruins their fun. I myself was baffled at the exclusion of the option to hide bodies, and a few bits required killing, but I don't think the direction taken is a bad one. No longer do I feel like a cow trying to escape a meat packing plant, I feel like a badass infiltrating an enemy base. I think that this could be the start of a middle ground between the classic "Hardcore" stealth of Thief or older Splinter Cells, and straight up tactical shooters like Rainbow Six Vegas. If you like the old version of Splinter Cell, good for you. However, I'd really hate to see negative feedback kill this new streamlined stealth gameplay.
And on a related note, why are some of you "Hardcore" Splinter Cell veterans so diametrically opposed to killing the guards? It's my understanding that a lot of the guys we're supposed to be getting past are all hardened killers, most of them being terrorists bent on murdering innocents. Every time I've been spotted they've killed me on sight. Now, shooting a Rent-A-Cop is just in bad taste, and killing in an embassy isn't an option for obvious reasons, but how exactly is is better for me to leave the actual terrorist guards alive? Surely once I've gotten whatever I wanted from the base they'd be fired for incompetence or killed, why go through the red tape? And by leaving a base full of terrorists alive you may feel stealthier, but IMO you're just letting another batch of career criminals move on to the next terrorist cell or drug ring. Dead men tell no tales, surely there's no proof you're there if none of the guards are alive to talk about it? Now the terrorists might get spooked if they suddenly realize a base-load of their guys just fell off the face of the earth, but by then it's not really my department. If that's what keeps them from pulling off their plan, then haven't I actually done what we set out to do? Stop terrorists from... terrorizing people? I've never felt bad about neutralizing a guard, and I almost always do so in order to lessen my chances of being detected (I REALLY hate it when a guard patrols up right behind me without me realizing). So... Yeah. That's all I really had to say.
Thankfully no Fox here so there's still hope.
