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I was a play tester for the currently cancelled Splinter Cell: Hunters, A Third Person PvPvE Battle Royale. We were told after our last play test that the game would be announced soon, "in the coming weeks" the last play test was around July of 2022.
Here's the gist of the a basic game. First you chose your "Spy Operator" Your class basically, Then you and your partner spy player spawn during the night at the edge of a square slice of the -"Washington DMZ", the one and only map available during the play-test, armed with only a starting knife. Your task: to locate and kill one of the 4 High Value Targets in a compound somewhere on the map, securing the cache they drop afterwards. Once you've killed the target and grabbed a cache you're given an option to extract with your partner. The catch is that up to 30 other players in duos are competing for the same assassination targets. The build we played was only duos and they said it was the core gameplay experience. You and your partner run into these places around the map where you can execute what they called "Team Tactical Moves" where both players were needed to get into specific areas stuff like, back to back wall climbing, boosted edge climb, and silently opening security doors. These places required 2 players to enter so you couldn't really go "do your own thing" as many players and myself found out.
There were special areas called outposts guarded by bot soldiers, you can find guns and equipment around in loot caches but outposts were the best way to get high tier loot. These bot soldiers were really kitted out so you can't really engage in gunfights with them like you can other spy players, all the spy weapons were weaker silenced weapons so you couldn't just run into an outpost and fight these soldiers head-on. Next were the Compounds which had the HVTs, heavily guarded fortress like areas which required good loot to get past, you could in theory just rush a compound with your parter and get the HVT but doing so was unwise since all you had was a knife and a class ability. Every class had an ability at the start of the game that could be leveled up by killing these bot soldiers or other spies. There were around 6 but I only used 2 of them cause they seemed the most useful. Blackout was the ability I had the most time with. At level 1 You press ability button and it turns off all the lights in the immediate area for around 30 seconds. Every spy could also activate night vision goggles by pressing down on the D-pad. At level 2, which required a-lot of bot kills or like 3-4 player kills, increased the duration of the blackout. At level 3 enemy players in the blackout area would be marked temporarily while your night vision googles were active.
Level 3 was the max level and killing a high value target seemed to max out your level regardless of what level you were. The other ability I had time with was the cloak, level 1 let you be invisible temporarily while being still, level 2 let you crouch walk while being invisible, level 3 allowed you to fire your weapon while invisible. Other abilities I saw but never used were the drone that marked people, decoy hologram that mimicked a spy player, and Mark Shot which allowed you to mark bots then instantly shoot headshot kill them (similar to High Noon from Overwatch). Now the most interesting part was when you died, dying wasn't the end of your game instead you became what the game called a "Merc". You were basically a kitted out armored soldier with either a sniper, LMG, or Ballistic shield with a pistol (You spawn at an outpost and chose). You basically get to walk along with the bots hunting spies. Playing as a Merc was way different because you weren't as nimble as the spies, you couldn't vault fences, climb wall pipes, or sprint as fast but the mercs had an area wide ping as their ability that would mark spies for them temporarily, this had a long cooldown. As a Merc your goal was to kill a spy, possibly even your duo partner, and when you did you would respawn as a Spy.
If your partner was still alive you would be put back on the team, if they died you would be grouped solo but if you killed your partner to respawn, you would be marked as a "Traitor Spy" and would grouped up with another "Traitor Spy" or respawn solo if there were no other traitor spies available. To fully lose, players would either have to die as a Merc, every spy died, or the last spy/spies extracted. While in possession of the high value target cache you become marked for both spies and mercs. So extracting wouldn't be easy. The game rewarded careful, attentive and tactical play. Games were very tense, straight from a dev saying they were committed to being more complicated than the standard "last man standing". In the build we played there was only spy customization, (suit, helmet, goggles etc) the mercs were non-customizable. The battlepass was locked but had 25 tiers of stuff to earn, skins from Rainbow 6, The Division etc. Gameplay wise, it was okay, the shooting felt kinda floaty but the executions/assassinations were fun to pull off and satisfying. Definitely not a "run & gun" kinda game, running and gunning was heavily punished.
