The entire COOP thing was before I joined IO, so of course I am dependent on what I was told retrospectively: I think nobody expected how incredibly hyped everyone got after the announcement. And if game industry has one thing in common across all games it’s the fact, that the first is almost always also the last impression you have of a game. So the pressure doubles.
This is why the decision has been made to make this proper and fleshed out before we can show anything major.
Yes, the public communication afterwards was not the best (and there are multiple reasons for that), but happily we could manage to agree, that we need to communicate something. Even if it is not the giant reveal and release as everyone maybe anticipated, but I believe I speak for everyone: We recognize how (literally) gamechanging the introduction of COOP can be - not only WOA, but HITMAN in general.
I will strive to keep everyone in the loop and as soon as I get the green light the HITMAN community will be the first to know.
This is excellent communication. Really impressed with how you’ve been doing things so far, @IOI_Artjoms!
Eagerly anticipating further co-op news, but very glad to hear this is being taken seriously & more than happy to wait as long as necessary to ensure quality!
Ooh great response… (Sorry for the autocorrect)
But: @thrison was talking about the footage from the end of year IOI party that you said you were a part of on one stream. A few frames of it were shown on the projector and it included Freelancer objectives and split screen support. The original announcement did include 2018 prototype footage though, so that obviously isn’t going to be a thing like the finished mode.
It’s still early on but not as much as last time anymore.
Yeah. Same gameplay. It was a behind-the-scenes for the announcement, since we have other teams besides HITMAN like Project Fantasy and Bond. And it was a nice way to show the rest of the studio “We announced coop, but how we actually tested is something we’ve never shown. Take a look.”.
It was a very jancky prototype with our devs testing it and losing their mind. :DD It ended fittingly with a crash.
Oh wow thank you so much! That does explain a lot and definitely helps with expectations. I’ll go tell people about that
(I’m so sorry if I came off rude)
Personally, I love seeing “how the sausage is made” but perhaps that’s because I’m a software dev. Though I do understand that there are also people that see pre-release content and decide your software should immediately be judged through the lens of such early work which discourages sharing progress as frequently.
There was a chap who demo’d a very early Hitman 2016 alpha build from around the time it was being titled “Silent War” and it was absolutely fascinating to see how the levels and gameplay shaped up - also the original intended scope of Colorado looked fantastic, it’s a shame that had to be handed off to a third party and re-done but I suppose the time pressure made it unavoidable.
Slightly off-topic but with the state of modding tools for Glacier being what they are, it would be amazing if IOI would consider releasing at least a subset of the .NET editor utilities - I’m sure some stuff is encumbered by licensing (NavPower for example) but embracing modding is a great way to extend and expand the life of a game.
I saw this animated promo for the Hitman Board Game crowdfunding campaign (by the talented Cartoonishly) and it reminded me of Ghost Mode in a way.
I know Co-Op won’t be competative like this, nor that competitive Hitman is for everyone (kind of why I think Ghost Mode stopped support). But I think an improved Ghost Mode using tech being developed for Co-Op could be fun to mess around in. Having both players actually in the same space and all that intails. Or at least turn Ghost Mode back on, even if it stays just the two maps.
In my opinion, as 47 works alone when he carrys out his hits, I would find it strange to see 47 running around with say Knight when trying to take out a target.
It would make more sense to be those two, yeah. But on the flip side I really want to play as the bald guy, and not these two that I don’t care about. I don’t want to have 2-3 suits for Stone and/or Knight when I have around 100 on 47. You can guess a lot about a Hitman player by the suit they use.
If they let you kill each other, you just know at some point some asshat is going to use the SDK to spawn infinite proximity explosives and drop them all over the map.
