For two decades, Ubisoft has essentially treated Sam Fisher as a mascot that hasn’t had a game in over a decade… but that’s about to change.

Splinter Cell Remake was officially announced in late 2021, when Ubisoft teased that it would be remaking the 2002 game using the Snowdrop Engine, which has since been used in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars Outlaws. (Neither game was a big hit for the French publisher.) After rumors for a while that the Splinter Cell remake had been scrapped by the Yves Guillemot-led publisher, the opposite has now come to light.

The main developer of the remake is Ubisoft Toronto, who announced the news with an interview on their website and the video embedded below. But it’s been almost three years and the Canadian studio hasn’t said anything about the project, which doesn’t run on Unreal Engine 2/2.5 like several Splinter Cell titles. At the end of 2021, it was said that Sam’s new adventure was in the early stages of development, and that it wouldn’t be remastered, but rebuilt from the ground up, as Square Enix is doing with Final Fantasy VII (the remake will be released in 2020 and the rebirth in 2024).

So a new visual is needed, and more time is needed. In the meantime, they are trying to make the game look similar to the original. According to some sources, the remake will not be released until 2026, but until then, who knows if we will hear anything official, because a lot of things could happen around Ubisoft (it could go private with Tencent, for example). Ubisoft Toronto could also be affected by the financial uncertainty of the publisher, which could affect the speed of development.

According to Insider Gaming, the game is still in development under the codename North. Hopefully it won’t be the case that the project is almost finished and Ubisoft will just throw away the work done so far! That would not be a very good idea.

Source: WCCFTech, Insider Gaming