HITMAN, the new episodic Hitman - GOTY Edition

[Zombra]

Maybe your intuition about all this is right, but that's all it is right now - intuition. Nothing we've actually seen bears you out. I'm content to wait and see if they deliver on some of what they've been saying.

 

[Dzupakazul]

It feels like a caricature of what people liked in the previous games. "Big, open-ended levels with multiple ways to do a contract is what you liked about Blood Money, so we're going to make it BM x500". Except it's overblown in this case.

You could argue that this huge a level can easily make for a couple distinct challenges - I find that in Hitman, some levels are designed in such a way that you might very well not even have to set foot into many of the rooms. So, if we had 4 sectors on a huge level and put compelling user-chosen targets on each of this sector, it might feel like you're playing four different levels.

Nevertheless, this game is advertising itself solely on things that don't mean anything without a context. 800 craftable NPCs doesn't mean a thing when some of them might be standing right next to each other and have no distinguishing features. Giant, massive "World of Assassination" implies three locations that, because of logical limitations, will stay more homogenous in theme than even the entire Hong Kong arc in C47/Contracts.

I also can't imagine how the community will track this down, or what kind of hell would I have to go through as a Hitman challenge runner to compare my results with others, which seems like half the fun of such an approach. Videos like "HITMAN: The Showstopper: Civilian #313/Pro/SO/SA/AZ"?

It's Bethesda-level of "make your own fun".

 

[upwardlymobile]

what i like about big maps is that it opens a lot of possibilities for making up your own goals. for example in a murder of crows you could try to drag off various people from the parade without setting off any alarms, killing all the fbi in a new life w/o triggering the swat team, hotel staff in both traditions of the trades, bunnies in you better watch out, etc.

 

[Metro]

This is how you sell an unfinished game in 2015. Don't fall for it, folks.

 

[Edward The Mediocre]

I thought the term for it was called Early AccessTM.

 

[Metro]

It's Early Access but they don't want to call it that.

 

[Immortal]

Yeah, I played Blood Money too. I get why a tight experience is good, and I'm not advocating for this achievement-based shoot 5 red windows bullshit you seem to be afraid of (perhaps rightly). But I don't get this outright hatred for big maps, and we seem to agree that large areas can be done well and provide good gameplay that's appropriate to the "soul" of the series.

Mostly what you seem to be responding to is the "smell" of the series arc, which is hard to agree or disagree with. They're clearly been listening to the negative feedback to Absolution. There's no evidence either way of the achievement stupidity you're talking about, and this stuff about little "side quests" is completely made up; even Absolution didn't have that. The marketing guy said that the new game is about a location and a target and the rest is up to you. To me that sounds pretty faithful.

With bigger maps comes the very real threat of not enough density of content. AKA risk of Quantity over Quality.

Which is where the minigame bullshit comes from in these large open worlds.

> Let's be skyrim!
> *create huge fucking level*
> wow.. this is hard to fill with meaningful content..
> Minigames?
> Minigames...
> "Please mr hitman.. I dropped my balloon - can you shoot it from the air?"
> Achievement Unlocked: Balloon Boy

Blood Money was great at packing a lot in a small space. One of my favorite missions is assassinating the guy in the house guarded by CIA agents. You can snipe him from a tree house, dress up as a pool boy and flirt with the wife, sneak in from the laundry room, poison donuts, etc..

That area feels like small neighborhood. It's all pretty normal until you show up (well okay.. not normal but youknowwhatImean.jpeg)

Cadmus fears are very grounded IMO.. There is a very real risk that they saw people hate Absolution and thought.. Okay Let's go back to open world.. But make it AWESOME *explosions* only to realize that making an open world is a little harder then it sounds.

Just ask DA:I, Risen, Assassins Creed, Farcry 4 and any other Skyrim wannabes filled with filler content / forest & building corridors.

 

[Talby]

This reminds me of a line from that crappy Jurassic Park movie.

 

[Ivan]

 

[Metro]

'Locations' don't matter when you count them in that broad of a sense. If a game takes place entirely in one country but has a dozen different (and elaborate) levels then it's has more 'locations' than a game with five different countries but only one level per country.

All this sandbox and randomized contract shit is filler content.

 

[Edward The Mediocre]

Hitman games on average have 12 levels 13 if it you count the training level, the exceptions being hitman 2(21 levels) and hitman absolution(20 levels). In the latter a missions are more linear and generally more shorter as well, hell one of the levels is just going to a tailor and getting a new suit. I should mention that hitman 2 had two levels where there are no targets and one level that is revisted.

 

[Carrion]

Generally the best Hitman missions have been the small, tight ones, but that's partly because many of those levels were built as puzzles and pretty much had built-in solutions that you needed to find. This was most evident in Codename 47, where the small missions early in the game were great but the bigger ones (aside from maybe the Budapest Hotel, which was great) tended to turn into total clusterfucks. I think Blood Money differed a bit from the previous titles by going more towards a "sandbox" approach (I don't really like the word in Hitman's case, but it does have its merits), allowing you to explore the levels more freely without the risk of blowing your cover and generally giving you a wider range of options. Honestly, I don't mind if they're taking that approach to the extreme, as I'm a fan of such simulations where you create your own solutions by manipulating a game world that goes on by its own set of rules. Hell, it's the direction games should've been going at least since the late 90's until things took a serious turn for the worse.

There is a real chance that it'll lead to lazy mission design, an overabundance of options that ultimately ends up diluting the experience or going full AWESOME with a billion deadly accidents you can cause with the press of a button and so on, but based on what I've seen shown so far I'd give them the benefit of the doubt at this point. I'm guessing the game will probably lose some of the charm and memorability of the best parts of the previous titles, simply because larger levels don't allow for such tight design, but if you look at it as something more than just a Hitman game it's hard to not see it as some serious incline. The video on the last page looks like almost an antithesis for modern game design, going for large-scale simulation and player freedom instead of scripted events and handholding, trying to create a believeable world and then inserting an assassin into it with a wide range of tools that can be used in any way that you want to while the game world tries to react to as well as possible, although it does seem to have some stupid stuff as well ("TRESPASSING!!!!") that fortunately seems mostly superficial. It's just hard to not like the basic philosophy they've taken with the game, even if there's no guarantee that the end result will be any good.

I'm still going to at least initially skip this game because the amount of real content seems so low and splitting the game into parts in such a way is a crime that I simply can't tolerate.

 

[Helly]

If you have questions for the dev team on the new Hitman, do put them here. There is a good chance I can ask them to a Squeenix dev soon.

 

[Ivan]

Are locations, e.g. Paris's Showstopper map, going to be repurposed for different missions? Or can we expect more than 1 map per country?

 

[Cadmus]

If you have questions for the dev team on the new Hitman, do put them here. There is a good chance I can ask them to a Squeenix dev soon.

tell them that unless they remove every single stupid blinking indicator on the screen like TRESSPASSING, BATMAN SENSE, ACHIEVEMENT, KEYPROMPTS etc. they can go fuck themselves

 

[Zombra]

Helly

tell them that unless they remove every single stupid blinking indicator on the screen like TRESSPASSING, BATMAN SENSE, ACHIEVEMENT, KEYPROMPTS etc. they can go fuck themselves

Strongly agree. Or to put it in the form of the question, ask "How many of those annoying UI elements can be turned off in the options menu?"
How about this, even: "Can the UI be turned off entirely? And if not, why not?"

 

[Cadmus]

Helly

Strongly agree. Or to put it in the form of the question, ask "How many of those annoying UI elements can be turned off in the options menu?"
How about this, even: "Can the UI be turned off entirely? And if not, why not?"

also the game must fucking work without them, not like Skyrim's quest compass

Ask them about subtlety, if they know what that word means. Additionally, ask them if they plan to make it a Hollywood movie or a hitman simulation.
Ask them what their favourite missions in each hitman were and why.
Ask them what each game did right and innovative and if they'll take that into their new game.

Fun stuff - ask them how much the havoc physics will affect the bodies - hitman 1 style or hitman 4 style?
Ask them if there'll be bulletholes in people like in Hitman 1.

Ask them about the save system. I haven't been following the news so maybe we already know about it. If it's not a limited save system of Hitman 2,3,4 tell them to die in a car fire or to explain why the fuck they think they know better.

 

[upwardlymobile]

ask them whether you can shoot your way through any of the missions

ask if any missions can't be completed w/o any violence (not counting the target ofc)

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

 

[Ivan]

Holy Shit. That looks like Anathema from H2

Is Jesper Kyd in this, the music suks

 

[AwesomeButton]

Perfect. Very hyped here.

Edit:
Also, please ask if Jesper Kyd will be returning for HITMAN's soundtrack. I really liked his music in Hitman Codename 47 and Hitman II Silent Assassin, less so in Contracts.

 

[Darth Slaughter]

Holy Shit. That looks like Anathema from H2

Is Jesper Kyd in this, the music suks

I believe jesper is not working with ioi for a long time now.

 

[Astral Rag]

Nice.

The first slice of Hitman will arrive in March 2016, having recently been delayed. I say “the first slice” because it’ll only have half of the game’s locations (Paris, Sapienza and Marrakesh). Each month through June, they’ll add a new location with new missions, and all along support it with temporary ‘live events’ like one-off assassinations. It’ll be sold several ways: $60 for the full game with new bits as they’re added, $35 for the initial three-location ‘Intro Pack’, and $30 to upgrade the Intro Pack to the full thing. Publishers Square Enix swear blind it’s not an episodic or early access game, but it seems a bit of both to me.

FFS, what's wrong with releasing a game when it's ready.

 

[Mr. Pink]

What the fuck

 

[Cadmus]

Where is "I WANT TO BE A DRAGON" pack???