Conviction Scans (foreign magazine)

Also, GameInformer (June 07) has a big article on Conviction. This is what I have managed to glean from the pages:

-Sam has over 10,000 unique animations that govern how he reacts to the enviroment.

-NPCs react to everything in the enviroment (they walk around fallen chairs and each other instead of trying to walk through them or over)

-Light and shadow gameplay have been nixed, and instead advanced lighting techniques like indirect lighting (aka color-bleed) have been added to the gameplay to let you admire the enviroments more.

-The game has been designed from the bottom up as mature-rated fare, so the violence and finishing moves Sam has at his disposal will be accurately reflected from the rating.

-Enviromental finishers will make an appearance (suprise a guard, handcuff him and kick him down the stairs as an example), as will diversionary tactics (a-la Assassin's Creed crowd mechanics, though both games innovations here were developed seperately, so they won't feel similar to each other)

-Waiting and observing guard patrols will be gone, and replaced by reacting quickly to your enviroment and always moving.

-Crowds will observe and immediately report suspicious actions in a way that sounds more realistic than Hitman has managed to do in previous games.

-Night-vision goggles are gone, but are replaced by a heightened "spy sense". For example, Sam can see guards and undercover cops in crowds and even behind walls due to a special visual cue.

-Due to the way the crowd-mechanics are written, there can apparently be well over 30 NPCs on screen at any one time, all reacting realistically to Sam's actions.

-Havok has nearly been completely rewritten to showcase the new physics and enviroment-based gameplay.

So far, it seems like less of a "Splinter Cell 5" and more of a "Bourne Identity" type game, which seems much more awesome, especially with the almost complete abandonment of the shadow-stealth mechanics.