It has come to my attention that majority of fans prefer the lighter, glamorous, anti-hero, persona of Agent 47 in WoA trilogy rather than the dark, serial killer-like persona of Contracts. Why is this? I accept that WoA is far superior to every classic title, but thematically don’t you guys want the sci-fic surreal psychological horror vibe?
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Not if I have to be the serial killer, no.
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Because the early 2000s was a long time ago, and as a wider cultural zeitgeist the popular edgelord vibes of that time didn’t age well.
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Loaded question/s™
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Need to go back to those edgelord-y times.
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Even in the old games, I never saw 47 as a serial killer since all kills were paid contracts and his only unjustified murder was the mailman in Blood Money, unless your play style is shoot everyone on sight. It was how everything was presented that was darker (and edgier with Blood Money’s marketing and Absolution as a whole) with none of that international spy / save the world etc. fluff.
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Well, I don’t see how the places he goes automatically should be attributed to his persona. Sure, there’s Paris and the Burj Al -Ghazali, but there’s also Santa Fortuna, Mumbai… The point is - his destinations vary from glamourous to grimey.
And that is why this topic feels like bait.
Or (Re: 47 waiting to sate his homicidal tendencies or having a job to do because he’s actually a professional, geographical location be damned)…
that’s just how the franchise has evolved. Would you prefer Hitman’s story stick with disgruntled person want to off put a hit on jerk person so they hire 47 to visit a backwater Kentucky trailer park- kind of missions?
There were actually a few “glamourous” locales in the old games too. Maybe not Glam, but exotic. If that doesn’t involve “globetrotting” then I don’t know what to say. What was your question again?
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did 47 ever give off “serial killer” vibes?
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The animations. Older game had 47 being much more brutal when performing actions. To the point o having a (deliberate) contrast between his movement/general attitude/pristine suit and his violent actions.
Current game have 47 be more surgical, and with more continuity in his behaviour.
A good example is a knife elimination : currently a quick slit, before a deep plunge. Also works for the garotting animations.
For all the rest.
The 90s / 2000s villain protagonist is just not good to me, like antipathique and repulsive not good. But many other here already made the same point, so refer to them.
For the overall plot, we are also past the B-movie science. The one when one single person or technology will redefine the world. Last one was in Absolution with Victoria and the Isotope, and it didn’t work then.
The current trilogy does it once, in Chongqing with the mind control / ultra-predictive algorithm. Even modernized, it was the weakest part of the level stories.
WoA was made to be post-Snowden (itself an extension of post-9/11). H2016 literally start with a data leak.
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i don’t think being more brutal equates to giving off a “serial killer” vibe. i think that’s a misreading of his character in the previous games.
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The animations. Older game had 47 being much more brutal when performing actions. To the point o having a (deliberate) contrast between his movement/general attitude/pristine suit and his violent actions.
I prefer that.
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47 was never a dark, edgy serial killer. Both Codename 47, Silent Assassin and Contracts portrays 47 in a more humane way. The Terminator persona came and went with Blood Money and I’m glad that it did. The 47 we get in the WOA trilogy is inline with the 47 of the first three games.
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Not completely true. The 47 of the first three games would kill anybody he’s paid to, without question. This carried over into Blood Money where he even killed people he wasn’t paid to, but that was for his own survival in Requiem and I’m assuming the agency compensated him after the fact for the mail guy and the Question Mark Lady, since it was still part of his job on their behalf to kill them.
47 in the first three games came across as grumpy, unimpressed, and reluctant to do his job because he doesn’t seem to enjoy it; it’s just the only thing he knows how to do with any excellence. In Blood Money, 47 goes from grumpy to being full-fledged angry all the time, but this is understandable considering that, timeline-wise, he’d just survived a gunshot wound and got a taste of what it’s like to be an assassination target, and he didn’t like it, so he’s pissed for quite a while after that.
Absolution had the same kind of thing happening because, whatever progress he made in the intervening seven years, Diana’s apparent betrayal flushed it all down the drain, then the ICA turning against him after not giving him the whole truth of the matter let him know how truly disposable he was even as their biggest cash cow, and he pretty much went into depression and despair throughout most of the game, only coming out of it once everything was set right in the end.
The 47 of WoA actually seems to enjoy his job, not necessarily the killing itself but the hunting aspect, the challenge, he made a game of it. He also seems to be more selective with his targets, or has allowed Diana to be selective and he just agrees with her. For every game prior, the fact that all their targets were bad people was just coincidence, following along with 47’s insistence on high pay and high difficulty, since he stated in the second game that he doesn’t do normal hits. So to accommodate his standards, the agency could only ever provide him work that dealt with total scumbags as a result of his expectations, but he wouldn’t have cared if one showed up now and then who wasn’t someone guilty of anything. The 47 of WoA would now actively question killing an innocent party, or at least someone who hadn’t tried to avoid consequences. He may not necessarily be interested in only killing bad people, but at least people who think they can avoid accountability. The whole “no one is untouchable” thing.
So 47 is no longer grumpy, seems to take joy, or at least satisfaction in his work, and only kills people that meet a particular standard with his new moral fiber, which coincides with Diana’s own standards. While I’m fine with the first two changes, I do wish it would go back to 47 accepting any kind of target, so long as the pay met his requirements and the difficulty getting to them met his expectations, with the target’s guilt or innocence being of no concern to him at all. I want the cold, pragmatic, mercilessly professional 47 who, along with Diana, pretty much shrugged over the fact that the real killer in The Meat King’s Party was not either of their targets, and that that fact wasn’t their problem and they just got on with completing the contract they were paid for. WoA 47 would likely have killed the brother in that mission anyway, or at least gathered evidence of his guilt to release in the right place and trigger someone else to try to kill him as an outsource. Or Diana would have leaked it to the authorities, or told the client that if they were willing to pay a little more, they could go this extra step for them. I preferred the 47 who didn’t care either way and just got on with his business.
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I like both 
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There can be only one. (And don’t give me that clone shit)
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H2016 literally brings up Wikileaks in the first proper mission. Thought I would say Hitman is more of a Post-Occupy/Pst-GFC game with its themes of class divide, corporate overreach and an exploration of the immunity of private figures from consequence and scrutiny.
47 is just simply at his best when he is a refined, stealthy and precise espionage operative. The two best games of the classic pre-WoA games are the ones that lean the most into it (2 and Blood Money), the WoA might be the best games in the series and the worst one (Absolution) was the edgiest one.
I mean he kills people in a serialised fashion with a set MO he never deviates from. Invading where the “victim” feels safest then observing them until he can strike often times as the result of complex social or mechanical engineering. The fact that he does it professionally doesn’t stop him from being one.
The nightmare in Untouchable alludes strongly to 47 thinking that he is little different from the classical interpretation of a serial killer. It also presupposes that 47 uses the more notion of a refined, perfectionistic and globetrotting agent as a means of deflection from the reality of his true nature as a killer. This deconstruction, funnily enough, is kind of edgier than any brutal animation of 47 shanking a man or any mercenary exclaiming he has an erection while dying.
What I am trying to say here is that Absolution fucking sucks and if you like it then you probably shop for clothes at Hot Topic and if there is one thing you should take away from what I have said here is that Absolution sucks balls tonally.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
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sure, and if we squint hard enough the other way, stroke our beards from a more acute angle so that he loosely fits some of the broadest criteria possible, that doesn’t make him one either. he’s a contract killer. that’s the fantasy the game has always sold itself on.
47’s obviously unreliable here. that whole moment is a crisis of confidence/conscience. to me, the fact he is even capable of such introspection shows he isn’t a serial killer (in the classical sense).
besides, op doesn’t think he is “serial killer like” in woa but rather contracts, where he crosses paths and can be directly contrasted with an actual serial killer.
I fail to see how 47 isn’t a serial killer. 47 just gets paid, exhibits no psychosis and has a set of standards in who he elects to kill so we disassociate him with serial killers. Even then I would say that having standards doesn’t discount him as a serial killer. Certain killers also had criteria, benchmarks and patterns in who they elected to kill.
Wait are we saying we know 47 better than he does because I feel 47’s thoughts make a much better argument than quibbling over pop psychology and true crime criminology. Also a crisis of conscience doesn’t mean he isn’t a serial killer, plenty of killers have most likely had one and plenty of serial killers are/were able to reach conclusions/justifications about their behaviour.
47’s ability to show some modicum of compassion proves he is not a low-functioning sociopath but doesn’t discount him from being a serial killer. The inverse can also be true, I can also dismiss 47 thinking he isn’t a serial killer because most killers explain away or justify their behaviours.
The notion that Malcom Sturrock is an “actual serial killer” because he is in visible disturbed psychosis is both inaccurate to real life and deeply harmful stereotyping that stigmatises people who do have forms of psychosis but are non-violent or lacking a long history of violence.
Plenty of real life serial killers are not visibly disturbed people or even exhibit psychosis, plenty of them were intelligent people (Wikipedia’s list of prolific serial killers has one list dedicated to killers who were medical professionals) or people who were able to function in society. If we are making comparisons between the games then WoA shows several serial killers with each of them not being disturbed and all of them have parallels to 47 and all but one are based on a real killer)
Etta Davis is a presentable and formal woman who maintains an air of respectability, she manipulates people around her for her own ends, preys on people who believe they are in a secure place and is fond of using poisons, accidents and plausibly deniable kills. All of which can be paralleled in 47 since he too is formal, manipulative, violator of personal boundaries and regards stealth as virtue of his occupation.
Etta also resembles real life British killer Harold Shipman both were elderly British people, both were medical professionals, both were called Angel of Death and both had poisonings as their preferred MO. Funnily enough I believe (though I could be mistaken) Shipman tried to blame psychosis resulting from OCD induced intrusive thoughts as the reason for his murders only to later state in conjunction with most psychologists that it was due to his perverse enjoyment over what he felt was a mastery over life and death. He enjoyed deciding who lived and died in his care.
Joseph Gorski aka The Censor is someone who enjoys going after people he feels should be capable of fighting back, he ambushes people after tracking their movements for a period of time, is highly mobile, makes veiled references to his killings in casual conversation and has his kills graded. All of which are behaviours 47 exhibits in the game even if the scoring system isn’t his personal system.
To my knowledge Gorski has no real life counterpart but I am no true crime aficionado or criminologist so if someone does have a comparison I invite you to make an addendum.
Philo Norman is the one who is admittedly the least like 47 but a few comparisons can be made albeit I will concede they are looser than Gorski and Davis’ cases. Norman has a very complex and very possessive relationship the strongest strong maternal figure in his life, he has severe problems with paternal figures in his life and he engages in trophy collection from his victims which 47 also seems to do in WoA.
Norman of course is a dead ringer for Ted Bundy. Classically handsome Vermonters with mother issues who went after (mostly) women while pretending to be someone else as a result of his childhood issues and both have very complex interactions with their female victims with a sick pride in their high body count.
I promised myself I wouldn’t interact with this thread because it is fucking bait but here I am.
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Newcombe. 
Other than that, good read. 
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