I know that we should have a sense of disbelief when playing a game or watching a movie, but the South Dakota levels are hilarious and take me out of the game.

I am originally from Aberdeen S.D. and lived there until I was 19. So I have a good idea what the state is like.

They got so many things wrong about S.D. that it feels to me like IO Interactive didn't do any research at all. As far as I can tell, there is no Hope, S.D., which is fine, but with the way the town is portrayed, you would think that it's one of the biggest cities in the state. Fun Fact: the entire population of the state could fit in the Pittsburgh metro area. The largest city in the state is around 150,000 people, followed by the next at 50,000 and then Aberdeen, which is around 25,000 (those numbers taken from when I lived there and that was 12 years ago, so a grain of salt should be taken).

The license plates are way wrong. Which seems like a silly/easy thing to get wrong. It literally takes 5 seconds to do an internet search for "South Dakota license plate." The plates in the game look like a Swedish dude designed them based on European plates. I understand that they probably can't use the actual plate because of legal reasons, but they could have at least done a little better job.

The scene where 47 drives from Chicago to South Dakota is hilarious too because he's on a highway and you see a sign that says "South Dakota x miles." Everybody living in the U.S. knows that there are no signs that say that anywhere, especially for a state as relatively unknown as it is. The road signs usually say the next biggest city or exit off the highway.

The scene at Mt. Rushmore I will let slide because of the context of the scene, but just know that there are a few inaccuracies with it also.

I realize that these are all minor things in the whole game, but they are game-breaking for me. I'm not normally someone who picks apart movies or games for these kind of inaccuracies, but it really bothered me in this case and I kept thinking about it, which lead me to write this.

That's as far as I've gotten with the game. If there is anything else I will post later about it.

edit: fixed some population numbers and added link to wikipedia for Aberdeen.

@pyrodactyl I get that, it's something that bothered me and it's something that took me out of the game. Different strokes for different folks i guess.

Informative thread about South Dakota. Heh should of read it's for the game Hitman Absolution...

Another S.D. fun fact: I can tell that the license plate pictured is from the county with the largest population because the first number in the sequence is the county number based on population. That plate is from the county with Sioux Falls in it (Minnehaha). For example: Aberdeen plates start with 3 because it's the third largest county in the state.

Sioux Falls resident here. Parents are from Aberdeen. I heard Hope is supposed to be in Brown County so I'm guessing it's supposed to be Aberdeen. I also heard Hope is full of trashy people and, sadly, that's about what Aberdeen has become.

Thanks for pointing these out. Because of these, I won't play the game anymore.

It just keeps getting better (or worse).

Hitman has always leaned more towards reproducing the stereotypes of an area instead of actually trying to be accurate.

In Blood Money, during the levels which took place in Mississippi/Louisiana, the chatter between NPCs had a heavy, heavy, ridiculous sounding southern accent. They would literally refer to each other as "Billy-bob", and talk about "dem gators."

Similarly, Chicago was stereo typed as some sort of aging, heavily populated American city, with heavy immigrant populations and fat incompetent cops.

That sort of stuff has always been rampant in Hitman. The devs use an area as inspiration and then just run with it--so yeah they didn't do any serious research. They instead just type-casted Hope as some bodink, white, backwards town, in the dried out plains of America. The fact that it was in South Dakota was pretty incidental--probably only done for Mt. Rushmore.

@darkjohnny47: Heavy Kane and Lynch cameos in that part too

@ozzdog12 I saw that/them/him. I got to the gun shop level.