Those poor people in Whittleton Creek really feel cheated about their solar panel output. In my mind they blame it on the sales person who convinced them to get it installed.
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I love Blood Money (because I’m not some kind of Norse deviant), but I think that the post-mission newspaper reports are mediocre in concept and absolute garbage in execution. Thankfully the rest of the game more than makes up for them.
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Hey it’s the effort, the concept and the soul behind it that count… It does decent enough job to let you experience the impact of your actions in a diegetic way, to flesh out the world and the targets a little, to highlight how law enforcement and our rivals close in on 47 (especially if you get notoriety from non-SA missions so they get better and better at identifying you).
Then again, I do agree that the execution is more mediocre than people give it credit for, but does this purely decorative feature need to be much more detailed than it already is? 
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Curious to know if you think they’re mediocre in general, or whether it’s the clunkily pieced together lead article (i.e., “Silent Assassin kills xyz”) you dislike?
I’ve always enjoyed the newspaper concept because it’s an example of how devs can really add to the immersion you feel in a game via fairly simple methods which are not overly taxing to produce.
Each newspaper is tailored to the location, giving you tidbits of extra context about the place. They also weave in overarching stories such as the ongoing US presidential election taking place throughout the game.
It’s the peripheral stories & design quirks for each paper which absorb me, rather than the lead story that often reads badly due to being patched together based upon certain player actions in the mission.
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Yeah this is definitely the worst part. Curious if it’s the same for @scat1620
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If this is my legacy, I’ll welcome it with open arms.
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Bit of both, but as per my original post it’s more the naff robotic execution (“Pyscho Killer kills 9 people” etc, like you said) than it is the concept. But on a conceptual level, I still don’t think there’s anything that the newspaper does that a combination of post-mission Rating screen and post-mission cutscene couldn’t do better.
Just made the post because I see the newspaper pined for a lot by nostalgic Blood Money fans (of which I’m one too), but IMO it’s a part of BM that I’m not in a rush to see brought back into the series. Working elevators first, please!
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Here lies Norseman.
Rich in family, poor in taste.
One hell of an epitaph there.
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I’m definitely with you on this. The newspapers are part of the charm of Blood Money as a game of its era. I think it would be weird for them to make a return in exactly the same way.
I wouldn’t be adverse to the return of some sort of a post-mission interactive summary, but I’d want to see it evolve into a new format. (Off the top of my head I’m picturing a future game with a Freelancer-style safehouse, where 47 can check various strands of internet coverage of his escapades).
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An in-game interactable news website (like in GTA?) with one of the articles dedicated to the latest assassination, possibly with a video from CCTV or a bystander’s camera that you could view might be a decent modern take on the concept 
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This may be unpopular, but I miss when contracts were extended over multiple stages like in H2SA. Having multi-staged contracts and non-target missions helped add a sense of scale to the story.
Sure, some weren’t as good as the main levels, but I’d argue that stuff like Hidden Valley only sucks because it’s broken. I could quite easily see it being awesome in a remake of the game - although they could probably merge that and At The Gates together.
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I agree. It felt like the big targets were actually hard to get to and needed a lot of preparation and setup, not just wandering around in public.
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Exactly! And your loadout lasted for that set of missions too, meaning you had to really plan ahead!
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This comes at a significant cost in gameplay variety by effectively turning these levels into a much more linear setpiece. Think if there were no loading screens between these kinds of missions – they would effectively turn into one large linear level. Most of the Absolution levels and the train mission also follow the same formula and it turns out to be way too limiting, people are not big fans of these for a reason.
Sure, you can argue that the idea itself is not bad on its own, it’s just all the times it was realised it hadn’t been utilised properly and on an appropriate scale… I still think the linearity aspect is inherent to this concept, and the open-ended nature of Blood Money and World of Assassination levels proves to be much more enjoyable. Then again, the curse of this franchise seems to be its dichotomy between the aspects of narrative (story, immersion) and gameplay – can’t make too big of an emphasis on one without the risk of weakening the other.
It’s also a limiting factor, unfortunately, so we go back to the same argument above… There was one part of this I liked though – like on Hunter and Hunted in Absolution, you could take the cop disguise at the first stage of the level, then it’s of no use in the club, but then it becomes important again when you have to evade the police once more. You can handicap yourself by not getting the bouncer disguise so you trespass in the staff areas at the club, but in turn you get a better disguise in the stages that follow after that.
Also also, there is a different kind of smaller contracts leading up to a bigger fish, without forcing you to use the same loadout (47 can prepare for each mission separately) – the Hong Kong and Rotterdam missions in Codename 47 (and Contracts) are an example. Well, WoA kind of has these, like all missions starting from WC leading up to the Partners…
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That’s what Freelancer does now.
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Same here. I love the individual tidbits in the newspapers, the easter eggs (and Kane and Lynch tie-ins), and how they develop the overarching storyline about the presidential elections and point to other events / foreshadows upcoming missions. The main story is usually very clunky, though sometimes, if the player makes juuuust the right choices, it can actually end up pretty coherent. If nothing else, it at least provides some extra little info about the targets.
For me personally, a Hitman mission with no target(s) is essentially a mission wasted, so I was rather happy when they finally ditched this in Blood Money, but it depends how it´s done. I love the likes of the Hong Kong and Russia/India sections in C47/Contracts and SA because they made each stage its own little assassination contract. But the likes of Colombia and Japan are generally tedious and come with a plethora of issues of their own.
And as Hotel_Pollisya mentions, one might argue that WoA actually does this, since many levels in the campaign are lead-ups to get you to the “main” target (e.g. WC to Sgail, or NY and Haven to Dubai/Dartmoor). Though with the sheer scope of its levels, it doesn´t feel quite the same.
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Yeah it’s a weird one. I like them in principle, but in reality the non-target missions just aren’t as good. I think I prefer when they have targets but are connected in location. Like how Temple City Ambush is more about protecting Smith and finding the location of the island before doing your business to the two targets (in separate levels).
You’re right though, there is an element of that in WoA but the vastly different locations make them feel totally disconnected. If Hawkes’s Bay was actually off the coast of Scotland and the computer info took you to Sgail, that’d be more the vibe I’d be after!
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Another opinion I didn’t realise was unpopular until recently, but I really like Death on the Mississippi. Apart from an exit that’s a pain, I like it a lot.
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Purely based on looks, the Bartoli 75S is probably one of my favorite firearms in the game. I would love a silenced version of it.
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So I’m thinking in June we’ll likely have the chance to obtain the Solstice Suit that that one guy wears in Dubai (because that just makes sense - I have no access to ‘Leaks’ so my apologies if I assumed correctly). Personally, I don’t care much for this one.
I’m guessing it’s a wanted suit for some players just because it’s different.
I’m also not a fan of some of the ‘skinny’ (whatever) suits… Usually for the pants/trousers. Or if we go in the other direction - I also don’t like the seemingly larger suit jackets of the Trinity suits (and others). They need to be either cinched up, or buttoned. That one probably isn’t “unpopular”.
Come to think of it - Novikov wears something similar to the solstice suit, just with a gray suit, not black.
Maybe if it had a hat of some sort I’d be more open to liking it. 