Because people complained about it being too easy.
I think when we’re talking about items in the game and balance, we should be asking ourselves do they break logic, more so than do they become a “free kill” or some meta item. I know I posted my thoughts earlier, and I may have implied as such in that post, but such a criticism can be made to the item right now so I’m not on #don’ttouchmycocktail. If you hit the bottle with a dart, it doesn’t explode but acts like it does, meaning you can get multiple uses out of it. People will catch fire to nothing igniting. This breaks the logic of the item, and if they’re going to patch anything, it should be this. I think everyone can agree that an exploding fire bottle needs to explode to actually count as a fire bottle, it doesn’t let out invisible fires if hit with an emetic dart. This, in my view, is the major element the item has that makes it unbalanced: it does something that doesn’t make sense in the context of Hitman, or well…how a fire bomb works, I guess?
Busted weapons/items in the sense that they can “break” a lot of the game isn’t a big deal, you could argue the lockpick does that to anything requiring keys but it’s “balanced” in some places because there’s onlookers, however even they can be tricked with some strategies. It’s when items have properties that go above and beyond what the description of them say that I’d ever have an issue.
I’ll even say this: bring back the wallbang. We have seventeen thousand versions of the Jaeger, give one of them the property to blast through one wall or floor. When this was first introduced, I never saw it as a bug, but that it was such a high caliber sniper rifle it pierced through material. The risk that came with it and what made it balanced was that it wasn’t silenced so you didn’t have a free, quiet, wall busting weapon at your disposal. This was changed when it seemed everyone was using this weapon in a lot of content (though at the time this was the second sniper rifle added to the game and they didn’t hone in on the sniper mechanics as well as they have now, people used this as a workaround for guards automatically marking you as the shooter in more visibly open spaces on the map).
In fact, the issue of the balancing can be seen with sniper rifles very clearly: you’re only really using one, and the rest exist for flavor. If it’s not the Ghost or even the original Sieger if you’re nostalgic for 47’s Blood Money kit, it’s a sniper added in a later game that replaces the same role with one or two extra bells and whistles, and they added far more than one or two sniper rifles since the addition of the Ghost. For the sake of parity between items, we’re honestly given a lot of junk unlockables. You can count the amount of unique items without a clone or a reskin on one hand, and what we’ve seen here is we’ve even lost items with unique functionality, we didn’t gain many. No wallbang Lancer and no electric phone, but at least four lockpicks. The game is bathing in this samey stuff, and I think it’s a larger issue than if this new item changes the meta to speedruns.
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Because it WAS too easy. The complaint wasn’t unwarranted. But that’s my point in my post. My question was rhetorical as the answer was obvious.
If you put it that way, then you paid for Hitman 2 to unlock the phone in Hitman 2 by playing countless hours in Hitman 2. And if you reinstall Hitman 2 you will notice you still have the phone in Hitman 2.
If you paid for Hitman 3 to use the phone, you were mistaken at the point of the purchase to be able to do that. Depending on if you preordered it or not, you could have known about it as I think around release time last year it was pointed out by IO.
Generally, a game is a product by a company that you pay to be able to play it. Sure it is nice to receive appreciation for your achievements in games, but that is what you do for yourself, not for the company that you paid to be able to do that.
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I don’t think that you can say that this is just a single player game that’s pretty reductive. RIP ghost mode.
But wasn’t the phone also game breaking for the single-player parts of the game such as the elusive targets.
I don’t think they want to trivialize everything.
Well then you don’t know many speedrunners, I guess, because I like to speedrun and find even if the game is properly balanced (meaning no violin boosts, no Molotov, no ePhone, no whatever makes the game’s design broken), speedrunning will still exist. It’s just it’s done with it properly.
Subjective. The kill might be easy but the kill is one part of the experience. One person’s “too easy” or “unbalanced” is another person’s “just right.” You may think it was warranted, but that’s not an objective fact; that is a perspective. The just right folks lost out from the complaining of the too easy folks.
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https://www.ioi.dk/hitman-3-pre-launch-guide/
(5 days before release)
Note that there are a small amount of items/unlocks that are not carried over through this process, such as the rewards unlocked through the HITMAN 1 GOTY Escalations, because they are linked to a purchase. Those items will be available in HITMAN 3 when you redeem access to the associated content. In addition, the ICA Electrocution Phone has been retired and will not be available in HITMAN 3.
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Not subjective. The game is designed on getting to the target, killing the target, exiting the mission.
The phone compromised the CHALLENGE of killing the target. And that alone was a big part of the game, if not the biggest. At the end of the day, when you think about a game called hitman, you think kill first. “Im a hitman and I’m hired to kill someone.” Literally the core premise behind the game.
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If you want to discuss the phone extensively, do that here:
In this topic it is only relevant to compare to what makes an item worth to be altered in IO’s point of view. It is not relevant if that was justified, only if it would be for the Molotov Cocktail.
Subjective. And I’m gonna alter your quote a little bit to emphasize these parts right here, that I’ve been saying all along.
Sorry, @Urben, just saw your post.
I voted no, but a thing that might help more is to make it illegal to throw. Similar to a car battery
Anytime anyone brings up the idea of the game being challenging, it’s subjective. What would be challenging to one person might be trivial to another.
The way Heisenberg plays (see his HPP), I could probably believe that getting to the target and then leaving is perhaps more “challenging” to him than actually killing the target in almost every situation.
The way that players like 47saso47 play (assuming normal speed running techniques) getting to the target and leaving is so trivial as to be not worth considering.
There are players who find it incredibly difficult to get to the target, kill them, and then leave.
If you’ve ever watched one of the OutsideXbox “3 Ways to Play” videos of the Hitman maps, think of the difference between Andy and Mike’s play styles. A player like Mike would LOVE the Molotov and probably use it almost as often as some players use fiber wire. A player like Andy probably will never use the Molotov in actual gameplay as it’s too “messy”.
There needs to be room in the game for all of these play styles. At the end of the day, the same argument applies to the Molotov, electrocution phone, or anything else IOI chooses to implement. If you personally think that the game is less challenging because an item was introduced, don’t use it. Leave that item alone though for those players who aren’t as good as you are or who just like the way the game works with that item.
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Hitman 3 is the end of the World of Assassination trilogy, so that seems extremely unlikely.
Kinda putting me and @47saso47 to shame there, @schatenjager. Not lying, though, I’ll give you that.
I do it only insofar as to say that there are multiple play styles and the game needs to be playable by all of them. The fact that you can both play using your own preferred styles and still not only accomplish the goal but have fun doing it is a testament to how good the game actually is.
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Psh, sensible both-ways bastard. 
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Yes. But that’s not everything. You focus on 2/3 of the game. I’m saying all 3 are important.
But your argument against the phone and part of the Molotov is only in relation to 1/3 of it, so you’re not focusing on all 3 either.
In any event, the way schatenjager put it actually helped me understand where you’re coming from a little bit better, so I actually have no further desire to argue it. I think we both might actually be right and wrong, depending on what we’re talking about. Big step for me; I never accept a both-ways viewpoint.
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