“One of my philosophies as animation director on this project is Sam’s a panther,” explains Ubisoft Toronto’s Kristjan Zadziuk as I’m coming to grips with a few of the tweaks to Splinter Cell: Blacklist

“ Cats are quick, cats are fluid, they always land on their feet and, not only that, cats hate dogs.

In the distance, through the hammering rain, I glimpse a guard dog standing vigil by a truck parked alongside a warehouse. I like dogs, but I don’t know what sort of dog it is. The kind that scares people who don’t like dogs. The lean, muscular type you always see slobbering and straining against their leashes, tugging blokes with flashlights and guns through gloomy forests hunting down escaped prisoners-of-war.I stay out of sight while attempting to remember the combination of buttons I’m going to have to employ to deal with this pooch shortly.“The dog doesn’t necessarily detect you by seeing you, it detects you by smell,” warns Zadziuk. “So it’ll follow you ’round and then will alert other people to your presence.”Crouched several metres away from the dog is close enough for it to get a whiff of whatever it is Sam Fisher smells like, which I presume is cordite and Old Spice. The dog looks up sharply and, a fraction of a second later, directly at Sam’s location. I panic, spring from cover, and plug a single round into the dog. The shot is supressed and goes unnoticed, and the dog is dead.In the context of Blacklist, all is fair. The stakes are high. If you want to make an omelette, sometimes you need to kill a few dogs.Admittedly, however, I do like dogs.

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“ People on the team have families, they have kids. They don’t want to go around making murder simulators.

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I play through the remainder of the level using mainly non-lethal attacks (or avoiding guards altogether by slinking through areas and leaving them untouched). What impresses me most is the rewarding way in which you can combine messing around with the environment (by taking out lights) with Sam’s vast array of gadgets; it’s certainly true that no encounter needs to play out the same way twice.What also impresses me, however, is the fact that Sam’s extensive suite of non-lethal abilities and gizmos exists within Blacklist in the first place. You can play through Blacklist without killing a single soul. It’s not the first game to allow you to do this but it’s not exactly common.Why not? Why don’t more games allow players to find solutions to in-game conflict that don’t involve killing? In 2013, why must the only way to progress through a game be so binary? Why must in-game enemies exist only in two states: actively trying to kill you, or dead?In the scheme of Blacklist, I don’t have much context on just who these gun-toting goons are. Perhaps they’d be better off dead. However, while picking my way through the soggy London docks focusing mainly on non-lethal takedowns I’m reminded of one of the most pleasant surprises I had at E3 in June. During the closing seconds of the Watch Dogs playthrough there’s a moment when Aiden Pearce is sprung by a trio of Chicago’s finest. What happened next was simple but has the capacity to transform how players will feel about the character they’re inhabiting; Pearce knocked one out and shot the other two in the legs.It’s interesting both Watch Dogs and Blacklist allow the player to make meaningful choices about how they play in the worlds of both these games. Now that many games are complex enough to support lethal/non-lethal playstyles it feels there is a responsibility emerging for developers to cater to it.“Yeah, absolutely,” says Zadziuk. “It was very early on; a choice that we made.”“We had a list of the top five things we wanted to do; the top of that was Spies vs. Mercs and the other one was lethal and non-lethal. It was an interesting conversation. I remember it very well, actually, because we were talking about the cost of it. It nearly didn’t go into the game because of just how much it would’ve cost to do from an animation perspective and from a budget perspective…“Max [Béland] was trying to get us to come up with a good argument, ‘Well, if it’s just choice and it doesn’t kind of affect anything, how are you gonna make people do it?’ Well, for a start it does affect how you play now, and that came later on, but we also realised that players want that choice.“It’s like you were saying yourself; you didn’t want to kill the dog. And we find that as well. To me, the lethal /non-lethal option, it’s up to you, how you play. You’re right; we have to absorb some of that responsibility. I think that there’s been a maturity for this generation of consoles, and we’ll continue to go on, because if you think about it we’re not as young an industry as we used to be.“I think it’s something, almost accidentally, [that] many Ubisoft projects have started to do. It’s not been a conscious effort; I think that we’re all just growing up, you know? You look at the beginning of your console generation with your Gears of War and things like that, and that’s great, but I think Assassin’s started to become mature, Splinter Cell always occupied a space where it could be mature.“It’s cool that you’ve noticed, actually, because it’s a hard one. We don’t know whether that’s gonna work or not but we know what we wanna do, and we don’t feel comfortable with creating murder simulators; it’s not cool. It’s actually a lot more satisfying to go through an entire level and not kill anyone.”Taking over the controls to demonstrate some of the additional tactics players will be able to use once they’re more familiar with the game, Zadziuk blasts through the opening section of the level. He delivers a sticky shocker to the dog, incapacitating it instantly.I concede to Zadziuk that’s what I should have done.“I’m a dog lover,” he laughs.

Luke is Games Editor at IGN AU. You can find him on IGNor on Twitter, or chat with him and the rest of the Australian team by joining the IGN Australia