Why did you blueball us with church bell?

Sapienza was a beautiful mission with so many things going on, but it feels very much like IO ripped out the best way to play it while leaving all the hints there.

For example, Paris is all about spectacle & distraction, and so after replaying it over and over, I loved discovering what felt like the “right” way to play the mission. Get a sniper, set off the fireworks, snipe both targets in broad daylight while every guard is looking up at the sky, and escape in the speedboat or helicopter. It can be easily done as SASO and thematically completes the mission.

Mumbai has a theme too. I won’t spoil it but obviously there is ONE way to do the mission where the game will literally prompt you to kill the last target at the perfect time, not just with dialogue but a literal blinking button. The way to get there is the ending to a theme I think of as “hiding in plain sight” and “pulling the strings”

Sapienza has a theme too - guilt, and every single damn hint points towards one perfect way to play it, but for some reason its just not possible.

This is the direction EVERY hint, challenge and dialogue points to for how the mission should go:

  1. Silvio commits suicide or has a suicide staged by 47.
  2. Francesca goes to mourn him in the church and dies by the church bell.

So many things point to this:

  • Shortly after you hand Francesca the DNA sample, she says “thank you for relieving me of the guilt of having you killed” in the room with the packed furniture. She then gets on the phone and says she will kill him after getting the prototype. She mentions staging a suicide… She mentions that she will forge a suicide note.

  • The prototype EXISTS on the map, hidden in the ship. But there’s just no way to hand it to her or place it somewhere she’ll see it. Presumably, once she has the prototype, she has no need for Silvio.

  • The entire mission has 4 different ways to make Silvio guilty and presumably commit suicide. You can make him go his mothers grave, you can play the tapes, you can impersonate the Dr. and make him admit it, and you can make him go to his mothers room.

  • Bells are a constant theme throughout the mission. Church bells, dinner bells, bedroom bells.

  • There is an explicit challenge on the mission to assassinate a target using a bell that just can’t be completed via the campaign? There’s like a whole well developed church and morgue and NPC dialogue around the area that points to nothing?

  • I mean most suspicious of all, Silvio faints in his mothers room. Seems like the intention may have been to get him to commit suicide, but it was changed to fainting at the last minute. Perhaps to appease some censors if it was decided suicide was too dark for the game.

Even after trying to hand her the virus prototype, dragging Silvio’s body halfway across the map undetected to the ONE place she will see it when she’s alone - in her bedroom bathroom, nothing happens.

Francesca even mentions anti-anxiety meds and pills, you can literally leave a bottle of poison pills next to Silvios body in his mothers room but nothing changes. I tried leaving it on his mothers bed before he enters the room too, so maybe he would take them, but nope…

Like tell me you all see this… just someone please did IO rip this out at the last minute?

At least challenges should have some indication if they can only be completed via contract… i don’t read stuff about the game online because i dont like spoilers, so i had no idea there’s just no way to do the challenge in campaign mode before seeing some posts here.

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Back then Silvio had a route where he would go to the church, probably to go to his mother’s grave, which was moved over to the mansion, he was also able to go inside the lab presumably, but all of that was scrapped (and he was also the one to meet with the detective)

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Caruso killing himself would fit his unstable character and actually adds some drama to the whole mother-son relationship he had, but Francesca mourning his death in the church just doesn’t make sense. She hates his guts and would be more than satisfied to have him out of the way. I agree on the church bell, but rather in another way. Maybe have Silvio go there to light a candle for his mother or some shit. That makes more sense imo.

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I can kinda see what you’re saying about Silvio… But having him leave the safety of his property makes killing him that much easier.

Here’s another idea. Instead of *killing himself, he goes over to the church to confess what he did to his mother. Maybe running the whole way. :joy:

Then maybe he goes up to the bell tower and says he needs to think about things…
Then that’s where you get the effortless, *free kill.

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Thats true, my only complaint there would be that it doesn’t give you a nice way to kill Francesca.

The way I was thinking about it is, Francesca already tells the drug company that she can kill Silvio after getting the virus prototype. So all you’d have to do is give her the prototype, and let her assassinate Silvio herself - maybe she would try to confront Silvio about his mother and plant some pills but that wouldn’t be enough, so then 47 comes in and gives her a little unnoticed help. At that point, she thinks she really did kill Silvio. Mourning his death makes sense then because she would be a little guilty at least even if she hates him.

But yeah, it could work with Silvio going to church too. Even then, we have the virus prototype with Francescas DNA in it. It just feels like a missed opportunity to have one of them kill the other :stuck_out_tongue:

I get the feeling that World of Tomorrow originally had a lot more stuff that they wanted to do when they first designed it and then cut out, given the size of the map, unless they were just preparing for the other 3 missions that would later be released for it. But WoT definitely stands out as seeming like a few things that should have been there given the state of things were simply never put in. I mean, just as one example, it’s a huge map, and yet the only one in the trilogy outside of the Prologue, epilogue, and sniper maps, that does have any lethal poison lying around. That seem to you like someone just forgot, or someone decided to remove it? Lots of things that feel like they should have been available in that level, but weren’t.

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Debatable, I think. She does lament “I can’t believe I even admired you” when she gets the DNA sample and addresses him by his first name.

I think that before or after meeting the PI, Francesca should have went to the church to pray for forgiveness for planning to kill Silvio. Or maybe reroute the opportunity so the meeting is set at the church.

Hating on Sapienza doesn’t work with me :wink:

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Im a little late but i thought the same thing. So i ended up knocking them out and leaving there bodies at the bottom while i went to the top to drop the bell. I had to kill a lot of npcs to get it to that point though

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As others have said, we know some things were scrapped and changed. Silvio going to the church would be fun but a push off the roof kill would mean it wouldn’t be as cool when Landslide came out. Also to kill Francesca with the bell she would either have to climb the stairs or the body viewing would have to be in the little room behind the church. Let’s also remember that h2016 came out in waves. The bell kill and the outside church well push kill were designed to get the players into contracts.

I’m not saying it wouldn’t have been fun, just that I’m happy with how it came out. Side note: Francesca wouldn’t have to mourn him to show up at the church… the game could make it as if she would be obligated to attend if he passed.

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That could actually be one of the reasons why they scrapped that, as both WoT and Landslide were developed at the same time

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