wish there was a way to randomize the cars to make each playthrough more different. i’ve played the mission three times and never want to again
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I was pretty happy with the level overall, as I’ve said before. I think given that they wanted to end the game in a specific way, with a specific set piece and scene, they had to do something to force the players into a tunnel at the end - so to speak. Imagine a full-on sandbox level similar to Mendoza or Miami. You’d have some players who dealt with Edwards in exactly the way that IOI wanted - face to face leading directly into the final cut scene. You’d have other players though who figured out how to take out Edwards without ever seeing him, or being in the same room, or from across the entire level with a sniper rifle. IOI had to force the player to end the level at least in a very straight-forward and non-sandbox way.
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this is likely a coincidence, but the beginning of the track “In Constant Motion” (that plays when 47 wakes up on the table) resembles the beginning of “White Room & Main Title” from Contracts. very similar vibe. thought that was neat. i know this is random and has nothing to do with the above posts but…whatever lol
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This level was a dissapointment for me. You can’t choose loadout even after you have full Mastery on this level. Just a few ways to kill Mr. Edwards. And that Airport level never happened… And I thought that HITMAN 3 has 6 level with Mastery Level 20 on every level.
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A weird thing I noticed that’s probably already been mentioned, you can pick up the serum and wait for a while until the prompt to inject it appears. Then I knocked out The Constant and used every explosive I had so blow him off the back off the train, then quickly injected myself with the serum. The mission ends with The Constant talking to you in the secret ending, despite the fact that he’s already dead. Slight oversight, I suppose. Could’ve been cool if you wake up on the train, now out of fuel, with blood on your hands, and you just end up wandering out into the nothingness of the wild.
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It’s a cool Splinter Cell level basically, something I enjoyed and might play through again someday but not something typical of this series where it has endless replay value due to being a playground. I think that’s fine as a bonus, but as one of the 6 maps (none of which are huge either compared to H2) it does lower the value.
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You could chalk it up to a hallucination. He remembers a man’s voice and someone telling him to wake up but it’s all a blur…
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Developer: We wanted to do something that really focused on the narrative and the themes of all the games in the series.
You: U R Broke?
Perhaps you should consider that refusing to engage with the message of the media, will always make the media frustrating. Also, you may want to look into a few aspects of the train level and reconsider your assumption it was cheaper to make.
Since the opening level of Codename 47 where he thinks he’s escaping and instead he’s being released by Ortmeyer and sent to kill his other fathers?
Lets see in Codename 47 he was set up to “escape” the asylum and join the ICA after years of training and brainwashing to be the perfect assassin, so that Ortmeyer could assume total control of the project. He didn’t have a clue what he wanted, other than to not go back to working for Ortmeyer.
In Silent Asassin, he wanted to be a humble church groundskeeper but he was pulled out of retirement by Sergei by making him want to rescue his friend the priest - at the end he leaves resigned to the fact that he will always be a killer and there will always be jobs for him to do.
In Contracts, he wanted to just leave Paris after doing his job, instead he gets ambushed and starts reflecting on his life - wondering if his time has come until he feels obligated to get back into business because the inspector knows too much about him, and he can’t have that - not even in death.
In Blood Money, he wanted to just get on with his job and he ended up being by the McGuffin and the Key Player in the ICA vs the Franchise war and after that he wanted to go on his own for a while.
In Absolution he starts off unsure of what he wanted, he definitely did not want to go after Diana but he felt obligated to because it’s “what I do” and then he felt obligated to try to protect Victoria because of their connection, the only way he knew how to do that was killing people until he ran out of threats.
In World of Assassination he just wants to do his job but he gets pulled into the war against Providence by Grey working as the shadow client as part of a ploy to make him remember his commitment to taking Providence down… at which point he immediately loses Grey and what he wants is to resume his partnership with Diana… which he can only achieve by killing all threats in the way.
Why? The vast majority of the people who played the World of Assassination trilogy have never played the older games, and likely never will - and its pretty clear at this point that a lot of the people who did play the older games:
- Weren’t paying attention or simply don’t remember much about them
- Fixate on what they remember (whether it was accurate or not) to an unhealthy degree where they rate the new products entirely by the old
IO Interactive has had people for years posting abusive rants about how their games aren’t Hitman games, they’re doing it wrong, they should do x thing (which was never done). They were really not going to benefit from encouraging that or treating it as valid discourse.
Some examples off the top of my head:
People are claiming that this had to be a sandbox level because that’s what Hitman is, but historically the final levels have always been very linear.
- Codename 47 was a shootout with your brothers in tiny corridors with a cheap trick to make you redo it if you didn’t guess about the bar code.
- Silent Assassin was a “kill everyone” on the loading screen level
- Blood Money was a “kill everyone” at a funeral where you start in front of them so you can’t stealth at all
- Absolution was a graveyard with three sniper targets
And there’s probably a good reason for that, for as much as people ranted about sandbox and only sandbox, it should be noted that way into the Blood Money period one of the consistently picked favourite levels was the most linear Hitman level to date: The Saint Petersberg Stakeout
Because there is value to contrast and there is value to structured approaches to experiences - which Hitman has leaned into since the opening levels of Codename 47.
They did the “all sandboxes, all the time” experiment with Blood Money and the result was Hitman got shelved for six years because it had underwhelming sales for the amount of work involved - particularly compared with Silent Assassin, which had embraced linear elements to create story, contrast and investment.
Just because you have a favourite food doesn’t mean you always want to eat only that food, same with gameplay experiences.
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Given that Absolution used the Glacier 1 engine… unlikely, that and there were developers on this forum talking about how the ultimatum for Absolution was Hitman must evolve or die. Remember this was around the time we got our Tomb Raider reboot too - Square Enix wanted to find out what properties in its new acquisitions had legs.
That and given that Absolution was intended to have bigger, more sandboxy levels but they found that it couldn’t handle it on the console of the day - but it still had a sales target of ten million units.
Hakan and the other people at IO Interactive almost certainly spent the six years working on Glacier, on new techniques, on new pitches, etc but the decision on whether to make a new game or not was made by Eidos and then Square Enix. Blood Money sold less than Silent Assassin, and Contracts had also been disappointing - money was tight for Eidos after that so no more big investment, high risk big sandbox games.
Games with just one type of level just don’t do as well with the common market because they want variety, they want contrast, etc.
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I like the Untouchable mission (not as much as I do the other missions in the WoA, but I’m still a fan of it in its context in the trilogy and think it is a very fitting/suitable conclusion for the WoA) so I’m not here to touch on that, but just wanted to pick up on the quoted part of your post above.
Surely the main reason for the prolongued 6 year gap between Blood Money and Absolution was the construction of the new Glacier 2 game engine, and IOI’s mid-development-cycle decision to pivot from making a purely linear Gears Of War-style successor to Blood Money to a new direction where they tried [with limited success] to introduce some more traditional Hitman sandboxes back into the mix?
I’m pretty sure that Hakan Abrak has explicitly cited these as the main drivers for the gap between Blood Money and Absolution in interviews previously, and I don’t think Blood Money’s sales performance as a pure sandbox experience was as important a factor in this compared to IOI’s under-estimate of how long Glacier 2 development would take, and then the design-philosophy change-of-course that they tried to accomplish midway through making Absolution.
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My bad. A mix of people insisting Blood Money was on the Glacier 2 back in the day and that they didn’t really hype the Glacier 2 for Absolution - what are now its key features such as the Bricks System and the ability to have hundreds of active AIs etc.
Combine that with the various issues in level design issues etc is that they were not waiting for the Glacier 2 to be ready - they were operating on an arbitrary deadline (ie Square Enix wanted to find out which of the major Eidos properties had legs: Tomb Raider, Deus Ex and/or Hitman). While googling I found that it was the same developer who is credited with “leaking” the existence of the engine was the same one who posted a “Hitman must evolve or die” on the forum when he got frustrated with people screaming Absolution wasn’t Blood Money.
But okay, lets assume that after the release of Blood Money, they made an immediate decision that the next game would be released on a new engine, with a new design philosophy and new approach to gameplay.
Why would they do that if Blood Money had received exactly the response they hoped for?
I think we’re talking at crossed purposes here. I didn’t originally reply to your post intending to argue the toss on whether IOI/Eidos/Squeenix wanted to change direction after Blood Money: clearly, going by what we got in Absolution, they did - we’re on the same page here.
I just wanted to point out that I’d recently heard an interview with Hakan where he explicitly discussed the long gap between Blood Money and Absolution. He said that the six year gap was primarily because Glacier 2 was being built from the ground up for Absolution (with development of the engine wildly over-running IOI’s initial timescale estimates), and because midway through development of Absolution the studio decided to pivot away from something even more linear than what we ended up with (due to initially chasing Gears Of War-style market trends that seemed to be going out of fashion during the development process), taking extra time to introduce the limited sandboxes we did get. That was all I wanted to say, didn’t have any wider points to make about the cost/benefits of making sandboxes vs linear experiences vs a mixture of the two.
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And my point was that it doesn’t really disprove that Blood Money’s “all sandboxes, all the time” approach was an issue.
It takes a tremendous amount of anxiety over a property for a company to stop the momentum for it and put making new versions of it on hold for six years, losing all the hype and community and good will they built up. And if you look at the numbers, its understandable.
That’s the sort of thing that makes a studio go “We’re not going to release again until we get a new engine.” then spend years working on it - then go “Maybe we should revise how we design the games…” then when the new boss comes in “We need it to be ready now, and we need to evolve or die.”
I guess my comment got removed since it was in response to a bit of a dramatic user, so I’ll repost the sentiment of it now.
I’m sure a few people have brought it up, but I’d love to see an update on the Carpathian Mountains that allows us to start with any equipment and suit we want and smuggle in an item. I know that story-wise it makes no sense, but that’s why the game has had ‘canon’ starting restrictions ever since Hokkaido for certain levels. Usually, there’s a way to unlock a starting point where you can use whatever you want (Hokkaido being level 20, Miami being playing it at least once, and the ones in Hitman 3 being a starting location that skips past story related moments and restrictions).
There are a lot of unlocks I’ve accumulated over the years and CM could be a great shooting gallery and testing area or a place to let off some steam with them since so much of the rest of the game discourages open combat (the Carpathian Mountains is the only mission that goes out of its way to tell you that everyone in the level is fair game).
Plus I imagine (could be wrong) something like this is fairly easy to implement relative to say placing a bonus mission there or something.
So yeah that’s all I wanted to get out there. Maybe IO-I is already/has considered it. It’s a level they took a risk on, I think it’s fine but they can definitely breathe more replayability into it by adding some of these options.
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Yeah, I’d love to see this too. Would be absolutely great to play Untouchable in both the White Shadow and Straightjacket disguises for maximum thematic suitability. Like you say, I’m glad that IOI made us play this with No Loadouts first time through so that we could experience the narrative conclusion to the trilogy in the way they intended, but unlocking the loadout slots after that (via Maximum Mastery or whatever other minimum progress benchmark) would add replayability and fun to the mission without restricting anyone who still wanted to play the mission in the ‘canon’ fashion.
It’s not gamebreaking as things stand, but if we could bring a loadout to the Initially-So-Secure-That-You-Can’t-Bring-A-Loadout GAMA Facility in Hokkaido, then I think it would add something to the Carpathian Mountains map to let us do the same here.
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Just a detail I figured I’d mention: the ‘Outdoors’ starting location I think is the only WOA start that just drops you into the level. No camera pan/transition into it or anything. (I’m not counting things like patient zero or Special assignment levels)
And yet, the Proloff Parable does have its own camera pan openings to each of its starting spots.
That’s just… kinda weird.
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Where do we find these coordinates?
Yeah some contracts mode starts do that too where they skip the cutscene. Nightcall boat and The Source
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Right, I meant that it’s basically the only Campaign starting location that drops you in with no fanfare of a camera pan.
Nightcall has a cutscene that leads straight into the level, and The Source has a mini introduction by Diana before giving up control. And the Proloff Parable has a music cue and introductory camera angle. Somehow the main mission doesn’t. Just weird how things worked out with that.
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