Development of the original Splinter Cell was “very difficult,” which led to a completely different approach for Chaos Theory, according to its creative director.

Speaking to Edge Magazine, Clint Hocking admitted that “development on the first game had been very, very difficult.” Hocking, who went on to be creative director on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory as well as Far Cry 2 (and the upcoming Assassin’s Creed: Codename Hexe), says that “many of us who went on to work on Chaos Theory felt we could have done much, much better.”

Most of the problems, Hocking claims, came from the fact that “we had failed as designers and developers to anticipate how the game would actually play.” Eventually, the team at Ubisoft started to realize the errors that had crept in – their stealth game never really offered players enough freedom to work around their errors. Unfortunately, it was too late to fix things. “By the time we encountered the problem, we had no plan and no time to address it except by forcing a mission failure.”

Those failures were so apparent that Chaos Theory was quick to make note of them, a brief fourth wall-breaking moment early in the game attempting to make light by telling Fisher that he’s not in a video game. Thankfully, however, Hocking and his team had a better sense of how to address those mistakes than simply making jokes about them.

“The core game experience did not change significantly [from the original Splinter Cell],” he says. That meant that it was “very clear to us what was working and what needed to be fixed. Our common goal became simply to deliver – to an exceptionally high degree of quality and polish – all the promises we felt we’d failed to deliver in the first game.”

“It seemed to me then, and it still seems so today, that the only path toward improving what we had done in the best parts of the original Splinter Cell was to totally unify story and level design from the beginning of the game to end.”

That path was the right one – Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory sits at a 94% score on Metacritic for its envelope-pushing Xbox version, a figure that Hocking says suggests there was little he could have changed that would have made the game any better than it was.

It’s been a while since the last Splinter Cell, so here are the best stealth games you can practice with while we wait for the remake.