Blacklist director explains why the team backed away from 'shock'

In an interview with Gamasutra's Christian Nutt, Splinter Cell Blacklist director Maxime Beland shares why the team decided to rethink their approach to interactivity. After critics decried a (now-infamous) E3 2012 trailer depicting the game's protagonist Sam Fisher brutalizing an interrogation subject, the team retooled that section of the game. Beland explains why the imperative for player freedom doesn't always supercede other concerns. "I don't want to [use] shock value just to shock," he tells Gamasutra. "And I guarantee you that we have scenes that we've toned down because they were that." He continues,

"The strength of our medium is that people are in control and that it's -- to quote Spider-Man -- "With great power comes great responsibility." It's a lot different from seeing an interrogation scene in Zero Dark Thirty than it is when you're actually doing it yourself. So we looked at them and we make the modifications, because I think as a team we felt that we weren't doing something that was meaningful enough to justify the emotions that we were creating."

Though Beland maintains that "the line is fine" between an interrogation scene and a scene of torture, at the end of the day he and his team were left questioning, "Do we really want people to see this and want people to be interacting with this?" "I'm in this job to make people reflect," he continues to Gamasutra; "to change people, to entertain them also, but I'm not in the business of shocking. I know how to shock and I could shock, but I don't enjoy that." Read the complete interview with Maxime Beland and Blacklist head writer Richard Dansky here.