Patrick Redding of Ubisoft Montreal has described a gameplay feature in Splinter Cell: Conviction’ called Last Stand. He identified this new feature for Splinter Cell as “a bit of a Horde mode”

In a recent interview with OXM, Redding detailed Multiplayer Content:

There’s a huge amount of content. To give you a sense of perspective on it, the single-player campaign covers twelve maps and most players seemingly get through it in between eight to ten hours.

The co-op story is four maps, and it runs roughly for 5-6 hours - the maps are a little bit larger to accommodate two players. Deniable Ops uses the same format from our co-op story, plus two additional maps that are unique to it.

The best way of thinking about these maps is that they’re broken into these five zones, so you’re going to get around thirty zones of gameplay. Multiply that over across the four game modes, and multiply that again across three difficulty levels… I’d say there’s quite a bit of replay value.

One of our modes, Last Stand, is a bit of a Horde mode - survival gameplay and it works in waves, twenty waves, so you can multiply that again. So there’s potentially dozens, if not hundreds, of hours of gameplay for somebody who falls in love with one mode or the other.

The Splinter Cell: Conviction campaign plot takes place roughly two years after the events of Splinter Cell: Double Agent. Sam Fisher has gone rogue from Third Echelon after discovering that the death of his daughter, Sarah, was not an accident. However, Third Echelon, now overly-bureaucratic and bound in red tape, are in pursuit of Sam. Sam must use all the help he can get, including former Third Echelon colleague Anna Grimsdóttír, and Sam’s friend, Victor Coste, in order to discover the truth behind the death of his daughter. Sam begins with going after his daughter’s killer, but he finds himself trying to stop a more serious threat upon Washington DC.

The game will be released April 13th in the US and April 16th UK with an invitation to the Ghost Recon: Future Soldier multiplayer beta, which begins in summer 2010

Source: OXM