In this thread we can discuss everything there is about the rating systems in Hitman or Hitman-like games in general.
Talk about the way they work, the problems or highlights of their implementation, compare them, suggest your own ideas. What game did it better? What changes to the formula you’d wish to see? Are the ratings even necessary?
Some FYI:
Basically, the rules for Silent Assassin in each of the games.
There you can learn how the rating systems work in the respective Hitman games in case you didn’t know something.
An extensive but far from complete list of ratings from Blood Money
Hitman: Blood Money/Gameplay — StrategyWiki, the video game walkthrough and strategy guide wiki
Fans suggestions:
by Kotti
Rating system idea for Hitman and other stealth games - YouTube
A rating system idea with the elements of SA/Contracts system and Absolution system.
by yours truly
One of the reasons I created this thread was to share this idea. Of course, it’s a purely theoretical concept that would need tweaking and elaborating on certain aspects, and not necessarily something I wish to see in a Hitman game. Don’t mind the numbers and the names of the ratings, they’re here just as an example; instead focus on the main idea here.
So, pretty much every Hitman game has a certain number of different ratings.
There is a Silent Assassin rating and, well, all the others. Usually players go for a Silent Assassin rating, and if they’re not, they’re not looking for any of the other ratings in particular. Having so many different ratings when in the mind of a player it’s a binary “Silent Assassin - not Silent Assassin” doesn’t really serve any purpose.
I created a goofy mock-up of how this works:
The answer to that question is here:
We can have a lot of “good” ratings that still require being stealthy, like Silent Assassin. But depending on how you passed the mission (I went with kill methods here, but that can be only one of the necessary requirements), you would get only one particular “good” rating. If you’re interested, you can try a different approach, once again manage to complete it stealthily (on Silent Assassin, basically) - and be rewarded with yet another rating.
If you slip up too many times, or don’t care about being stealthy at all - then at one point you just get too many witnesses or civilian casualties, so you acquire the one and only Terrorist rating, the antipode of Silent Assassin from the current Hitman system. There is no pride in getting this one and no reason to.
Of course, there has to be a middle ground here. That’s what the yellow ratings are here for. And ideally a player needs to be informed of what they are missing out on. Let’s say you were going to get your target with a silenced gun; you slip up and get witnesses or something but carry on regardless; you finish the level and, for example, a BM-style newspaper report says “A Hired Gun have murdered Mr. Novikov today. Safe to say it wasn’t a work of a Professional Hitman as the culprit was spotted by bystanders”
TL;DR
Hitman: one good rating - a lot of bad ratings
My system: a lot of good ratings - one bad rating