Season of The Splitter - December 12th 2024 - January 12th 2025

[sammland]

I haven’t been able to go on Twitch as much as i wanted to since january is our busiest month I. I was happy to know there were not only one but two drops this time, but i wasn’t able to spend my usual time watching streams, didn’t bother either to check the conditions because i know one drop equals one hour on a stream. Which i did for two hours so i knew the drops were secured. I was severely wrong about getting the robe.
I get that subscribing can be a condition and i should have read on how to get it but why you’d end a Twitch drop on the 8th on january instead of the 12th just like the Splitter season is beyond me. I thought i could manage this weekend. Sorry if i seem over dramatic but i’m more than annoyed because well, i like collectibles and this one stinks.

Anyway. A surprising ET for sure. I liked the big obvious connection with the Hitman lore, clone wise but i am not entirely convinced about the execution itself. It was an… intricate target, you follow a certain road which may allow a lot of experimentations, though because this is ICA level, it’s not that easy (on my level). I wish the ET took place in the street portion of Chongqing, the place deserves love more than ever. But i understand where they were going and how is a fine tribute to our international JCVD, for real.
Celebrity ETs are more than welcome if it means changes in the usual destinations. I hope we’ll get a woman at some point, please no Carmen Electra type.

[LandirtHome]

I can confirm the 23 percent.

If the fixer returns as an Elusive Target in the still hypothetical Year 5, I’m mostly wary of conflicting design with the sedative.

Contrary to Hitman 2016, sedatives are now fully Silent Assassin. So unless they mark it clearly in the visible objectives, or remove it, I’m afraid that a fair amount of players will not understand why knocking some NPC out with them can send them into an automatic fail.

To quote Travis:

@Travis_IOI

I’m not sure that we’ve ever said that all ET’s can’t be reactived. In theory, they are all available for selection in the Arcade (aside from the obvious ones you mention), but some of them are not a good experience and don’t hold up so well in their current form. For example, the Fixer or the Ex-Dictator are troublesome and can be frustrating for players.

---

Community keep asking for mediocre-to-average content to be made available in the name of “we want everything”.
So we get them.

[Dribbleondo]

Complex is not the word I’d use to describe it. There’s more to do in the Splitter sure, but this is a case of looks can be deceiving. You’re essentially doing the same thing several times over, and in fairly easy ways to setup, I might add. More targets doesn’t necessarily scale with difficulty.

Freedom Fighters and Three Headed Serpent are complex because reaching all the targets requires liberal disguise usage and lots of moving about, all while avoiding a lot of armed guards and sicarios. The Splitter by comparison has two useful disguises that can be swapped out for at any given time, has many scripted kills that are not behind barriers, the guard population is surprisingly low, and in general feels pretty relaxed as difficulty goes. Heck you can waltz around the first floor of the facility in your starting outfit pretty much unimpeded.

And starting a shootout is surprisingly tricky given how, as described above, how low the NPC population is in the Splitter. Not saying it isn’t possible to screw up, but it’s not nearly as bad as other levels. In fact, all the clones are compartmentalized to their locations, and some of them don’t have guard overseers (as the clones themselves have guard AI) so any kind of retaliation is a lot less likely than other levels – including the base level and even several ET’s like The Ex-dictator and The Revolutionary.

The Splitter is not complex, certainly not nearly as much as the Fixer, which to repeat what I said, does not tell you about things you actually need to know to complete it. Relying on the unknown is what makes it both tricky and complex-looking, as you need to discover information that you aren’t sure is correct, and that’s partly what makes it frustrating. Even when you fail, the game keeps up the illusion of secrecy. It tells you how you failed (killed courier, handoff marketeer etc.), but those are not adequetely defined ahead of time. It is bad game design if you expect the player to figure out mission critical gameplay elements for themselves, which could’ve been explained in the breifing. In fact, IO had to spell out what to do on their blogpost when the Fixer re-ran in H2, so it’s clearly a fundamental design issue with the Fixer that players aren’t gelling well with.

The Fixer sucks. Always has, and always will do unless IO changes it to be more intuitive for the player. It is still the worst, most difficult, and one of the more complex levels in WOA, to this day. Having more clones to kill and therefore more opportunities to mess up does not make a level complex or more difficult; it just depends on the levels’ execution when playing it.

[Heisenberg]

@Dribbleondo

You’re essentially doing the same thing several times over, and in fairly easy ways to setup, I might add. More targets doesn’t necessarily scale with difficulty.

@Dribbleondo

Having more clones to kill and therefore more opportunities to mess up does not make a level complex or more difficult; it just depends on the levels’ execution when playing it.

In a one-and-done scenario where, after the first kill, you’re locked in, yes, it does. With the Fixer, all you have to do is pay attention, and not mess up at only three specific phases. While it may not tell you as clearly what to do as other missions, careful listening skills make it clear what you’re supposed to do. With the Splitter, once that first target goes down, that’s it, you’re either getting this done or not, unless you take the disconnect restart option. That opens up far more opportunities for a critical playing failure than the Fixer has.

[Dribbleondo]

@Heisenberg

With the Fixer, all you have to do is pay attention,

I’m gonna say this now, but I don’t think the low success rate of 23% is because people weren’t paying attention, and the stats seem to suggest the opposite. People were interacting with the game as intended, and still missed the gameplay cues because they are ever-so slightly out of the way enough to be missed. Think about this for a moment, the success rate of the fixer is almost 1/4 of the playerbase of 2016. That leaves 3/4 of people that failed it. Paying attention or not, That is a concerning number of losses that IO, rightly in my opinion, has used to justify not re-running the mission in H3. That number suggests there’s a fundamental design issue with the level if so many people are failing.

With the Splitter, once that first target goes down, that’s it, you’re either getting this done or not

That’s why all the target kills for the clones, and even JCVD, are so scripted. It’s done like that so as to not overwhelm the player for the sakes of gameplay balance. And that point of no return is much more annoying on side-objective missions (I.E, The Warlord and her USB stick). This is not specific to the mission and I’d hardly call it an issue in the Splitter tbh. So long as you’re “paying attention” that is.

Having more points of failure (the same ones repeated might I add), does not make it more difficult. True, The Fixer does have some diegetic dialogue, from both Diana and Xander and the Courier, but it’s easy to miss this, especially if you don’t get to the Shisha den in time. The advantages of the scripted intro in the Splitter, as much as I hate it being long, is that it gives a rundown of the facility for you to explore, which makes the mission more palatable and feel beatable.

The Fixer actively hides gameplay elements from you, the Splitter tells you in a diegetic and nearly impossible-to-miss manner.

[lukefsje]

@Dribbleondo

the Splitter tells you in a diegetic and nearly impossible-to-miss manner.

That is something really cool about The Splitter’s design I never really considered before. If you take out Valiant before the meeting, it then explains about the clones and marks them as targets. If you look through the facility first Diana will say “That is NOT Max Valiant” and mark the clones, which is also a fun little subversion of her usual line for targets.

Given such a large number of targets for an ET, it was probably done the best way they could where it’s a surprise there’s so many but you still have a decent chance to complete the mission. Unlike The Fixer where the surprise is you didn’t know you couldn’t knock out the courier so now you have a permanent fail.

I’m not sure what the best solution is to fix The Fixer. Change the objective text and add new Diana voice lines to better convey how the mission works? Remove the instafails (but then would the mission break since the courier needs to pick up the diamonds)? Make the courier and diamonds just an optional objective for people who want that sweet sweet 5 star Silent Assassin?

Or just make The Fixer along with the rest of the ETs permanent with no restrictions, I seem to recall someone making a video about that:

Make Elusive Targets Permanent. (ᵖˡᵉᵃˢᵉ)

[Heisenberg]

@Dribbleondo

I’m gonna say this now, but I don’t think the low success rate of 23% is because people weren’t paying attention, and the stats seem to suggest the opposite.

You don’t spend a lot of time around average people, so you?

[Dwolf]

(I haven’t received my purple streak baller yet is that normal for twitch drops?? Who should i email about it??? I have completed the challenge & accepted the baller.

[Canucklehead]

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