Ubisoft turned a new Splinter Cell game into the failed live-service shooter xDefiant in an effort to chase live service hits and Call of Duty, former devs say

The developers behind narrative superhero adventure Dispatch have certainly proven that there's still a big audience for story-driven single-player games these days – it's just too bad they couldn't convince their bosses at Ubisoft of that fact a few years ago. Some of the founding members of developer AdHoc Studio were working on a new Splinter Cell game before higher-ups tried to push it down the live service route.

After working on Tales from the Borderlands, Telltale veterans Nick Herman, Dennis Lenart, and Pierre Shorette all joined Ubisoft in 2017 where, according to a new report from Bloomberg, the trio started work on a Splinter Cell game.

"I was so excited to be a part of this and help revitalize it, because it's been dormant for a while," Herman says. “And we thought we could tell a great story and do something the fans would love." But according to Bloomberg, the project pivoted under the whims of Ubisoft management, who wanted a games-as-a-service hit.

Herman says the team "tried" to make the pivot work while hanging onto their storytelling interests. "Let's make a narrative GAAS game," Herman says. "We were trying to make that make sense, and a lot of cool prototypes were made."

The report suggests that Ubisoft lost interest in that Splinter Cell game and was more interested in chasing Call of Duty's success. Ultimately, the project morphed into xDefiant, a game that seemed to spend forever in playtests before it eventually launched in 2024 – only to shut down barely a year later.

“It was exciting to go to work for the first six months because we thought we were going to be able to make something really great,” Herman concludes to Bloomberg. “And then you realize that all of the things you care about, they don’t anymore. It's a common thing in games.”

Herman, Lenart, and Shorette left Ubisoft in 2018, founding AdHoc along with another Telltale vet in Michael Choung. With 1 million sales in 10 days, AdHoc's Dispatch seems to be proving there really was an audience willing to pay for a good single-player experience. But I guess that's not a scale of success that registers for Ubisoft – after all, xDefiant itself shut down with over 15 million players on the books.

After 4 quiet years, Ubisoft keeps some hope alive for its Splinter Cell revival as it asks for some parts of the Netflix show to be cut because of "other plans" for the dormant stealth series.