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Hey, I’m Zack Cooper… your Splinter Cell Community Developer…
In this ComDev video, we’ll be putting away the gadgets and weapons, for the most part,
and diving into the visuals… this is the Art Direction of Splinter Cell Blacklist.
We hope you enjoy! --
Through the lens is basically the glue that holds the art direction in Splinter Cell Blacklist
together. In practice, what that is, is that there’s a camera in the world, in our game
space; lens flares, we’re talking about atmosphere on the lens, we’re talking about
things that spray on the lens, say when it’s raining and things like that, so we try to
have a sort of condition for ‘through the lens’ for anything you might see or feel
throughout the game. Light and shadow: meat and potatoes for Splinter
Cell. You know, it lives everywhere in our game, it lives in our history, it lives actually
in the gameplay in the fact that Sam, when he’s hiding in the shadows, is undetected
and he’s got an advantage over his enemies when it comes to that kind of thing. So for
us, the next step really was – especially after having a history of very very excellent
lighting in Splinter Cell games – we wanted to take it a step farther; that light became
an object in the world. It wasn’t just something that made things look good and cast nice shadows,
light became something in itself. It’s an actor, it’s a player in that space, and
for us it’s an object in the world. When you look at the light, not only do you
see the light, you see the source of the light and you see how that light plays on you, as
a player watching your character through a camera.
This stuff is all manual for us, right? This stuff isn’t procedurally generated, it’s
not automatic, you know, we pick our spots and we have to apply it. We need to make sure
that everything is covered. So… how does it look when you look at the Sun, versus how
does it look when you look at the moon, versus how does it look when you look at artificial
light… and then there’s many different kinds of artificial lights. We wanted to make
sure that each and every one had kind of a soul.
A big motto for our creative director was: Sam is back. When it came to us designing
his suits and, really his anatomy and his physique, we really wanted to sell the fact
that he is not super-human; he is more the “every man,” but with an unbelievable
amount of skill behind it; Which meant that he was sleek, he was fast, he was very quick…
the silhouette, as you might have seen in Chaos Theory, I think, was really the icon…
and we kind of really went back to the roots of it.