Literally all Escalations are jury rigged, its been that way since the escalations in the training missions of HITMAN (2016). They’re twist on contracts where they tweak the level and the goals so as to make it a unique experience, never what the game was originally designed for.
There would be no point for them to have incorporated a mechanic in the main game where a target drops something only on death, not being subdued. It’s an escalation so they use the mechanics available.
Similarly preventing players from putting a future target in a container would simply create a different problem, now you’ve got a body you can’t hide in the way you planned because it turns out you’ve got to kill them later.
So far from what I can see the issue seems to be if you have a set with two targets, and you say… have to kill them with an unsilenced pistol - you have the temptation to subdue them both then shoot them afterwards. If you do this, you will get the same amount of coins for each and come up one coin short.
Can’t really complain though, whenever you subdue a target the frog speaks to you and demands you kill them - fuck with the client’s expectations, take a pay cut.
Then it would cost a lot more to make and we’d be asked to pay a lot more for the DLC.
Well, to me it just sounds like a complete waste of time since it is unlikely people are going to use most of the variations possible - you’ll get hardcore players who use found weapons only and you’ll get players who take the most convenient option. One of the biggest problems with “classic” Hitman was you had tons of weapons but 99% of them were never used because your defaults were better.
In this scenario you’d also get a lot of people complaining that this means you either should be able to “buy” gear from the start (rather than unlock) or this is shitting on their work they’ve done unlocking things but letting you “get” the gear but not through starting selection.
However, even if this is the greatest gaming concept since the progressive difficulty curve, there is the issue of how many effort it would take to actually make it.
You have to work out the way to design the “store” which is a User Interface/User Experience nightmare in its own - you can get away with it being a little awkward when it’s one item, one price - but when it’s dozens of items you need to group them and make it a way that it’s worth going through (remember most Hitman players are used to doing missions with minimal equipment)
You have to balance out everything so that you don’t immediately have people posting “Propane tank is ripoff, there are seven on the level (see my map) and no remote ducks.” or “Best value is…” The only way to really balance it is to playtest it, extensively.
That, along with all these extra rewards, revisions in response to playtesting, etc, mean you need a lot more work and that means…
Then you have to raise the price of the product, factoring in you now need to spend more on marketing to try to get enough attention to make it profitable and suddenly the base price is three or four times what you started with.
At that point you may as well start looking at making a whole separate game.