I wish the games didn't have a story and had more cold blooded hits

Hitman 3 (2021)
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The trilogy tries to justify your 'hits by painting your victims as villains, and by virtue you as some form of neutral arbiter of justice. Ever since Hitman SA, I’ve enjoyed role-playing the hitman games as a cold-blooded psychopath trying to get his next pay check. I kill good, bad and the inbetween as long as the price is right. The new hitman games though make your killings feel more justified. It makes you feel more like a government assassin rather than a cold-blooded psychopath killing for money.

This has bothered during this entire trilogy and was encapsulated during the Mendoza mission where it was suggested that Diana didnt take contracts for purely money or power, but only when she believed there was some moral justification for it as well.

The fact that we have an overarching story also plays in to this - it’s hard to have an overarching plot if you’re killing randoms based on a paycheck. To me, these games would have been better and more immersive without a storyline. Instead, I would have preferred if IOI filled out each map with more backstory or information about each target
as well as deeper mission briefings up front. Not painting them as people that deserve it, simply providing more details about the people you’re doing hits on. Not making every target connect into some larger plot of revenge - to me that just blunts the role playing element.

All the hitman games had a somewhat sad excuse for an overarching plot in the past, but they were extremely minimal and nonsensical. They didn’t really break immersion and never made me feel like I was doing society a favor. In fact, the ferris wheel guy in Hitman blood money was almost sympathetic - he had a hit done on him because he made a mistake. He wasn’t evil.

Do you think Hitman games would have been better served without an overarching story and a greater focus on the non-connected plots of individual hits? What about making them more diverse in terms of having marks that really didn’t do anything wrong?

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This is a topic that has been discussed every time a new HITMAN game (since 2016) came out. And I can see why.

And I also totally can see why people feel that way, and that they want the game to feel more like a simulation, you being a hitman and doing those … well … hits. I always looked at the games that way, too, up until Absol… after Blood Money.

I am just saying it outright: I love the new Hitman games and their Mission Impossible / James Bond vibe.
I think it is a refreshing change.

I do think that how some of the characters are written is too much „Yes, they are evil!“.
I always have to chuckle when Diana says that the Knox‘ are „complicit in a war crime!“.
It is SO on the nose.
Though I have to admit that the biographies are doing a better job than the intro videos, although I adore the videos. They always have a „F**k yeah!“ feeling to it because of the design and music.

Anyway, I am rambling.
I would prefer more gray characters (like … well … Lucas Grey) instead of straight evil. But I would not want them to go back and do Hitman games with little to no story.
I think the four main characters in the trilogy (47, Diana, the Constant and Grey) were very entertaining to watch.

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I guess contracts mode is in a way the closest to hits for hire as other people select the targets & you kill them.

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Eh, Kinda half and half. From what I remember of the older games most targets were pretty horrible people or did messed up things but I guess there was a more of a vague 47 and ICA is just as bad as them vibe and didn’t care who they were attitude.

It is also a lot harder to to keep making targets where might not be a justified or non-horrible person given the nature of the Hit and “worlds best assassin” The Local Karen isn’t gonna be able to afford Agent 47 to take out her 3 ex husbands.

Also having a trilogy no real plot can make the game bit harder for people to get in to. Not saying the plot overall is great but in general keeps people engaged.

ET’s at times had a sense of vagueness to them and random jobs as they come in. If they combine more ET’s together like they did once in Hitman 2 they could work as good standalone levels. Or add more of a bonus campaign with that in mind if they end up doing a complete or GOTY edition.

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I never play contracts though because most of the NPC’s really dont go anywhere, they have very limited routines and no protection which makes the hits kind of one dimensional

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This is true. The best you can get outside of the actual targets is a unique npc like a Jason Portman or The Constant that do a little bit of roaming & aren’t generic looking.

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It would be really easy to make sympathetic hits. Business men trying to take out competitors, athletes or rich gamblers trying to sabotage other teams/athletes, musician trying to kill his record label owner, etc. You just need a rich client, rich hit and a reason to kill which is usually money or power.

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A cool feature would be if it were possible to customize contracts even more by selecting if your target has a guard or two(basically follows their pathing) It could be selectable in the menu after play making the hit.

Edit: I’m sure that’d be easy to make right lol?

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I hope they bring back all the past elusives and package them as hits we can access at anytime. Not sure if itll ever happen but would add a lot of content and some variety to hits

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yeah thatd be pretty cool actually.

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I’m pretty sure almost everyone Agent 47 kills is a scumbag bar a couple of exceptions (and the poor delivery guy in Blood Money). Its never really been a game where 47 goes around killing whistle blowers and progressive activists in fascist countries and stuff like that. In the current Trilogy Penelope Graves was probably an alright person. But the game has always explored his morality as far as H2SA when he questioned his place in the world.

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I kinda tend to shift in opinion on the topic, but when they announced the episodic nature of Hitman 1 I did think that the series was well suited for it because theoretically they wouldn’t need to tie episodes together with a story.

And I do wish they will continue to make content for Hitman 3 and standalone levels with no connection to the trilogy’s story seem like a good opportunity to me.

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Couple could work but be lot harder to make a full game out of that. Plus making sure locations are interesting to work with the target. I do believe random off the plot hits can work as fun side content to the main plot and locations.

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Most movies and such with similar plots do the same. It’s hard to root for a murdering psychopath, so it helps the audience if they see it as at least somewhat justified.

Kane & Lynch had no justification or redeeming qualities though, so IOI are capable of that.

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I think that’s as true of the game as a whole as it is of the characters… :smile:

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This topic gets raised constantly and its always in vague terms and generally unable to address a few key points. It also generally overlooks that pretty much all assassin stories etc always happen to have the protagonist killing bad people (or the occasional target who’s ambigious enough we can assume them to be bad) even if they’ve shown they can kill anyone without flinching.

Firstly most story tellers understand that most people will look for a moral narrative and underlying theme, and “the world sucks and innocent people just die without being able to fix anything” isn’t a very satisfying theme per se. It comes up sometimes in other stories, but those are usually stories critiquing capitalism, government, military, etc. It’s also particularly unsatisfying to play as a protagonist in (unless you’re a terrible person who genuinely wishes you could murder activists etc, and those people don’t need encouraging).

It undermines the feeling of being cool and powerful if you’re just maintaining the status quo.

Second is that its just hard to come up with scenarios where “innocent” people are under the kind of protection that warrants the world’s greatest assassin. They don’t have the budget to hire ex-military private security, own their own fortress and they don’t have the connections to have armed thugs with illegal weapons patrolling the inner area. Nobody thinks of these people as “untouchable” by any standard other than moral.

It undermines the feeling of a super skilled assassin who can bypass any security if you’re breaking into a shoebox apartment to smother someone in their sleep while the cops are taking a nap because they don’t care about that particular neighbourhood.

Thirdly is, in a world where you have super assassins, its particularly difficult to portray one of them as being dangerous or influential enough. Super assassins implies the mega wealthy exist to hire them, and they can always buy other solutions to their problems (like the bit in Paris where someone is rethinking their whole approach because of one phone call from Thomas Cross offering to fund them if they do).

It undermines the feeling of being the ultimate game changer if midway through you think you could probably just pay someone to write a hit piece on this person and then offer them a job with a contract that prevents them doing the thing.

Kane & Lynch was kind of an experiment in making the characters who were less likeable and the end result was… people don’t like them.

Part of the appeal of Hitman is people like 47 and they like Diana. They like that 47 has his own, unconventional but generally unshakeable stance on the world, they like that Diana is able to both have a strong opinion on individuals but also able to freeze her blood and operate devoid of passion when it’s game time.

It makes them interesting, and their targets being super criminals, mercenaries, oligarchs, etc facilitates that dynamic.

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Haha, I like the mood and atmosphere of the first half of the first game a good bit. Actual gameplay is pretty bad though.

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I think the amount of targets would be endless - anybody that’s rich. Business men, heads of state, celebrities, etc. It would actually make it easier to create targets, because they would no longer have to facilitate some overall story. You just need to come up with a reason for one rich person/organization to pay to kill another one. Those reasons are dime a dozen. These people can all afford protection and can have a reason for having them.

Then you can also have targets that are bad people - like drug dealers, but the people hiring you could be rival dealers as well, which would accomplishes the same sense of immersion of being a cold blooded hitman that doesnt take sides as long as he’s getting paid.

Even without going all in, past hitman games felt a lot more malicious than the new trilogy as well. Part of that were more ambitious targets, part of it art direction, music, animation etc. It’s difficult to role-play the evil, dead eyed psychopath with the new trilogy.

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By definition, in real life, a specialist of 47’s caliber would only ever be called in to deal with someone whose risk and danger profile would be very much like the targets in HITMAN. This is because anything less would be not cost effective anymore for someone seeking the elimination.

There is also a rationale there that goes something like this: “If you are sent a contract to kill a person who has done nothing wrong, you as a contractor carry immeasurable risk to yourself because at such point even the person who paid for the contract can ‘change their mind’ and get YOU in trouble by notifying authorities.”

So there is, I can imagine, a form of due diligence. To be worth this much money, to be hated so much to see them dead - a Target must have done very horrible things.

So in that way it works.

The rest of the personal drama thing though… doesn’t so I’m mostly happy it’s “done and dusted” by the end of H3 and Diana and 47 go “back to business”.

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I dont see that as the case - people hire hitmen for petty things like life insurance. I imagine op level business people may be interested in spending a good deal of money on a pro if the ROI is in the millions or billions by getting rid of pesky business problems.

““If you are sent a contract to kill a person who has done nothing wrong, you as a contractor carry immeasurable risk to yourself because at such point even the person who paid for the contract can ‘change their mind’ and get YOU in trouble by”

Nobody would do this - they would be in trouble for hiring you. They wouldnt spend a million dollars on a hit only to throw themselves under the bus afterwards.