Are you able to provide a source/statistic in regard to how individual updates made to Ghost Mode affected its overall interest?
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It sounds like you didn’t joined F7SC in time for that game mode, the tournament was awesome, and being honest, it’s a milestone better than RR, RR feels like a pattern, GM is new every time you play it, that’s what made it great.
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I recall there being a very strange “feature”, where you could get a free point by causing an accident (usually fall-kill) to a target in full view of any other NPC.
You wouldn’t really “get away with it”, but if it was the last target you needed to win, it would be so cheap to win by killing the target with no regard to SA, or having that occur to you.
It was a mode that encouraged and rewarded memorization, given all the NPCs and target routes were the same, every area they’d appear in. There’s some small variation in when it would occur in a match, but it’s a strange kind of strategy in a multiplayer game.
I get that’s why the speedrunning community really took to liking it – I did too, especially for the novelty of a MP mode – and I commend the insane plays people could do I’d never have thought of.
But something just felt a bit off about its execution for casual play.
I feel like it would (obviously) have benefitted more from having more content and maps
Santa Fortuna didn’t really help when it dropped – being a map with lots of running, and everyone had gotten used to the one map for 6 months already
I wonder how it would have fared with a Silent-Assassin-centric points system. Encourage clean, spotless kills on each target, and for fairness, reset NPC knowledge after every target round.
And, I dunno, shift NPCs routes around a bit, add some variety to who’s an enforcer or not.
A lot of what I’m pitching I’m hoping might come true in Freelancer, but I feel like Ghost Mode as it was still deserved some tweaking.
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That was any accident, and the pros in the tournaments would be doing these all the time if there wasn’t an option to get the kill without getting spotted, I mean, afair death didn’t affected the score or anything, it’d just spawn you like 100m from the targets.
Isn’t every game a bit harder for casuals? Pros usually set the bar really high and when getting into a fight with a pro while being a casual would usually mean that you would lose.
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No, it’s just based on available matches after those changes were implemented. I saw a massive decrease in activity after each one of those changes.
There was still a handful of people who played regularly, but that was it. So if you played it after those changes, you basically had to play multiple matches with the same group of players. As opposed to before that when you could easily play 10-20 matches a day with different people each time.
But nothing scientific. 
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I’m aware of the tournaments that were hosted by people on here, but the participants were essentially the “regulars” I mentioned from every platform. There were still small groups of people playing, but not like before the changes I mentioned above (on Xbox).
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Not only regulars, it had lots of people joining in, and ofcourse we did it for the fun of playing Ghost Mode, not just for the pure competition, that was lots of fun.
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This was a good change. Having the first targets location be pre-determined by your startin location got stale very quick, and the game wouldnt really get started until the 2nd target.
Find/memorise better crates.
Santa Fortuna was far more interesting and complex than Miami for GM. And ghost mines were great.
GM is far more pattern based than RR
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RR is all about unique strats of each target and killing them as fast as possible, at this point it feels like a speedrun race where you just wanna see who does it the fastest first, it’s all about pre thought strats and patterns.
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Wdym at this point? That was always a core element. Same applies to GM btw.
GM is way more about that.
You enjoying GM more than RR is fine, to each their own. But GM simply is far more pattern based than RR is.
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Let’s agree to disagree then, like you, I played both, and GM has way more improvising then RR, if you get caught in GM you need to think what to do, you can just get rid of that NPC quickly, or that could turn into a firefight asap, in RR there is no option of failing, you end up for lots of the time doing what you planned for very long, how to take each disguise, how to isolate each target, in GM it’s on the spot, in RR lots of it is usually pre planned, thats why I ended up enjoying GM more, there was always that feel off, what do I do now? In RR I might already have planned it in the menu screen. GM >>>>>>>> RR.
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Lol what
You’d be suprised. The fact that there are still spins popping up that completely throw off even the most expierenced players says enough. There is lots of mini improvs and quick thinking required, especially in the planning phase.
Might just be you though. With a fixed numbers of GM targets (that are always in the same area) it was pretty obvious what to do exactly for each target, and very easy and fast to learn.
It’s not a suprise that in a GM match between good players the score would almost always go 4-4, and then have the luck factor of where the last target spawns in to determine the winner, especially on Miami.
Not such thing in RR.
To each their own.
Im not arguing about which is better/more enjoyable. That’s up to you. GM being more pattern based is not an opinion though.
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I will agree with what @47Agent states in terms of player involvement on Xbox. At first, there was a good amount of people playing on Miami, but players moved on to other games shortly after Xmas.
There was a brief resurgence when Santa Fortuna was released, but it was because of the suit unlock with 100 GM kills. The population soon died afterwards.
After that, most matches I would get would either be people new to the game, or people killing all NPCs first to get the target kills afterwards (fortunately it didn’t affect me much as I knew how to play and eliminate targets efficiently).
I would still get requests to play the mode through the Xbox Hitman club, but they were usually new players trying the mode out.
Does this mean that the same thing was happening on other platforms? Maybe, but I don’t know. But the perception was there. Hitman is a niche game and doesn’t have a player count a game like Fortnite or CoD has. IOI would have had the data before making the decision to a) not continue development of GM on other maps or take the mode out of beta, and b) shut down the mode.
It was great that the community kept the mode going with events, but it wasn’t enough to warrant IOI perusing the mode more. Look at FC submissions, how many forum members submit vs the amount of registered users?
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Ghost mode didn’t have the fanbase to keep it viable.
However, it was useful for IOI to invest in VR and multiplayer Hitman to get practice in creating a VR and multiplayer game with minimal risk, since it was introduced as a free add-on to an existing game. Now with the experience, IOI are more likely to introduce VR and multiplayer in a new IP down the road.
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Disagree. It made all the matches take longer. Unnecessarily. I understand the reasoning behind it (it was supposed prompt players to gear up BEFORE heading for the target) but that didn’t happen. It just turned into both players having to run all the way across the map BEFORE starting. It was simply a delay. In reality.
I don’t think you understand what I’m saying. Every single crate on the level had blunt melee weapons 99% of the time. Guns, rare. Syringes, rare. That was all changed.
Keep in mind, I still played after all these changes. I just adapted. And still enjoyed it. But I’m saying I definitely saw a drop in the available player base and the amount of available matches you could get after those initial changes (minus matches with the “regulars” who supported that shit until it died on Xbox). And I was one of those.
That map was terrible for GM. If you disagree, cool, but you’re in the minority with that.
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I know there isn’t much to discuss regarding Freelancer, but isn’t there a thread dedicated to Ghost Mode for this?
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If there is, it’s probably old as shit and then the complaint will be “why are you guys upping old threads!?”
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Not really, it simply made it so the first target wasnt completely auto-pilot. And if the first target spawned far away from you, you always had the choice of running there, or kill yourself straight away and spawning near the target (but lose your equipment). This was always an interesting choice, with good players knowing exactly when to do what.
Not really, every crate was pre-determined, with two possible scenarios that alligned. So say there was a propane in a certain crate, you immediately knew what every crate on the map would have.
SF was far more interesting than Miami.
In Miami you just need one of the two god disguises (both guards) and you are golden. And no points on the map where you could succesfully block the other player off.
Meanwhile SF didnt have god disguises, with lots of different potential blocking points (the gate to Jorge, the door under the mansion to the caves etc). Trickier targets too.
It was more difficult, hence why the majority didnt like it + navigating the map (especially the tunnels) was a big task for some.
The fact that Miami very often ended in a 5-4, where in SF we would see all kinds of different scores also tells something
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hell i’d even say that Ghost Mode SF was the better version of SF
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After Hitman2016 and sale from Square Enix, Hakan Abrak said that they had considered turning Hitman into free-to-play, but was not the kind of model that was appropriate for the Hitman franchise, said Hakan.
I don’t think that IOI will invest in creating a viable offline mode for the Hitman Trilogy in the future, even if updates of new content are less frequent. The Hitman Trilogy is deeply integrated in the Microsoft Azure cloud gaming platform. There will always be a greater cost / benefit for IOI for Hitman to always require an online connection. It was much more controversial for Hitman to always be online during the release of Hitman2016. Now there are many games as a service offerings which require an always online connection.
Always requiring an online connection means that IOI knows who are their customers, and all aspects of player engagement of their paying customers of their content.
Once Hitman Trilogy is available online, IOI loses their direct and ongoing connection with their existing Hitman community. IOI will never give this up, even if updates on their servers are less frequent.
Having the always online connection means that IOI can continue to directly advertise updates to all Hitman players of all new IP releases from IOI.