IO-Interactive's open letter to Hitman fans- new game

IO-Interactive just posted this letter to Hitman.com. It seems that they've heard some of the popular feedback from Absolution, and are going to try to make this game more along the lines of Blood Money. As a huge fan of Blood Money and a not-much-of-a-fan of any other Hitman game, this is great news to me. Did you guys like the direction Absolution was going in? Are you excited to see IO-Interactive talk candidly about things like "47's magic pockets"?

I liked Absolution. I really liked the multi-tiered level, where you'd switch rooms and get a new set of obstacles to get through. I like open levels, sure, but I also like a tiny bit more linearity. Like the recent Splinter Cell: Blacklist, for instance.

I wouldn't mind going back to Blood Money's open style, though, as long as the game keeps its own rules interesting. Although I liked Blood Money, it was way, way, way too easy for me. I wrote walkthrough for it back in the days. It seemed like Absolution upped the challenged.

Pumped for this. Sounds like a blend of Absolution's mechanics with Blood Money's level design!

I played about half of Absolution really didn't like that the game seemed to be more like Splinter Cell than Hitman. From what I played there were only a few traditional "Hitman" missions. Since this game seems to be a prequel, we'll hopefully get more things in common with the first few games.

Oh fuck yes, this is the last thing I expected from them which makes it even sweeter. Time to replay 2/Contracts/Blood Money.

I have bought Absolution (during a sale or something at some point) but never played it. And I've never played Blood Money - so going by the fact there taking a different turn, I guess most people don't like it?

With Blood Money being my favourite game in the series I'm happy to hear this news. Absolution provided some great moments but in the end fell flat. The level designs didn't feel as imaginative as Blood Money and that concealing your identity mechanic (covering your face) felt half baked and not tuned right. I heard they patched the game after maybe fixing it but by then I was done with the game. As long as they listen to fans I'm hoping things will turn out better this go around.

Absolution was a shame because the core gameplay was the best the series had seen, but as a whole the game was plagued with design issues (checkpointing & disguises), and simply wasn't much of a very good Hitman game, with too much focus on traditional stealth over large assassination sandboxes. Though if they really are planning on bringing the series back to what made Hitman so engaging in the first place, only with the tighter gameplay of Absolution, then that sounds like the best thing. Cool that they're keeping the Contracts mode, too. It was kinda limited due to the generally small environments, but it definitely shown potential.

It also appears they're doing a 'prequel', I guess, since Diana is said to be your mission handler once more.

@yummylee: wasn't the status quo pretty much reset at the end of Absolution anyways? A sequel could still work, if I remember.

Oh no Aboslution is a very good game with some flaws. However Blood money is an even better game with more flaws.

Blood money gives you someone to kill and drops you into a map. Its large an intricate. You scope the place out and learn what you can do and then create a plan. However your plan may be perfect but are you? you then have to have the skill to pull it off.

Its like the map is a blank canvass for you to paint on.

Absolution there is such an over arching story, you only get such freedoms to paint on one or two maps. Otherwise its linear and paint within the lines.

Its a good game. However after the freedom of Bloodmoney the narrower world felt like a step back to older games. Where Bloodmoney was the break out.

Still a good game to play even as a Bloodmoney fan. Just Bloodmoney is the apex of Hitman games and a top in stealth games lists.

@alecofthewest: Eh, it doesn't really matter either way I guess. Hitman isn't a series I come to for compelling narratives (and Absolution certainly didn't do much to change my mentality), and I would ideally prefer that they take the traditional Hitman format of simply dumping you into different environments completely separate from any sort of timeline or overall narrative. Although I suppose there was some sort of core story to all of the prior games, but it was loose enough that it never felt jarring or out of place for you to be travelling all over the world and then killing whomever for whatever.

You ever play Hitman 2? That game was way harder to get SA on.

@akyho: Maybe I'll still play it at some point. I remember now why I bought it - it was a week after I had built my gaming PC (Christmas of 2012) and during the Steam sale it was 80% off, then I used the Quick Look and thought "this looks visually impressive" so I bought it to look at and feel good about my PC purchase. I don't think I knew much about any of the Hitman games at the time when I bought it (only knowing about the few times Ryan had mentioned the series on the Bombcast as one he loved). I like Assassin's Creed and the idea of Splinter Cell (though I tried one of the earlier games and hated the stealth implementation) so maybe Absolution was made for players like me and just not Hitman-series fans.

Blood Money was way harder than Absolution. Absolution is a piece of piss.

E: I do like the specific challenges though, it made it more fun to get an SA ranking.

I thought Absolution was really good. It was certainly flawed but it's not the flaming pile of garbage that a lot of Blood Money (which is a fantastic game) fans make it out to be.

I liked Absolution as well, I played Blood Money and didn't like it that much.

I really didn't like Absolution. The stealth system was horrendous and the way the levels were broken up (run from the cops mission, contract kill mission, run from the cops mission, contract kill mission, etc) threw me off. I never finished it but the 10 hours I did play weren't very fun.

Blood Money was fantastic. This seems like good news.

Er what? I'm not talking about Blood Money or Absolution. I'm talking about Hitman 2 which was way harder to get SA ranks in than the subsequent 3 games after it (Contracts, Blood Money, Absolution)

Er, it was clearly in response to the whole conversation. Hitman 2 was harder than Blood Money was harder than Absolution.

@yummylee: I honestly felt like Absolutions story had potential, but yea, Hitmans strength has always been in the scenarios and locations it places you in.

Absolution was fine. The weak point was really the story, but then again, Blood Money also had a poor excuse for a story so whatever.

Absolution raised the bar for replayability by giving players a means to construct different scenarios on their own but I feel like the contract creation could go much deeper, the system in that game definitely felt a little like it was bolted on afterwards and not created alongside the actual game. The different challenges and playstyles were also great fun.

I honestly don't know about the magic pockets, is that where he can pull out random stuff cartoon-style like in most videogames or adventure games? If that is it, I don't want it to be realistic where he can only carry like four or five things on him.

We’ve adopted an open, non-linear level design approach to the game, ensuring the game will play out across huge, checkpoint-free, sandbox levels.

This gives me hope, because the best levels in Absolution are those open-ended missions. The linear chase missions were fun to see the pretty graphics ratcheted up a notch, but they felt like short filler levels with not much replayability.

Honestly, I'd be more excited for Kane and Lynch 3, love the characters and atmosphere of that series. Along with Hotline Miami and Spec Ops The Line, there aren't many disturbing shooters that fully take ludonarrative dissonance and "Your character will never be more righteous than the core mechanic allows" into full effect.

I'm glad that they're making another Hitman game. I was a little worried after Absolution didn't meet SE ridiculous sales expectations that they were gonna stop, but after reading it it's nice that they're looking into the feedback from Absolution (which was a fine Hitman game, btw.)

Absolution was a master class in how to make every single wrong decision possible. The moves the developers made in that toward an almost incomprehensible story at the cost of essentially everything that made Hitman popular was breathtaking. Breaking the disguise system, choking the life out of levels, cutting out pre-mission gear selection... All of it together made Absolution such a stunning disappointment. Not to even mention IO's bizarre idea that Hitman should be in the grindhouse genre.

I don't blame them for not admitting "we fucked up bad, sorry", but IO definitely has their work cut out to bring Hitman back into form. Then again, the blueprint has always been there. Just make more Blood Money maps.

So they're finally giving us what Absolution should have been...finally.

k now wait until 2016/2017 fro the game to come out

@sdharrison: I seem to recall that you couldn't even look through keyholes anymore, and that they never distinguished between guards and civilians on your minimap (also, no overall map of the entire environment anymore), so it was a constant trial and error for whenever you would enter a room to see just who's actually in there. Even when you look past its noticeably different take on Hitman, that game was coated in flaws and bad design decisions.

Totally. I'm surprised so many responders here have a somewhat positive impression of the title - apparently standards are very low. Absolution was also able to slip past critics. 7 or 8s out of 10 and that was that. It kind of just got away. Setting a critical eye to that game pretty quickly reveals a dense list of design decisions that range from puzzling to outright detrimental.

I wouldn't say way harder. Some of the missions can be a bit tricky. If you want a keyboard-smashing challenge try Absolution SA suit only.

I really hated the silly story segments, like that nursery level. The disguise system was a bit broken too.

well, can't blame them for getting feedback. Seriously admire the whole Square Edios openness to the community.

Absolution started out pretty strong but the level progression literally looked like a funnel - beginning with fairly decent sized areas and very quickly ending up with these A-to-B corridors. The disguise system was shitty but it wasn't the end of the world. It was the bad level design and the weird checkpointing that really killed it. It wasn't a flaming pile of garbage, but it wasn't a good Hitman game either. A mediocre third person hybrid with some really nice graphics.

If they are really going to bring back the wide open sandbox levels and hopefully fix the disguise system then we can have another really good Hitman game on our hands.

Edit: Also I really liked the "nun" enemies. They were EXACTLY the type of video game villain I love - zany and unique. I especially liked that each of them had their very own rendition of a nun outfit. I guess I'm a misogynist.

Oh been there done that mate. On the hardest difficulty no less. The hardest bit about Hitman 2 is there are way less tools to LTL pacify non-targets. You had the chloroform but even with that they woke up within like 5 minutes if you didn't get the deed done and get out. That made missions pretty tense at times.

Good. Absolution felt like some weird attempt at creating a classic style stealth game like original splinter cell but succeeded about as well as Velvet Assassin at it. Sure it had some more freeform levels (a lot of which still seemed to rely on weird crappy splinter cell stealth rather than the hiding in plain sight stuff of my favourite Hitman stuff) but they felt more like weird throwbacks to actual Hitman games rather than being the core of the game. What a disappointing thing. Hopefully this will be good!

The levels leading up to the Hayamoto Sr. assassination really pissed me off. Especially the bug on hidden valley where guards randomly get hit by the moving trucks. Hitman 2 had a really killer soundtrack though, it had that 'world traveler' vibe going on.