The answer to whether or not we'll ever get a new Splinter Cell game is still apparently "no." Instead, Ubisoft has inserted Sam Fisher into other Tom Clancy games, first as cameos, and then as part of a wider roster of faces from across every Tom Clancy game Ubisoft has ever published.
Now, we're getting even less Sam Fisher than we already had thanks to the pending shutdown of Tom Clancy's Elite Squad.
Tom Clancy's Elite Squad is a mobile title that just released last year after a 2019 E3 reveal. It combined RTS and RPG elements with X-com-style combat, pitting heroes and villains against one another from games like Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell, and more.
The game never really got off on the right foot. Advertisements for the game showed the bad guys had a logo that looked exactly like the Black Power Fist, an absurdly tone-deaf move during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests. On top of that, there was also some anti-semitic imagery that also gave Elite Squad a ton of bad press.
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Then developer Owlient’s studio managers both left Ubisoft just two months ago. We don’t know why they left, but perhaps they saw the writing on the wall and thought that it was a good time to start looking for a new job.
Today, Owlient broke the news that Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad is living on borrowed time. "It is with a great deal of sadness that we are announcing we will no longer be releasing new content for Elite Squad. Today’s update will be our last, and on October 4th, 2021 we will shut the servers down."
Owlient described the game as "no longer sustainable," which we'll interpret as Elite Squad having too few players spending money on microtransactions for Ubisoft to even bother keeping the lights on.
But where Ubisoft shuts down one Tom Clancy compilation game, Ubisoft also reveals a brand new one. XDefiant was just announced earlier this week as a new hero shooter based on all of Ubisoft’s various Tom Clancy properties, and yes, Sam Fisher is almost certainly going to be in it.
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