Maxim Beland has worked at Ubisoft for many years, serving as creative director on the two most recent Splinter Cell games, Conviction and The Blacklist (which is hardly the latest), Far Cry 4, Primal, and 5. He left Ubisoft in early 2019 to become creative director at Epic Games, but that only lasted about eight months and he is now back at Ubisoft, according to VGC.

Beland will serve as vice president of Ubisoft's editorial team, and the company has recently revamped its editorial team to better differentiate between Ubisoft's many, often very similar games, according to the report.

Splinter Cell, with its established characters and linear narrative, will not need as much help in that regard as games like Far Cry, for example. However, fans have been encouraged by other signs of activity on the Sam Fisher front over the past year. Ubisoft creative director Julian Gelaiti said in May 2019 that the company was "working on the next Splinter Cell," which was later dismissed as a joke, and in September Gamestop said a new Splinter Cell game was "imminent." In November, Ubisoft Spain made an outlandish tweet about understanding the "darkness," but nothing came of it. Still, hope is hard to kill, and Ubisoft is bound to resurrect Splinter Cell sooner or later.

According to LinkedIn, Béland was at Epic from March to October 2019 and is now back at Ubisoft. We have emailed the company for more information and will update if we hear back.