When Splinter Cell Blacklist launches later this year, Sam Fisher will be 55 years old. He will be eight years older than when we first met him in the very first Splinter Cell--yet many will argue that he's far more spry and agile than ever before. As RowjinZee points out, Fisher is our medium's Benjamin Button.

Ubisoft producer Alexandre Parizeau says that Sam Fisher isn't getting younger, saying gamers might expect him to be much older than he actually is. "You have to keep in mind that this happens six months after Conviction. Even if it's been a few years for us, so maybe we expect him to age older," he said.

I said that having a more agile Sam gives him, at the very least, the appearance of being more youthful. However, Parizeau said that "a lot of the stuff you do in Blacklist, you could do in Chaos Theory, but the controls were not as fluid or as easy to access. If you were really good at the controls, you can do a lot of the stuff you could do now. But we streamlined the controls, and made it a bit more fluid."

Oddly, in spite of replacing Michael Ironside as Sam's actor, the team decided against doing a full reboot of the franchise. In fact, Blacklist continues to make references to earlier games, including the kidnapping of Sam's daughter. "If you're a fan, you'll see some stuff that goes back to previous games," Parizeau teased. However, while Blacklist may not be a fresh beginning for the series, it will feel that way for many. "We made sure that with the story, we have a fresh beginning for the team and for Sam... A lot of characters in the game are new, either to Echelon or to Splinter Cell... For the story, we made sure that you don't need to have all that knowledge to appreciate what's going on."

For more on Splinter Cell Blacklist, read our preview.