Maxime Béland is a long-time Ubisoft employee who served as creative director on the two most recent Splinter Cell games, Conviction and Blacklist (although they’re hardly recent), as well as Far Cry 4, Primal, and 5. He left Ubisoft in early 2019 to take on the role of creative director at Epic Games, but that only lasted about eights months—and according to VGC, he’s now back at Ubisoft.
Béland will serve as a vice-president of Ubisoft’s editorial team, according to the report, which the company recently said is being revamped in order to encourage greater differentiation between Ubisoft’s many, often very similar games.
Splinter Cell, with its well-established characters and linear narrative, probably doesn’t need as much help in that regard as, say, Far Cry. But fans have been encouraged by other signs of activity on the Sam Fisher front over the past year, even though they haven’t added up to anything substantial. Ubisoft creative director Julian Gerighty said in May 2019 that he was “working on the next Splinter Cell,” although that was later dismissed as a joke; in September, Gamestop said that a new Splinter Cell game was “on the horizon”; and in November, Ubisoft Spain dropped an out-of-nowhere tweet about understanding “the darkness” that ultimately went nowhere. Still, hope dies hard, and Ubisoft is bound to bring it back sooner or later, right?
LinkedIn indicates that Béland was at Epic from March to October 2019, and is now back at Ubisoft. I’ve emailed the company for more information and will update if I receive a reply.