It was earlier reported that Ubisoft had been working on a new Splinter Cell title which was also going to feature the company’s games-as-a-service model but eventually got shifted and turned into XDefiant, a game shut down by the publisher just a year after release. But after the publication of this report, XDefiant director Mark Rubin has denied the validity of this news and also offered insights on the game’s development process.
As posted on Rubin’s official Twitter/X account, he stated:
“Saw the rumor from Bloomberg that we were working on Splinter Cell game before switching to Xdefiant. I can say that is not true. When I got to Ubisoft they had been working on a game for a year that was very ambitious but was struggling to find the fun. And it was NOT a Splinter Cell game. I then canceled that one and let the team pitch any game ideas they wanted. There were some cool ones but I felt the scope/difficulty was too hard on some ideas so we stuck with an arena shooter and we found the fun quickly.”
“So no we didn’t pivot off Splinter Cell to make XDefiant. Now maybe they were thinking about working on Splinter Cell before I got there but it was never a thing while I was there. My experience with Ubisoft was they are very open to whatever the studio wants to do which is great but I do wish we could have used external engines.”
The original report of XDefiant being an offshoot of a Splinter Cell game originated from a recent Bloomberg report on AdHoc studio who are the developers behind superhero comedy game Dispatch and the report details the journey of the studio under different publishers across the industry.
A Splinter Cell Remake is also reportedly at works which is exciting news for all fans of the timeless stealth classic.
