A portion of a Click interview with Ubisoft Toronto's Maxime Beland...

Click: You’ve got the three “traditional” difficulty settings there, but you’ve also got a brand new one – perfectionist. What’s the thinking behind that?

MB: Well, perfectionist is an evolution of how do we make those purists on the forums happy? How we give them a version of Splinter Cell that not everyone wants, but these guys do? We’ve done things like making detection time faster, enemy AI will be a lot more lethal, your goggles don’t let you see through walls and so on. You need to take your time and observe a lot more - this is what the purists want. They want to think about their next move first. We’re also removing the execute function in this mode; you can still mark enemies, but you can’t execute them anymore. Also, the AI will deny you hand to hand combat from the front – they’re going to block you and shoot you – so you’ll need to get them from the side or from the back. That’s a real game changer. That’s the type of thing we’re doing to make that mode attractive to the purists