Ubisoft said last year it’d be shutting down the online services for Splinter Cell: Blacklist among a number of other games, so when the multiplayer element of the Splinter Cell game was depreciated in October 2022, many players were confident that’d be their last time playing the game online. However, Splinter Cell fans got quite the surprise in recent weeks: the game’s multiplayer servers have sprung back to life for some reason with players now able to play against one another online, though there’s no telling how long that’ll actually last.
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The game’s online features for the Wii U were shut down long ago, but the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC versions of the game still supported online play up until last October. But earlier in January, players within the Splinter Cell subreddit reported that the Xbox servers for the game had been restored for whatever reason.
Many thought this to be a fluke, but within the past couple of days, people said once more that the Xbox servers were indeed back up and running. Another post confirmed that the PC servers were back, too.
Right now, players are a bit confused as to why or how this sort of thing has happened, and it’s hard to blame them. One might wonder why someone was even trying to check the online servers of a game that was said to be shut down, but the game is indeed online according to these anecdotes. One might also speculate that the game coming back online was an error, but it’s hard to imagine how a game could accidently regain multiplayer servers.
Ubisoft has been wishy washy about some dated online services in the past, however, so maybe someone’s had a change of heart. The shutdown of these games’ online capabilities, for example, was previously scheduled to happen in mid-2022, but Ubisoft delayed that decommissioning to later in the year to give people one more shot at getting whatever they wanted out of these games. It also totally reversed course on Anno 2070 and said instead of that game becoming 100% unplayable as intended, a version would be released that people could still play anyways.
Splinter Cell: Blacklist is the most recent game in the Splinter Cell series, and it released back in 2013, so that should tell you something about how badly people want a new Splinter Cell game and why many were annoyed to hear about this game’s multiplayer services winding down. There is a remake of the original Splinter Cell in the works, however, so fans at least have that to look forward to.
