ICA Electrocution Phone removed from HITMAN 3

Hitman General
289

The EP made it harder for me to make interesting contracts.

It’s too useful

That’s the crux of why the phone was so hated. It was seen as an in-game cheat code. I can, today, download a trainer and play the game as an invisible super-soldier. I can shoot every single NPC in the face and retain Silent Assassin. I can run from the start point right to the target without using a disguise, shoot the target with an unsilenced shotgun, leave the body where it falls, and exit the level and STILL get a Silent Assassin rating at the end.

A lot of players saw the Electrocution Phone as an in-game, sanctioned version of that. It made contracts “harder” to create in that the players wouldn’t need to use the same routing or tactics that the creator used. It would undoubtedly be very frustrating for a creator to go through the process of creating a contract, complete with a detailed route in mind and a prescribed kill method and then see a player just toss a phone on the ground and wait by the exit.

I imagine it’s somewhat similar to the developers watching the speed runs and seeing all of their hard work just ignored as a player finishes off the entire map in 10 or less seconds.

It’s still a problem for the creator though, not the player, as a differentiator. As a player, I have to side with Heisenberg. If you don’t like a thing in a game, just don’t use it. I almost never use Fiber Wire or any variant of it nor do I ever use the suit-and-tie outfits. I wouldn’t demand that IOI remove them from the game (and to do so would be asinine because they are so tied to 47 as a character). Their existence doesn’t impact me much. If I do come across a contract that requires fiber wire or the signature suit, I just ignore those requirements and take my less-than-5-star rating at the end.

Both points of view, that of the creator and that of the player, are valid, but they are also contradictory. There’s no way to reconcile the frustration of the creator in seeing their intentions ignored with the frustration of the player in having an (relatively) easy kill method removed just because it was “too easy”.

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290

Okay, that’s a weird comparison to make. None of the suits are OP, and the fiber wire isn’t OP either, if anything it’s on the opposite scale of the spectrum in terms of game balance; niche and outclassed. “Not using a weapon because it’s OP” is not the same as “not using an underpowered weapon or suit I dislike because I don’t want to”. The former is bad for the game and how you go about it, as you lovingly detailed above, the latter is, for the most part, personal preference. That and the fiber wire is not a new item, it has legacy. The EP was only in H2, and had no such clause, and neither is it iconic to 47’s character. There’s an inherent balance of power being ignored here.

As I said, you don’t fix a problem by ignoring the problem, especially weapon balance. If people find an OP weapon, they will use it. And as you also correctly surmised, it made contract completion trivial, and contract creation unfulfilling.

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So, yeah, it was an issue with competitions, not because something was wrong with it itself. Oh well.

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It was an issue in competitions precisely because something was wrong with the EP.

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In a way, it’s a shame that IOI ever put in the scores and leader boards. Every time in video game history that a high score was implemented, it resulted in players competing with each other for who was better. Without those leader boards and high scores, the whole thing with the phone would have been a complete non-starter. No one would have cared.

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But you just said earlier you recognized that there is also the issue for contract creators to set up challenges. :cry:

295

I think that a device like the phone could easily co-exist with the desire of a creator to set up a challenge for a player. Even without a leader board or a high score, there still exists a potential to create a contract and let a player play that contract. The only thing that is lost without a high score is the competitive nature of the contract. There would be no readily available mechanism for players to compare their play-throughs of the contract, and thus limited competition, but that wouldn’t stop someone from playing the contract in the first place.

It’s entirely likely that a creator will create a contract that some other player completely messes up. Players who aren’t the contract creator have only limited ways of knowing what the creator intended.
Also, isn’t the creator still free to specify that the contract requires a specific kill method? Wouldn’t requiring a thrown fire ax, for example, preclude the use of an electrocution phone anyway?

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Well it did not with my desire. I do take leaderboards into account, but only in the regard to not include huge waiting times like requiring Consumed Poison for a NPC who drinks 15 mins into the contract. I don’t mind if you use item X to be 5 times faster than others. I do mind however if it makes that also 5 times easier than the other approaches.

In my opinion it is a bad design to bloat up the required load-out or to remove all freedom regarding the kill method just to make the player unable to use the phone. Any Method is a great thing.

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As a player who has, and will continue, to ignore complications whenever it suits me (no pun intended - my thoughts on “suits” are well known I think), I hear you and I do understand that my view on the subject is probably self-conflicting.

I have never cared about leader boards (obviously) or the time it takes to complete a level. I care whether the contract is fun to play. When the phone was available, I likely used it until I discovered that it frankly made the contract less fun to play. I didn’t find it fun to complete a contract in under a minute. I didn’t find it fun to finish a contract without having to actually infiltrate the target’s area or find a suitable disguise.

I tend to be more in the “use it if you want to but ignore it if you don’t like it” camp. I can see the various points of view but to me, it just is what it is. As it stands now, if you really want to use the phone, load up Hitman 2 and play it to your heart’s content. If not, stay with Hitman 3.

There are kill methods that make contracts a lot easier than others. A sniper rifle can finish off a contract pretty quickly if you don’t mind a body being found. The phone did legitimately make it a lot easier to get an accident kill without a lot of risk. It was about as close to a “Easy SA Button” device as IOI will likely ever release. On the other hand, if I ever did create a contract, once I created it and released it, that’s my involvement over and done with. I wouldn’t care what happened afterward (which is why I do not create content).

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Well, them’s the breaks then. If affecting the competitions and leaderboards was the cause of the phone’s removal (and it was when all is said and done), then screw the competitions.

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That is pure conjecture there. The phone was OP, inside and outside of contracts mode, Its problems were not specific to leaderboards or contracts mode. People found it unfun to use, it was faster than any other kill method, and as I’ve repeatedly said now, broke the flow of the game. It just didn’t work as an item. I think leaderboards have very little to do with the decision tbh, but that’s guesswork on my part.

Having what is essentially a “free kill item” is, shocker, not that fun to have in a game after a while.

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I found it fun for its entire lifecycle in H2. :cry:

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That is one opinion, and as pointed out numerous times here, plenty of us found that it was fun and did nothing to the flow of the game; that’s our opinion. If contracts creation, competitions and leaderboard scores are not a factor, then we are right back to “don’t use it if you don’t like it.” The only reason why other people using it would be a problem for you is if it affects you in contracts and such. If that were not the case, then if the phone were still there now, people like me and scat and all the others who would enjoy using would not be affecting you at all. You could let the damn thing sit unused in your inventory while the rest of us used it without issue and no impact on others. How it affects contracts and scores had everything to do with its removal.

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It’s educated guesswork, but guesswork all the same. In a single player game like Hitman (and this is ignoring Ghost Mode or some hypothetical multiplayer mode mod), the only way to compare two play throughs of the same map, and thus the only way to compete, is for two players to compare their scores or to share videos of their respective attempts.

If a single player goes through a game like Hitman (that has a LOT of different options for how to approach the game) and uses nothing but the electrocution phone, then the player will get a less than ideal experience. That player will likely go ahead and replay the game using different items (as I’ve done and a lot of players have, I think). If the player, in isolation, doesn’t like playing the game with that phone, it’s on them.

Once you introduce competition into it, then the score becomes important. The score itself (and thus the leader board) becomes the mechanism for two players to compare their attempts (or for a single player to compare two different attempts). The score takes into account the rank achieved, the method used, the disguises, the time, and provides a way for two players to directly compare and contrast. I can play a level completely differently than you but if your score is better, you win. It’s a self-leveling system, more or less.

Once you have that sort of system, introducing a system-breaking (not game-breaking, but system-breaking) device into that provides a reason to complain. That reason is that the score is no longer necessarily indicative of how good the player is. A player who uses the phone can presumably get a score that is just as good, if not better, than a player who uses a more “legitimate” method.

Free Kill or not doesn’t matter in a truly single player game because the only person that the game has to satisfy is the player themself. Once competition gets entered into it, that game also has to satisfy the competition, the audience, and the player. Leaderboards had everything to do with the reason that players complained in the first place because without them, who would have bothered to complain?

If you look at other overpowered weapons like the BFG in Doom or the Fat Boy in Fallout, how often do players go back to “lesser” weapons once they unlock them? Rarely if ammunition isn’t a factor, I’d bet. What those games do though is to make the game levels harder at the point where those weapons are unlocked or they make it so that the ammunition is so rare or so expensive that the weapon becomes unusable. The only other way to make an overpowered weapon undesirable is to make to so overpowered that it’s usage is highly specialized. The Fat Boy, for example, has a very wide blast radius so you’re just likely to kill yourself and other NPCs as to kill actual enemies.

Hitman doesn’t have anything like that. There is no level difficulty that makes harder or more enemies based on the weapon. There’s no ammunition cost to the phone. Maybe Freelancer will add those elements so that the phone is an Easy Kill method but it costs so much money to buy that it’s prohibitive. Maybe they will introduce something like the Wrath waves of enemies such that even getting to the target to drop the phone would be next to impossible without massive planning and stealth. I’d actually like to see something like that implemented. It might give genuinely powerful devices like the electrocution phone a valid use without making the levels less fun.

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Well said, @schatenjager.

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  • Bring back phone as it was, easy kills and all. :baby:
  • Bring back, but nerf it. KOs normally, but kills when target is in volatile situation (water, gas, etc.) :teacher:
  • Don’t bother bringing it back. We have other weapons that are fair substitutes. :brain:

0 voters

:joy:

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Let the people decide! :joy:

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I hate getting involved in topics like these, but what people exactly? That’s an extremely broad statement that cannot truly be backed up with any facts, unless you or IOI have done official surveys of EVERY SINGLE Hitman player since the inclusion of the E-Phone. I personally didn’t mind it. It was silly and kind of funny seeing the skeleton of the target. Also this is a single player game. If I want to do a clean hands playthrough suit only with poison or a pretend to be Rambo and kill everyone in my path to and from the target, or just drop a phone and let them get electrocuted, then that’s my/the player’s prerogative. Because once again, Hitman is a single player game. The only competition the player has is themselves.

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In my opinion, the issue was that there was a disconnect between what the many fans consider an “ideal experience” and what the game encouraged the player.

Scores don’t just serve as a metric for competition; it also provides a general goal for the players who want to be better. Of course, there are other ways one can be better at the game without a high score, and it is okay if one is satisfied with its performance regardless of the score. But in general, scores should guide the player to be better and help get an ideal experience.

The game encouraged the usage of EP through scores, even though many fans consider that EP, especially during the learning curve, does not make one a better player nor create an “ideal experience”, and it resulted in the disconnect.

I will not deny its significance to the competition. However, scores can be used for more purposes, therefore, can have issues without competition.

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True, but then the argument still goes back to the single-player experience. I can look at my own score on any given map and decide for myself whether that score is good enough for me, personally. I will know whether I used a “cheap” kill method or not. I will know whether I took the objectives to heart and I will be ok or not with those facts.

When the only person I’m competing against is myself, I am the one who has to be OK with the method and the result. I don’t have to defend it to anyone else who may or may not accuse me of using the “easy button”.

Many fans seem to have seen the phone as that easy button and taken offense at its mere existence without considering that they could have simply ignored it, for good or bad.

Regardless, we lost the phone with Hitman 3 and, this poll not withstanding, it’s unlikely we’ll ever see it again so the point is effectively moot beyond a historical curiosity point of conversation.

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