I’ll definitely be considering it canon unless the next entry in the franchise excises it.
Still not the point they’re trying to make. Whether they play it or not is irrelevant. Hitman content is supposed to be based around firstly a person completing the mission in SA, and then branching out from there. That’s how it’s done. And again, I don’t think this mode was done differently than that; it seems like it with some of the finer details, but I don’t think so. However, those who believe it is, wrongly or not, are correct in their assertion that that is how Hitman games are supposed to be made.
If you listen to the video, the choice of going to the Azure Cloud Computing Platform provides a huge cost / benefit for a small company like IOI. Hitman could not be made as it is without always being online. Now, a greater percentage of video games are now always online, and yes there is possibilities that the servers will be removed down the road, and Hitman will be inaccessible, but this will happen when most have moved on to a new version of Hitman / 007 game. Continued legacy support for old digital content is an issue, but it is an issue with all video games.
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I believe that the main consequence of it was the Professional Mode in Hitman 2016.
The new cameras, enforcers, and NPCs were all curated to counter the main way people played, as visible through those data. I think.
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+100% characters of agree
Is that an actual in game option or are you just saying that? lol
So for you Hitman is being Silent Assassin? I’ve been an active player since Codename 47 and this is a nonsence. Its YOUR vision of what is Hitman. True nature of hitman is freedom. And when you design game around Silent Assassin score it’s devaluate this freedom and force people to one-mind approach. Silent Assassin is just an optional play style of your choice, not a goal in itself. The goal of Hitman is freedom in achieving obiectives in way you like.
It was the community that built the idea in Hitman that Silent Assassin is the ultimate goal and true purpose of game style. But this is not core aspect of Hitman game.
So if Hitman is all about being Silent Assassin so you can easyli remove all nonsilencer weapons, explosives, all that melee stuff and assault rifles, because that make these items totaly pointless.
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This mode cannot be done that way though. It’s not repeatable. You can’t play it Silent Assassin and then go back and experiment afterwards because you cannot replay it. Every mission is (theoretically) different. In a normal map, you can play it over and over and over again, using different assassination methods, different strategies, different disguises, different routes, etc. Freelancer doesn’t work that way. Once you finish a map, that specific mission is never playable again.
Yes, you can play that map again, but the target and objectives are now different. There’s no experimentation, no trying different ways of doing it. Every mission is one-and-done.
Also, and this has always bugged me, IOI owns Hitman. They are the developers. If they create a game and call it Hitman, that then is how Hitman is supposed to be done. Even if they change literally everything about the game from the previous version, they own it. They can redefine it however they want. The player base can reject that and they can declare it “not Hitman” but the players don’t own the franchise. Similarly, DC owns Superman. If DC puts out a comic where Superman is suddenly evil and weak, no one else has a right to say that it isn’t actually Superman. DC owns the character and can do whatever they want with it. IOI Owns Hitman and whatever they say Hitman is, it is. The only thing the player base can do in response is to not buy.
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It wasn’t the community that built that idea - it was the developer of the game. 5 stars is inherently better than 4 stars. 4 stars is inherently better than 3. If IOI made Silent Assassin the top-most rank, that makes Silent Assassin the default goal of the game.
I say this as a player who rarely cares about stars or ranks - but it is the default goal of the game, all else being equal.
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Yes, but that is kind of reward for better results. But you can’t say that if game doesn’t force you to make an Silent Assassin rating - it’s not a Hitman game anymore. And this is what Heinsenberg try to say.
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I don’t think it’s a bug, but rather an unfortunate side effect of how objectives work in Freelancer (when you fail one, you can’t gain it back if you manage to meet its conditions again).
OK I stand corrected XD. Still it would be interesting to know how they sort through all that data (in the “analytics” section he only talks - with a heavy French accent 
- about how they gather and store it).
(On a side note it looks like Urben will have to cleave away all those posts about how Freelancer should / shouldn’t be about SA again lol)
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Ok, everything you said there is wrong. Codename 47 was an experimental game whose mechanics could not allow SA gameplay at the time. It was redone, mostly, in Contracts, whose events are to be considered the canon way those missions went down. Ever since the second game, IOI had emphasized SA as not only part of the gameplay, but 47’s character and his status as the best assassin with a perfect record. Even the title of the second game; Silent Assassin. The emphasized gameplay of every game since then; SA.
The whole freedom of gameplay thing is there to encourage people to play how they want, but the game is built around the assumption that the player is going to follow the character on how he would do things, and everything else is just to let you mess around after taking care of business. The freedom gameplay aspect is an add on, not the point of the game. You have not been paying attention to this series if you haven’t realized that by now.
And @schatenjager, I know you can’t replay it the exact same way after, but that’s not really relevant to the point I was making. And no, they cannot just “redefine” it out of the blue, ownership or not. I mean, yes, they physically can, but if they do, then they have betrayed everything they’ve already committed the series to. After a certain point, a creator’s control over their material is only technical; it just continue along the path has been set, and deviations from that are never met favorably, and show that the creators no longer know their own creation anymore and are just making up shit as they go. This has been seen before across all media, from Star Wars to DragonBall, to even Hitman itself, with Absolution as the example. They can’t just do whatever with it and say that’s what it is; it had to fit the path they’ve already set it on.
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If the game “pays out” the most rewards for getting Silent Assassin, then the game is encouraging that play style. There is an icon in the main game who’s sole purpose is to tell the player whether they are still on track for getting Silent Assassin or not. The World of Assassin game has, from inception, encouraged players to earn that specific rank.
One of the earlier titles was even called “Silent Assassin”. The game actively tells the player that Silent Assassin is the “Best” rank and therefore the rank most worth working towards. There is a reason that there aren’t a bunch of YouTube videos showing players how to earn Black Cat or some “lesser” rank.
The idea that the game (and I know I’m contradicting my own arguments in other posts) doesn’t use the idea of the Silent Assassin as a core game element is silly. A Hitman game which rejects that wouldn’t feel like a Hitman game.
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It’s an issue that needs to stop. With older games, the only concern was having a physical copy and system to play it in when the company stopped making the game anymore. Now, when a company stops supporting a game, entire games or important content can be lost forever. This is unacceptable. All games need to be designed to be played in full and indefinitely so long as the player is able to have access to a copy of it. And there is no “moving on” to new games. People may focus more on new ones, but people still go back to older games to play them again. Letting old ones die off for the sake of new ones is also not acceptable. If being online only is what allowed IOI to continue on, then maybe they shouldn’t have continued on. I’d have rather never gotten another Hitman game again than get one where someday I’ll lose access to all but the bare bones of it when lack of support guts its content. This needs to be addressed.
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Dude, I’ve been running a hudge Hitman website for over 18 years, I’ve maked a lot of research, articles and content, which now many of these information and some of components (mostly images) was used to create article in Hitman wiki over past years. I’ve payed more attention than most of regular players of game 
And I have around 2k hours spend in WOA currently. But I see things diffrently than you. I agree that game was build at some point around Silent Assassin rank, but that isn’t the only one thing which makes Hitman a Hitman game.
So when you try to say that if Freelancer mode is not a true Hitman Experience because don’t award you for Silent Assassin (which it do, but as optional objective) it’s just nonsense.
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This cannot literally be true. That is equivalent to saying that you’d rather a developer never built an amusement park if one day it might be shut down. You’d really rather not have the experience of playing a game if one day that game won’t be playable? In the time before VCRs and recordable media were accessible, would it have been better for something like Citizen Kane to never be produced because it wasn’t available to be watched five years later?
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Ok. Is that supposed to be impressive? You and everyone else from New Jersey. Doesn’t mean you understand the series. A series’s very creator can lose their understanding of a series.
Uh, I wasn’t the one saying that.
Ok, you make your point. Your understanding of a game is better than others. Cheers and I don’t have nothing more to say, because is a word against a word. I’ve maked my statement.
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It can and is.
Close, but no. It’s the equivalent of rather never having an amusement park built if one day only a single ride was operating.
Yup.
Pretty much, yeah.
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Oddly enough, I can respect that.
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