20 Years Ago, Ubisoft Finally Gave Solid Snake A Run For His Money
Emerging from the shadows.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, there was no video game that could wrestle the stealth action crown away from Metal Gear Solid. Hideo Kojima’s influential series created, and by 1998 seemingly perfected, the genre in a way others could only do so much to follow.
In 2002, however, Ubisoft Montreal’s Splinter Cell sought to add a fresh spin on the genre Metal Gear Solid popularized. This was a slower, methodical approach to stealth that saw its protagonist Sam Fisher skulking around in the dark and treading quietly deep behind enemy lines. The game lifted mechanics liberally from Looking Glass Studios’ Thief: The Dark Project (a less popular but equally influential stealth game for PC released the same year as Metal Gear), and wrapped it in the thrilling espionage of the Tom Clancy universe.
Three years later, however, the true potential of the series was realized. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory finally moved the series out of Metal Gear’s shadow, giving Solid Snake a run for his money for the very first time.
Chaos Theory is the third game in the ongoing series following the undercover adventures of Sam Fisher, iconicly portrayed by legendary actor Michael Ironside (Starship Troopers). When Japan creates a branch of its military force focused on preventing cyber warfare attacks, tensions flair between itself and both China and North Korea. As an ally of Japan, the NSA’s covert-ops branch Third Echelon sends Fisher to prevent a dangerous technology capable of mass-scale cyber attacks from falling into the wrong hands.
As is the case with the first two Splinter Cell games, the story here is a heady what-if involving international powers on the brink of consequential conflict. It’s about as Tom Clancy as it gets, meaning players’ mileage will vary depending on their own taste for political thrillers.
None of that ever gets in the way of how these games play. And unlike 2004’s hastily put together (but still excellent) sequel Pandora Tomorrow, Chaos Theory was a significant step up from both a gameplay and technological standpoint.
Chaos Theory still looks incredible 20 years later, a credit to Ubisoft Montreal’s technical work.
The Rise of Ragdoll
It was the first game in the series to incorporate ragdoll physics. A fairly new bit of technology in the industry at the time, this addition meant everything from the way enemies reacted to attacks and their environment to the act of hiding bodies felt more tangible than ever. Enemies could be thrown off cliffs or hidden in small encasings to prevent their colleagues from discovering their unconscious (or dead) bodies. And enemies no longer needed to be attacked from behind, making offensive moves more effective and reliable.
Sam, and by proxy the player, was kitted out in new tech that let him better read and take full advantage of his surroundings. An aural reader lets him know exactly how loud his footsteps were relative to his environment. Used in conjunction with his Visibility meter, the player is constantly in the know of how shrouded they are in the game’s tightly designed levels. Creating stealthily opportunities was also made easier thanks to a new pistol attachment allowing you to disable most lights from a distance for a limited amount of time. It was a better alternative to shooting out lights, which was much more prone to alarming guards.
Speaking of alarming guards, Chaos Theory would cut the rigid lose conditions of past games. Players would no longer get a game over for triggering an alarm a preset number of times. Instead, clumsiness would shut out side objectives to the players. This incentivized replaying missions for better outcomes rather than demanding perfection the first time around.
Getting caught by enemies more than a handful of times no longer ended missions.
Higher Stakes, Better Gameplay
With death being the only persistent way to fail a mission, enemy AI was improved to pose a serious threat to the player. They can communicate flanking strategies when a player has been discovered and create cover for themselves when in Fisher’s line of sight. They notice when a fellow guard has gone missing and make note of how many times they’ve heard suspicious noises when deciding how doggedly they’ll pursue an explanation or source for what they’ve sensed. These enemies are smart, reactive, and capable enough to make the game a challenge, even with all of Sam’s new tools at your disposal.
Lastly, this entry was ahead of its time. It was a graphical powerhouse. Lighting, character models, and textures were some of the best in the business at the time. Twenty years later Chaos Theory still looks phenomenal. Booting it up on a Steam Deck with buttery smooth frame rates shows just how far ahead of its time Ubisoft Montreal's technical work was.
What’s harder to replicate is its collection of groundbreaking multiplayer modes. Its fully-featured co-op campaign let two Third Echelon agents tackle missions together. Before Portal 2 and Split Fiction, this was one of gaming’s earliest showcases for online co-op and its gold standard. The revolutionary PvP mode Spies vs. Mercs (first introduced in Pandora Tomorrow) ruled the early years of Xbox Live and PC. It pit two titular mercs, who played the mode as a first-person shooter, against two Splinter Cell spies breaking into a facility and stealing information. It’s ludicrous that this mode isn’t playable today, as it remains one of the most inventive multiplayer games ever made.
Players on the Mercs team had to find and neutralize spies sneaking into the map and stealing data.
A Stealthy Legacy
Chaos Theory is the moment the Splinter Cell franchise went from a compelling take on the stealth action genre to a must-play. It’s unfortunate the franchise couldn’t maintain the momentum. Future entries failed to recapture the magic either from a gameplay standpoint (as seen in Chaos Theory’s direct follow-up Splinter Cell: Double Agent), or in terms of popularity (the tragically underrated Splinter Cell: Blacklist).
Still, the series turning point lives on in gaming’s modern landscape. While we seldom get focused stealth experiences in the AAA space, everything from The Last Of Us to nearly every Ubisoft game that incorporates stealth (which is basically all of them), games are still borrowing the distinct feel of Chaos Theory’s stealth mechanics and ideas. Even the best part of the recently released Assassin’s Creed Shadows is indebted to Chaos Theory, going as far as incorporating a visibility meter straight out of Sam Fisher’s OPSAT.
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is one of the most important stealth games ever made. In an era where the undisputed king of stealth games was still ruling in convincing fashion, this razor-sharp refinement of Solid Snake’s closest competitor finally gave the Foxhound operative a peer on equal footing. It made the series’ alternative take on playable espionage shenanigans an equally compelling take whose ideas live on today.
