Obviously it is : how are you all doing ? And congratulations on hitman being the second best game of the year for PCgamer. Disco Elysium was first, so it’s a very honorable second place, I’m sure more awards are to follow. The game deserves it.
But beyond that, I have three questions : a serious one, a curious one, and a lighter one.
The Serious :
The largest change made in Hitman 3 are the hidden story missions. They are at its core via the most intriguing challenges and the level design.
Grey Dubai Story mission, admittedly a tutorial, makes you pass next to the NPC with the phone conversation about the explosive golf ball. I doubt that it’s by accident.
I presume they were made because most players never really disabled the story mission HUD, so they allow them to have the pleasure of “outsmarting” the level by themself.
Was this the design goal ? And because you have access to the metrics : were they found by most ? Did it work ?
The Curious :
As I said in the Gluttony thread , the gluttony escalation have a lot of small but significant changes to add opportunities, sometime ease, sometime challenge, all adequate to the escalation gameplay and objectives. How much fine tuning was made here ? I don’t have a specific question, I’m just curious on the process, on the craft. I also want to give my appreciations to the Live Team.
To directly quote from this thread
The Lighter :
Hitman has a lot of references. (recently @maydaymemer pointed out the ones from Burke and Hare).
Carpathian Mountains have a bunch of densely packed, heavily armored guards where the best combat strategy is to constantly switch targets, make them fall over and close the gap or slowly finish them off. Is that a John Wick 3 Continental shootout shoutout or just a happy parallel ? Whichever, it was a fun gameplay idea, if only a one off.
Thank you for doing those streams.