The Splinter Cell remake gets a new director, and he's the same as the Splinter Cell remake's old director

The Splinter Cell remake Ubisoft announced in 2021 has a new director: His name is David Grivel, and if that rings a bell it might be because he was director on the project when it was first announced, but split—from the game and Ubisoft entirely—just under a year later.

Grivel said when he left Ubisoft in October 2022 that after 11 years at the company, "it is now time for me to go on a new adventure." That adventure, according to his LinkedIn profile, took him immediately to Electronic Arts, where he spent a year and a half working on Battlefield 6 as studio design director at Ridgeline Games.

That came to an end when Ridgeline closed in early 2024 as part of major cuts at EA, and so Grivel tripped back to Ubisoft to work briefly on "an unannounced project in conception phase." He left again at the end of 2024 to join Worlds Untold—just in time for that studio to fall victim to major cuts at NetEase.

And now he's back where it all began. "Today, I am very, VERY happy to announce that I'm rejoining Ubisoft Toronto as Game Director on the Splinter Cell Remake!" Grivel wrote on LinkedIn (via GamesRadar). "A very special team and project to me."

If you're hoping that Grivel followed that up with big news about the state of the Splinter Cell remake, sorry, but no—that's the whole thing, start to finish. Which, wildly, means that Grivel's return announcement is the first bit of news we've had about the game since his departure announcement three years ago.

There was (faint) hope for some sort of new info earlier this year, but that went nowhere, and as if that wasn't bad enough, Ubisoft continued its decade-long run of trolling Splinter Cell fans with an image of Sam Fisher from Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, except it was actually a pic of Sam in Pandora Tomorrow. As trolls go, that was a good one.

Grivel's return comes at a tumultuous time for Ubisoft: The delayed financial report turned out to be nothing, but the company's share price remains in the toilet and its plans for the future seem to lean alarmingly heavy on AI, live service games, and Tencent. Still, this is at least a sign that the whole thing hasn't been abandoned and forgotten, and even if there's something of a 'starting over from square one' whiff about it, at least that's progress of a sort. Right?

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