Heya, just wanted to write a short update on a new fix in UCP that I consider to be a pretty big one :]
So, a bit of backstory. There are 8 “outfits” in the game that are tagged as “AR_Elite” (AR here means “Actor Rank”) These are:
Lloyd Burgess, the Pointman in Colorado
Masked Facility Guards in Chongqing
Splitter Clones, who are copied from the masked guards
Juan Cortazar, the Head of Security in Mendoza
Dimitri Belikof, the Commando Leader in Carpathian Mountains (yeah he actually has a name!)
Assassins in Freelancer mode
Elite Guards in Isle of Sgàil (the ones with the blue hoods)
You’ll notice that all of those fall into one of two categories; they’re either a unique NPC, or not a permanent map feature… except for that last one.
So what does AR_Elite do? It makes guards go directly into combat when becoming suspicious rather than go into follow-warn state or trying to arrest 47.
So the issue with the two roaming guards on Isle of Sgàil who would go berserk and kill you over “I don’t like your face” actually wasn’t unique to them, they’re just the most likely ones to catch you (there are practically no other enforcers among the Elite Guards for some reason)
TL;DR the berserk guards on Sgàil are now fixed if you use UCP :]
Thank god. IO have been doing their now signature “pretend its not a issue” for years on it now (they were switched over to this at Freelancer launch).
It wasn’t just for enforcers, NPCs that became suspicious for any reason would do it. The only exception I could find was if someone else becomes suspicious first, and the AR_Elite guard joins in. But NPCs in that state barely do anything anyway :p
This is perhaps the only justified used of the “skip sus questions”. This specifically may need reverting, as the idea is to avoid them and not get caught in an obviously hostile place that is under lockdown.
Not sure what you mean by this. You said it may need reverting but then it seems like you’re making a case for it to remain as-is? Just a little confused is all
As I understand, this boils down to painting the hoodie in Lucky Ducky suit in black and adding a couple of PNGs. However, I have no idea how to do that… or where to even start…
Could anyone help with that? Or even assist me with that… Thanks!
Have a read through the glacier kit modding site, some good tutorials on there that should help.
Also some people on discord might be able to help you, Blossom Fox for instance I have spoken to a bit about suit modding and she is really good at it.
I get it, it means that the facility guards with gas masks should attack you without warning because you’ll mostly encounter them in an area you’re not supposed to be in and they are on full alert during this moment
Would it theoretically be hard to make a mod that makes non-target accident kills count towards Silent Assassin like in Blood Money? Even offline only? With the amount of actions you can sabotage that regular NPCs do, I always thought that may have been, at least, considered during H2016 development. Especially with the bombastic Paris light rig and Marrakesh turret kills.
This should be possible, given that some items such as the Molotov and Fire extinguisher have different rules to what’s expected of the player (fire kill lethal instead of fire kill accident for the former, pacify and sedate instead of accident kill for the latter), so it should be possible to change such things. Weapons, NPC’s and items are given stats via the repo, which environmental objects also have an entry for under “Setpieces”.
Small problem; they are basically unreadable and requires manual searching to find the right repo id’s per level.
The problem, I suspect, is trying to find a way to keep SA in accidents that’d work within reasonable contexts (I.E designated traps instead of random hanging objects).
I don’t think IO would change this, primarily because the point of SA in WoA is to only kill your targets, and the game emphasizes that quite a bit, hence the loopholes around that with sedatives and emetics, making the game have a bit more of a puzzle that requires you to interact with the game a bit more, which works well, even if I think that chandeliers should be counted as accident kills when they kill targets and guards.
I dunno, maybe i’m overthinking this, and they just don’t want people killing Victor with a chandelier without repercussions so easily.
Oh yeah I totally get that part! I agree too! It’s “reverted” that’s confusing me here since the facility guards haven’t been touched.
And as I wrote that I think I realized that Dribbleondo might think all of those were changed? All I did was remove AR_Elite from the Sgàil guards though, since they seem like an outlier compared to the others
(and there are other odd properties set for actors on that map, like the sentries who have radio filters - I still need to fix those, but unfortunately it’s not as easy as Colombia since the thing causing the filter also makes them check their radios from time to time. And I’d hate to kill a cool ambient detail as collateral damage when there’s probably a cleaner way.)
“even if I think that chandeliers should be counted as accident kills when they kill targets and guards.”
I agree wholeheartedly! The APC Turret kill is especially a problem, because it’s so cool, but practically impossible to achieve with an SA ranking. Witnesses are another thing that void SA, but with a few accident kills… It’s fun to imagine, something that could potentially help you regain SA with some more time, patience and skill - no matter how sloppy the initial attempt was. Unsure how much it would mess with the game balance.
To be honest, there aren’t that many staged traps like this in the game (and the APC kill requires a lot of game interaction anyway to find the code that lures Strandberg to the school). This is less a game balance problem, and more to do with IOI’s puzzle design philosophy the devs want to adhere to.
IO have to manage what makes sense in-universe with what counts as an accident, and what’s good for the gameplay loop of Hitman. There’s some give-and-take there. You win some, you lose some, i’m afraid.
