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   Hitman: Absolution 08 - Range Day (Commentary) Hitman: Absolution 08 - Range Day (Cut Commentary)
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Feb 16, 2018 02:28
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I’m so glad you made that edit.
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Feb 16, 2018 02:54
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Feb 16, 2018 13:36
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Feb 16, 2018 16:17
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It looks like he's about to cry 
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Feb 16, 2018 16:27
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Looking at that picture of 47 makes me hear the same sort of sad music that plays during an ASPCA commercial.
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Feb 16, 2018 18:54
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 Episode 6: Shitman Absolution Notes That outfit: fwiw IOI has been trying to get priest outfits for 47 for some time, he also wore one in Blood Money. The devs really like their nonspecific christian imagery. No clue why Birdie just happens to have a priest outfit in 47's size in his bus. As always, the devs had to retrofit a justification for each mission leading into the next. "well that's convenient because something terrible's about to happen here": Yeah, they needed an excuse to get rid of the kids in the violent setting, while still doing the whole "creepiness and violence in children's setting" schtick. BTW, no, there's never a stated reason why the leader of the nuns knows 47, though given past games, maybe it's that he paid for the orphanage or something trite like that. A Note on Settings There was a tremendous amount of time and money spent on so many of the locations and environments in Absolution, and I don't want that to be overlooked. There's a bunch of unique drawings and a "GET WELL VICTORIA" banner in the background used only in this one room, that does some nice storytelling work. The game has a lot of these touches, and that's a significant resource cost. Even the boring alleyway levels have a lot of time and effort put into them. It's really tragic that so many of these carefully crafted details were in service to such a hateful, wasteful product. Daughter issues The whispering "one will harm you ever again" carrying scene is atrocious. This behavior from 47 makes no sense and doesn't sync well with any of his characterization elsewhere in the series. 47 having a magical soft spot for daughter proxy NotEllen Page is a core plot element of the game, but it makes no sense and comes out of nowhere. Like the whole "getting knocked out in cutscenes" bit, the use of a daughter proxy to undergo sexual and physical threat is a cliche that a lot of games from this period use, but none of them mangle it as badly as Absolution does. "The power is cut- I don't know why" Wade's people cut it. Fuses: I took a look around the level; the fuses are canonically in their positions because they're going to be installed in their respective locations. Each one has a small clipboard (which is also used as a color contrast to highlight its location) with installation instructions. The Guard: he was gutshot before you arrived. A Note on Syringes Syringes gently caress up the game's scoring, due to an oversight. A stealth kill with a syringe counts simultaneously as a silent kill and a pacification, and it kills the target, but doesn't apply the non-target kill penalty. As a result, the best score in this level requires jabbing every enemy to death with the syringe, then hiding every single one of their bodies. Oh, also all the innocent victims whose deaths you have nothing to do with. You can hide their bodies for bonus points, too. Rosewood and Fuses: This place is nominally an orphanage, but it's set up like it's more of a hospital than anything else. Idk. It's clear that the fuse objective was created to give players a goal and let them experience the vicarious violation of the orphanage without any actual, you know, killing targets. The devs came up with a cool environment and set of enemies (Wade's men are junkie lowlife criminal psychos) and just...made it. Without really fitting any of the core gameplay into it. Since there's a unique "leader" guard model, I think originally you were going to kill some of Wade's lieutenants in this area before moving on- they might have been holding the fuses. Lenny Let's just keep experiencing the joys of Lenny's character. It's going to keep getting worse. The scene where he shoots a nun in the face is the closest to cleanly sympathetic characterization he gets. Wade Bye Wade. What a detailed character you were. I'm so glad those other characters in other levels talked about how you were a brutal rape-murderer. My guess is that the original drafts really, really leaned into the rape material with Wade, and that's part of why he's such a nonentity ingame. The "fight level" against him, of course, exists only to remove him and have a spot for that "iconic" Press E Kill. If you go forward instead of turning the wheel, you're locked into a point shooting attack. If you ignored the sidepath and just walked straight up to his location, he and his remaining crew will ambush you in a point shooting moment. That one's at least a bit amusing, because after all the other enemies attack (though weirdly they fire no bullets), Wade flies into view sideways in a John Woo dive. Addendum on Syringes There are three challenges for using the syringe to get silent kills on the level. The first two are straightforward, but the third apparently requires you get 1 silent kill, then 4 more within ~2 minutes of the first. There's no information about exactly what the challenge requires, unfortunately, because the description says nothing different for the third part. There's a trick to it, though. Take the syringe with you to the hospital basement. For some reason, the requirements glitch out and you no longer have to get silent kills to get the challenge. Rosewood Image Bonuspost  The aforementioned clipboard used to highlight/explain fuses.  Another clipboard, in the room the fuses are placed in.  As one of Wade's crew, you can hide at these banks of pamphlets. This makes no sense, and suggests the level was once going to be more social stealth-y. ...yes, they went there. Are you surprised at this point? Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 14:47 on Jul 22, 2018 |
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Feb 17, 2018 03:52
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Discendo Vox posted:[Oh, also all the innocent victims whose deaths you have nothing to do with. You can hide their bodies for bonus points, too. play a game within a game of Viscera Cleanup Detail?
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Feb 17, 2018 10:10
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Fish Noise posted:So you can just Btw Jobbo, just to be sure you're aware, The first in a series of bonus videos for ChaosArgate's great Hitman (2016) thread
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Feb 17, 2018 16:39
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Discendo Vox posted:Yes. There are a couple other levels where this happens too. Money ran out and I couldn't get the writers to change the script.
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Feb 17, 2018 16:56
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I'm at like 80%, aside from the miserable contracts mode grind, and I keep finding more reasons to loving hate Absolution. All this time since I first posted about it like a year ago, I was worried someone would challenge me on the game's use of an antisemitic stereotype in one of the levels. I'd needed to squint a bit to realize what they were going for with that one. I just replayed it, and I had nothing to worry about- it's a fuckin' lot more explicit than I remembered.
Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 02:38 on Feb 19, 2018 |
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Feb 19, 2018 02:33
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I think Absolution felt like it was trying too hard to be 'American-style'. "Uh, what do we need to really make this game sell? Uh... Sex. But gross depictions of sex, so that way people will think we're cool and gritty. Oh, and swear words too for the same reason. Just be super offensive everywhere, we're going to be rich. Oh, and everyone is a jerk to each other for no good reason." Usually, I see this sort of stuff in anime when they try and be hardcore, but I'm seeing it all over here in this game.
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Feb 19, 2018 03:10
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I watched a few videos of this last night and it's really good! Great job, OP! I particularly love the Silent Assassin Suit Only runs, because my mind can't get around how to beat any of these levels without ever changing. The Silent Assassin part, no problem, but the Suit Only part is loving rough. Night10194 posted:I really enjoy them leaning ever harder into the running joke that 47 is better at whatever he needs to do to disguise himself than the guy he's replacing. 47 spent weeks learning how to do that sweet loving drum solo, he is a dedicated assassin who prepares for all possibilities. Every time Diana says "I will leave you to prepare" we should get a Rocky style montage of 47 learning all the skills he'll need for this particular assignment. WampaLord fucked around with this message at 00:30 on Feb 21, 2018 |
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Feb 20, 2018 23:05
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Boardroom Jimmy posted:No, the one I'm thinking of comes much later on. Dear Boardroom Jimmy, gently caress YOU kindest regards, Discendo "I just spent 40 minutes on that run, there were fewer than 10 enemies left, now I have to wait forever for a pair of goons to walk down a balcony again" Vox While I'm at it, have some "amusing" background images and details from the LP so far. This won't be a regular thing, I just need to vent more. I'm also going through and adding details to previous writeups. Rosewood  The aforementioned clipboard used to highlight/explain fuses.  Another clipboard, in the room the fuses are placed in.  As one of Wade's crew, you can hide at these banks of pamphlets. This makes no sense, and suggests the level was once going to be more social stealth-y. ...yes, they went there. Are you surprised at this point? Birdie's Gift  The high score board at the shooting range. Trainstation  This image appears along one train platform, and in one room that the player never needs to go into, as far as I know. Again, a lot of characters, concepts and assets got generated for this game and then cut- then were positively fetishized by the devs in a thousand easter eggs and incidental references. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Jul 4, 2018 |
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Feb 21, 2018 03:58
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 Hitman: Absolution 09 - Two-Bit Villain (Commentary) Hitman: Absolution 09 - Two-Bit Villain (Cut Commentary) She's beyond perfect, so much so that she wraps around and is total poo poo! Jobbo_Fett fucked around with this message at 12:11 on Feb 23, 2018 |
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Feb 23, 2018 06:07
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I feel like that heavy sigh at the end of the video is the most appropriate addition to the entire commentary.
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Feb 24, 2018 05:07
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Ye gods, what was the point of that last bit with Lenny? Was it supposed to be black humour or something?
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Feb 24, 2018 07:12
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It's just real gross. Apparently if you leave him long enough he offers to suck 47's dick if he'll let him live?
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Feb 24, 2018 07:23
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Hey, no fair doing multiple eps in one video, now it's going to take me even longer to catch up! Yes, Lenny offers to give you a "real good reacharound," I forget the cause. Just...think about how much time and money went into that last scene.
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Feb 24, 2018 18:33
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Discendo Vox posted:Hey, no fair doing multiple eps in one video, now it's going to take me even longer to catch up! I remember playing it like 5 times just to get all the different kills. And then I gave up, because 
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Feb 24, 2018 18:45
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Episode 7: Angry Barfly Notes "Custom Keyfob": Yup, it's a skull. The drive: They're going for a whole "these images and stress are reminding 47 of his murder of Diana" with parallel cuts bit, here, but it's as tasteless as possible, using sex ad silhouettes to cut to a woman in a shower being shot. Special shoutout to about 2:50 in the video, where Blake is compared to the presidents on Mount Rushmore while he waxes on the American dream. God the writer was so full of themselves. Millions! Millions! Like the Austin Powers joke, in this game universe, "millions of dollars" is a lot of money. Also casually calling Jade a "bitch". This is a theme. "even the editor got tired of flashbacks": Spoiler alert. The editor will never tire of it. WHY Rather than waste time talking about the gameplay of the bar (there's really nothing y'all didn't cover), I just want to point out that 47, after a run-in with Blake Dexter, needs to use Lenny's name, which is on a matchbook for some reason, to go to a bar in Hope, SD to find out who was behind the kidnapping. Remember that he had to go to the bar to get this information, to know to go into town after Lenny. Remember how little sense this makes. (of course the reality is that the devs wanted a barfight level, in contradiction of the rest of the game design ethos, so they inserted it). The if you wanted to do the Hundred Percent collection run" defense: Not really. Even Lost and Found (which I'm planning to get into later) is really dumb and simple in this level. Kane has a smg, there's a billspike by the bartender...you have to clear the mission without getting in a fistfight. That's about it. As deep as a puddle.  Episode 8: Range Day Travis: Tavis Benjamin is a Division Chief for the International Contract Agency. He has a long backstory that's mostly irrelevant, except that he had a history of moderate psych problems when he started out, is "ambitious", and personally came up with a number of programs and initiatives for the Agency while in a tech/research role. As you can tell, the Agency is basically SPECTRE meets COBRA in this game, what with their Mobile Lair Command Yacht. That will intensify. Absolution makes a number of references to ranks, systems, etc in the ICA that make no sense or are never mentioned again. Travis's tie pattern is stylized ICA logos. I like to think it's standard issue. Like the robohand? As I mentioned earlier, 47 was originally going to shoot Benny boy here during the opening mission, hence the cybernetics. Of course, actually rendering something like that hand in-game is resource intensive...I'm sure the eventual confrontation with Travis will do it justice. He has a robot ear, too, in theory, but it mostly looks like he has a bluetooth headset. Jade: You pretty much cover her. She's female, hence a subject of abuse, and asian, hence stereotypes. At 1:03 in the video, you can see her dress has the agency logo on the collar. This nonsensical branding of a secret organization will also intensify. The Hitman Novels The ICA's depiction in Absolution is at least partially taken from the Hitman novels, Enemy Within and Damnation, which I haven't read but which are apparently execrable even by video game novel standards. These books were also the basis of much of the plot of Blood Money. It appears that Travis and Jade were both introduced in those novels, and that they were intended to be canon. Thread, let's be serious for a moment. I love you. I respect you. I long for your approval, as a substitute for the emotional distance and abuse doled out by my mother. I don't love you enough to read the Hitman novels for you. That would just be perpetuating the cycle of abuse. "this huge puppetmaster": Birdie's a combination of plot lubricant and a mary sue; an incredible spy/information broker former Agency employee who can reach anyone, anytime, via magick, and plays all the other characters off of each other for no clear reason. He also has an inconsistent hispanic accent. "he shows up in this random spot": This bit is explained- Birdie sent 47 to this store with a phone call in the last mission. Gosh, I can't believe you're not attending to the Deep Plot of Hitman Absolution. Microphone Man: Hey, a deformity as a personality trait! I sure do love Quentin Tarantino! The laryngyal voicebox is hard to render, so he talks fine without it in the main level. "there's stuff you can do, I guess..." This level actually has a fair amount of depth and options; you can knock out Mic Man and pick up the key for the silverballers from his safe with the combination he drops. There's also a side range shooting gallery, some easter eggs (a set of references to the latest tomb raider game, for instance, such as a range bag with Croft's name on it), and a bunker in the back of the range with an Ultramax (a boxfed LMG that's this game's poor substitute for the classic Hitman Minigun) inside, etc. The range is a nice concept, sort of, but of course, it doesn't support a level design. It's a lousy, shallow fairground attraction- it's just had more time put into it than the previous one. Up your arsenal Challenges These three get a special mention for being so obtuse. Each requires beating the range challenge with certain weapons, but there's no indication which. The description is just "Stick to your guns. All of them." For the first level, you actually have to use one of the less common pistols. For the second, you have to use the Ultimax. For the third, you have to use Lynch's shotgun, and maybe you can use the sniper rifle hidden in the back of the range (I can't be sure, because the game is so reviled there isn't a consistent set of challenge descriptions). I, of course, thought I had to clear the range challenge with every gun in the level. I also didn't realize that using point shooting with some guns swaps you to your pistols, which inconsistently invalidates the run with the other weapon. fun. Birdie's Gift Bonus Image  The high score board at the shooting range. PS Boardroom Jimmy, I know you said it was bad, but...I think it may be bad in ways you hadn't considered. I...I don't know what I'm going to do to deal with this, now... Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 16:00 on Nov 13, 2018 |
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Mar 1, 2018 01:19
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If Absolution was a good game I'd be more thorough in the vids.  Also I forgot that Point Shooting swapped guns automatically 
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Mar 1, 2018 02:14
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Discendo Vox posted:
As far as the Up Your Arsenal challenges go, I think the generally accepted answer for them is this. Part 1 is win the shooting contest with any pistol, Part 2 with any light machine gun and Part 3 is with either the shotgun or a sniper rifle. You can use the Ultramax for Part 2 but there's also a separate challenge for winning the contest with that gun specifically. And as far as that other challenge is concerned, I can think of one thing that could ruin a run at it. But really, it's just a terrible challenge all around for oh so many reasons.
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Mar 1, 2018 03:03
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Jobbo_Fett posted:If Absolution was a good game I'd be more thorough in the vids. You're giving the game the LP it deserves. Boardroom Jimmy posted:And as far as that other challenge is concerned, I can think of one thing that could ruin a run at it. But really, it's just a terrible challenge all around for oh so many reasons. God. You've got no idea what you've done, do you. Edit: I was driving toothpicks up under my fingernails (as it’s a Thursday night) and a complete reworked Hitman Absolution, plot, design and gameplay, sprang into existence before my eyes. When this LP is over, I’ll share my vision with you all. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 06:47 on Mar 2, 2018 |
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Mar 1, 2018 04:29
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 Discendo Vox posted:Edit: I was driving toothpicks up under my fingernails (as it’s a Thursday night) and a complete reworked Hitman Absolution, plot, design and gameplay, sprang into existence before my eyes. When this LP is over, I’ll share my vision with you all. Oh my god what have we done to you
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Mar 5, 2018 05:04
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ChaosArgate posted:
It's now five pages of notes. It's like 50/50 game mechanic and plot revisions. I am a thoroughly broken man. I'll wait to share until the end of the absolution run. edit: 9 and a half pages, 5000 words. It's done. If you were playing Hitman Voxolution, it'd be over by now- it's got a total of 9 missions. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 05:34 on Mar 6, 2018 |
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Mar 5, 2018 17:20
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Discendo Vox posted:It's now five pages of notes. It's like 50/50 game mechanic and plot revisions. I am a thoroughly broken man. I'll wait to share until the end of the absolution run. IOI thought they were making a game about the absolution of Agent 47, but actually truly it is your Absolution they have constructed Agent Discendo Vox.
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Mar 5, 2018 18:18
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 Hitman: Absolution 10 - Slow Descent (Commentary) Hitman: Absolution 10 - Slow Descent (Cut Commentary)
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Mar 9, 2018 04:09
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For what it's worth, Devil's Third at least had charm to go with it's stupidity. I mean yeah starting the game at Guantanamo was tasteless but then introducing Ivan when he was doing a drum solo in his pimped out cell made it amazing. You honestly could make a case that the game is a satire of of seventh generation gaming trends. Like the only thing missing was that the needed was to make Ivan more like Batman and you'd have the whole set. Also I just remembered I need to finish playing Devil's Third for myself. David D. Davidson fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Mar 9, 2018 |
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Mar 9, 2018 17:07
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Episode 9: Two-Bit Villain Notes Jade/Intro: Jade has virtually no characterization aside from, as you noted, being a broad Asian stereotype. She was probably meant to set up a parallel between Travis and Dexter, two powerful male antagonists with female assistants, but that goes nowhere. This screen shows up briefly- it's pretty comedic that a figure like 47, normally supposed to be top secret even within ICA, would have a giant profile pic displayed on the wall like this.  Note the "Death as business" at the bottom, a lovely translation of "Merces Letifer", or "lethal trade", the motto of the ICA. For comparison, here's the ICA logo(warning, huge):  Note the IOI. It's based off of the original emblem for MI5. Let's get the setting out of the way. Hope: Located at the intersection of Arizona, Texas, and South Dakota (the latter being its canonical location), Hope was one of the biggest resource sinks of Absolution's development. The basic idea is that Dexter's company came and revitalized a failing town, with the trade-off being that it's now a company town: Dexter controls everything through Lenny, Sanchez and the corrupt sheriff. Hope is an interesting concept for a game, especially one that wants to dwell on themes from latter-era Western films- the role of industry and the frontier, etc. It's also completely inappropriate for a game like Hitman-nothing about the layout of a smallish, flat town filled with armed modern midwest stereotypes works well for a social stealth assassination game. Hope was going to be the setting of the entire game at one point in production, and like everything else there's a metric ton of assets developed for it that were cut. Cutscenes, levels, dynamics, plot arcs- the whole shebang. IoI actually sent some of their creatives to South Dakota to travel around and take photos of things. They generally did the same thing they did with the Chicago areas. Someone hit on a group of general themes and a setting, then just...sort of messed around in them. A huge number of ideas and assets were made and dropped, wasting money and time for months with no plan. Of particular note on the cutting room floor are: 1. A massively obese troglodytic old lady stereotype. "Big Momma" was going to sit on a porch with a shotgun and be a sort of super-sentry- probably the porch you enter at 5:05. This charming fixture had her assets reused for some other NPCs we'll see in the next video, and the whole game is replete with references to her. You pass by a photo of her at 11:18 in the video (there are at least two variants with romantic captions), but there are a ton of other references. 2. A chili sauce factory that reached almost full beta status before being cut, wasting weeks, if not months, of man-hours. There's a chipmunk mascot costume in a couple levels of Absolution- it's a joke "trespassing everywhere" outfit that's used in some challenges, and it was originally the chili sauce's mascot, taken from this cut level. There are a lot more of these. On to the regular level comments. "too late, they're already here" idgi. "he has a bunch of high schoolers for his crew?" The Cougars, Lenny's gang, are normally Dexter's enforcers in town. They're all nebulously adult-age, despite wearing outfits and having a bunch of traits right out of Grease. They all despise Lenny. "I don't know that we ever meet Darien"  (It's implied that Darien was a Cougar who angered Dexter somehow and was beaten to death, possibly by Sanchez). High Wire Act: if you look at the power lines running along the main street, you may see them flopping around oddly. The game does a really weird thing with any sort of hanging wire asset- it's effected by physics (wind, gravity etc), but in an apparent attempt to save memory it unloads the asset when you look away, then reloads it in a default state whenever you look back. So every time you look up, the wires pop in and suddenly flop downward, effected by gravity. This happens everywhere there are wires. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. Weird dead end (one of many) There's a keycard door underground in the entrance to the junkyard- just past a vat of tar you can push one of the targets into. The keycard is, annoyingly, all the way across the map in the garage. Your reward upon getting in is...a save point, a wrench, and a mechanic's outfit. I have no idea why it's there, unless this was originally a different way into the second half of the mission. The car lift thing: You can also use it to kill one of the targets. "There's no reason to kill these guys": The game actually does provide a mostly cromulent reason to kill the Cougars. We're killing them both a) to get to Lenny, and b) because they're planning to steal Victoria and sell her to a rival arms manufacturer, Stallion Armaments. This is actually conveyed in the car conversation cutscene from the beginning of the level. It's a weak contrivance, but it's been there for a long time. These two Hope levels are some of the most internally consistent and coherent in the game, because they were released very early on as more demo material. Now, in connection with everything else, no, they make zero sense. But internally their reasoning mostly works.  Note the "I'd do her!" under Victoria's image and the note to kill Lenny. The Stallion Armaments contact on the right is a generic civilian NPC wearing an american flag jacket, presumably used in some cut content. Level Layouts/Transitions: It might not seem that way, but it's pretty close to consistent. You're heading into a back outbuilding on the barbershop grounds (which have been taken over by Lenny's gang as a clubhouse). The front window is wrong, but I think that's about it. I suspect that Shaving Lenny and Streets of Hope were originally one map that were split up pretty early in construction due to resource limitations. As it stands, most of the exterior is consistently modeled in the Streets level. A note on the switch: In the area next to the clubhouse with all the buzzing wires, one of the targets will periodically urinate against a wall. You can electrify him there, but you have to loosen a wire, something you can only do if you're holding a wrench. There's a wrench right there, but there's also no other sign that this is required, this sort of item key scenario never comes up again, and the prompt is just gone if you don't have the wrench out.  Once you do it, then you can use the switch nearby to get the kill.A Note on Thrown Objects: Thrown objects in Absolution are either things that embed in and kill the target, or they're only good as destractions. No knocking people out with thrown items. Pizza and Kidnapping Lenny: The Pizza's only eaten by Lenny- it's his "special #2 pizza, Chicago Style" (the other Cougars took a dump in it). Charming. It's a much harder, less effective way of kidnapping him than putting on the barber outfit, which makes him travel to the uninhabited shop area after you put on the disguise and walk into line of sight. You can technically drag Lenny all the way to the entrance of the level- there's a slightly modified escape scene with a different background if you do so. A Note on Notebooks: For months after release, it was impossible to get 100% Lost and Found in Shaving Lenny. The level had an item, a notebook that explained the whole pizza thing above, but it was cut late in development. This would be fine (the notebook was useless), except they left it and its entry in the completion system. The notebook itself was just moved into level geometry, impossible to reach. It was properly patched out much, much, much later. "beyond perfect" You've covered the basics. This was a plot device to make sure Victoria doesn't just kill everyone and leave, while still making her have some sort of plot importance by having superpowers. It's horribly delivered, ill-conceived, and I suspect it was added when it was decided that the game wouldn't start with her death/rape and move forward from there. I'll discuss Skurky and Mrs. Cooper later. Lenny: Lenny has a limp(implied to be from being beaten by his father), and a speech impediment, and may be cognitively deficient, and may be gay. He's called "limp-dick Lenny" by everyone and is openly a source of narrative mockery, even as he's also made hateable by being egotistical, cowardly and, y'know, shooting a nun in the face. So, of course, we don't just kill Lenny - we get a special, expensive, unneccessary playground to do it in, with a lot of custom voicework and several easter eggs (you can make an ice cream truck hit Lenny, or cause the screen to gain a silent film filter). You don't have to kill him any particular way to get 100%, but you do have to find all the items hidden around the area- and some are really, really obscure. The worst of these is probably the poker, which spawns inside the abandoned stagecoach. You have to find and shoot an open crate of dynamite (you can't pick up the dynamite itself), which blows up the coach and flings the poker...somewhere. Good luck finding it. What's really offensive about Lenny, for me, isn't that he embodies the "everyone and everything is terrible" grime-laden ethos of Hitman. It's not the homophobia, nor the gendered violence, it's not even the amount of resources that went into him- there are too many other examples in the game for that to really stand out. It's the pointlessness of the whole exercise. The big reason we had these three levels and this "Kill Lenny" playground was to find out that Victoria is at...the giant factory complex that literally has Blake Dexter's face and name on it. Great. Fun Fun Asset Reuse Bonus Round: Lenny's limp animation is reused for the limping characters in HITMAN 2016, specifically targets in the Patient Zero Colorado level, and the Point Man in the base game Colorado level. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 14:52 on Jul 22, 2018 |
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Mar 10, 2018 07:08
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I always assumed Lenny was meant to have some form of cerebral palsy. Neither interpretation makes things any better though.
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Mar 12, 2018 06:00
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I eagerly await the nine and a half pages. 
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Mar 12, 2018 06:01
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Episode 10: Slow Descent Notes I have relatively little info about these levels, but you've given me much more material to cover because you've gone Rambo so often. Not that I'm complaining. Well, with some of the stuff I'm having to do at the end of this one, maybe I'm complaining a little. "I love Johnny Cash" I'm pretty sure this song was commissioned just for this game. More western scene-setting. The whole scene does vaguely tie into the location of Dexter labs due to the weird passing truck, but that's it. That snake The snake was a planned logo for the game for a lot of development- it appears in the main menu animations, coiled around the silverballers. The game also does an ambient rattlesnake sound when you choke someone out in these levels, which is the sort of great touch I'd love to see in a, you know, good game. Dead End If you're sneaking through, you usually have to cross over to the left side of the map to get to the end of this particular area, once you've disarmed the security systems. That said, this whole video consists of transitional areas- they're just corridors with guards. The only notable elements are a couple keycard-locked doors with guns behind them, and some mildly inventive stuff in the final area. A Note on Security Systems: I'm, um, not really sure what's going on with them. This gets done a lot through this video and the next. At a guess, these were going to be optional objectives at one point, but were turned mandatory to make sure players couldn't rush through the content. On the other hand, there may have at one point been some sort of plot hook about deleting all computer records of Victoria's presence. On the third, mutant hand, their locations mostly make no sense (especially in the next video) and the objects for the security servers look like they might have been placed in a hurry, so maybe the whole set of them were just added to give players something to do other than move from entrance to exit. Old Mill Basically, after the devs developed the run-down mill exterior, and the descent level that would follow, they realized "oh wait, we need something in the mill itself!" So this single room with a video game distraction was tossed in. My guess is they had the concept and needed a spot to place it. Descent For what it's worth, the start of this level at 5:49 shows a nice reveal for Dexter Labs- behind a country-styled, run-down exterior, a massive, gleaming weapons lab completely hidden in a canyon. It doesn't make much sense, but it's a cool enough concept that I'd be willing to excuse it- if the level were well done. "so this is probably one of the more fun maps" I know very little about the Descent level, but there are several spots in it, and at the start of the Factory Compound level that begins afterwards, where it looks like intended play areas were hastily blocked off with props. My guess is the entire descent was going to have additional branching paths, and maybe even alternate exits that wouldn't involve the elevator. A separate mine level might have been cut, it's hard to tell. In any case, the level has several branching paths with nicely varied scenery- the video shows off the one that's probably hardest to complete in full stealth. I agree that it does some relatively interesting stuff with verticality. The "Resident Evil cameras" were probably used to make sure the player could see the path forward when it was a ledge crawl of some kind- playtesters probably found it hard to spot in testing, because the cliff face would otherwise limit the angle of the third person camera. "Did I mention you can use human shields?" This is a feature also present in Blood Money. As you identify, it's not a very good match for the base design of the Hitman series. Taking a hostage is a sign that something's gone very wrong, and there's never a clean way to get out of the situation when you do wind up taking one. It doesn't help that it's mostly only possible to do it in stealth, so...why do it? It's basically only used when it's an element of a challenge. "We're sorry Discendo Vox" I entirely understand. The game is bad. I don't blame y'all at all. Mines: Here's how I think it works: mines are completely safe until you "arm" them, or pick them up. They're automatically armed when you pick them up, though- so don't use a mine as a melee weapon! Oddly, I think you can throw them safely. Those Dudes: The guys you shot just before the keycard gate at about 9:20 are a fantastic example of the hand-holding, forced narrative approach to level design that Absolution does way too much of. The intended approach to the level is to make you follow just behind these two guards as they slowly walk through the gate and down a hill, listening to them converse about the plot as they head to a meeting with the patrol team leader, who you then also have to wait for. It's like an Assassin's creed tailing mission, except there's no risk of discovery if you just move slowly. There's also no reason to it- you're safe purely because the guards never stop, turn, or look behind themselves, even though the whole route they take would leave you completely exposed if they chose to do so. You have to realize the designers want you to slowly follow and listen to these people. Notably, Hitman 2016 has almost none of this at all- because in a game focused on replaying levels, having to listen to the same conversation over and over again is agonizing. Other guard conversations in the level reveal that they are betting on some sort of cage match to occur later between Sanchez and a wrestler called "The Patriot". "Games can't all be MGS2 or else we'd all die of happiness". Let me get the thread a bit more active by coming out of the closet on this- I hate MGS2. I hate just about everything about it. Fight me, goons. A Note on the Elevator Switch: I don't know why this is here, either, except as another victim of map cuts, or as a way to block rushing to the end of the map. It's worth noting that all Absolution levels that end with elevators have some sort of "throw a switch/press a button" action, followed by a wait for the elevator. This is either to buffer loading, or to heighten tension. Many better stealth games use the "call the elevator, wait as enemies search area" trick a lot, but this one doesn't seem to pull it off. This one has an added gently caress you for hardcore Absolution players (yes, they exist): if you throw the switch without going to the elevator first to get the "restore power" objective, you don't get the several thousand additional points for completing the objective. drat it, this is gorgeous: Look, I just want to pull back for a second here and note that even with Absolution, IoI had a bunch of asset and design team people who made some really excellent stuff. the bridge, the factory, the cliffs...this level, and many other Absolution levels, are really beautiful to look at. This is, again, what's so frustrating about this game, and why I fixate on it so much. It's a really tragic waste of resources, of good effort, money, time, years of people's lives. It's still worth stopping to admire the effort that went into things, though. Dreaming of the well-made, narrative-driven, more action-oriented Hitman that could have been. The underground lake at the end of the elevator ride is a great example of this. There's no reason to spend any time in the area, and you start the level facing away from the lake, toward the steps leading forward. That's downright tragic; the room's a work of atmospheric art. The canyon you cross over immediately afterward is similarly beautiful and detailed. God, what a waste! Factory Compound Under the Bridge: The 3-part Under the Bridge challenges are actually pretty fair and fun- you have to knock guards off the bridge, using the sniper rifle you used to clear out half the area. It's an example of the challenge system done mostly right. Blood pool found: This flashed up briefly, so just to explain, blood pools were a thing in Blood Money and Absolution, then were cut. Killing an enemy with a gun or sharp object leaves a blood pool, which triggers the same amount of suspicion as finding a dead body- permanent caution, increased multi-man patrols, etc. This was removed because, well, it's really limiting to gameplay. Hitman 2016 still creates a blood pool when you kill someone in a gory way, but NPCs ignore it. Sniper damage and dismemberment: To briefly note, Absolution has a much more detailed hitbox and damage system than the 2016 game does. Enemies like the guards on this level have accurately placed damage resist areas on their torsos to mimic their flak gear. This is an element first introduced in this level. I do not believe the game has weapon damage falloff, at least not for sniper rifles, nor does it have scenery penetration. The damage calculation is mostly obscured, which is fine- it really shouldn't be a focus of play in the first place. There is no dismemberment, astonishingly. Dismemberment was something that a particularly psychotic division of hitman players had been asking for since the first game. In practice, the main reason it likely didn't happen is because it's really time-consuming and processor-intensive to do well, and it'd cause problems for that whole "hide bodies" thing. Dogz: There's a dog behind a fence on the far left side of the compound. It will bark as you get near, briefly attracting a guard. This is the same bulldog model used in the intro cutscene, in various signs, and similar ones appear in the Streets of Hope levels. You can throw a bone into the dogs' cages to get them to stop barking, although it's not a significant obstacle. There's a reason these guard dogs are so prominent in the game's imagery- they were originally going to be a whole separate enemy type, but were cut into basically stationary noise alarms. Of course, the devs couldn't leave well enough alone, so they still show up in a couple levels and in a bunch of signs. In the Cougars' clubhouse level, there's a cage off in a corner with a pair of dogs loving. No reason for it, they just wanted to show two dogs loving in a corner. "I don't get the level design here" and Secretaries: You wound up bypassing/murdelizing the secretaries, but there are two of them, based on the "Big Mama" body type, in different parts of the complex. The level layout doesn't make too much sense, and there are some side routes which are just included so that they can exist (like the dog above, a mostly useless canteen and skylight route, a keycard area with guns and a chipmunk costume, etc). Parallel paths do exist, so I can't be too sore about it. There is an attempt at storytelling with environment, too. There's one lousy, run-down area for truckers and employees working for the company, and a separate, sleek, luxurious area is for the people buying weapons from Dexter Industries. Speaking of which: Fun Fun Happy Time!: Right at 20:02 you spare a guy in a suit near his sports car. This is the "Arms Dealer". Nearby guards mention they saw him on TV, a peace negotiator working to end a South American conflict. if you knock him out, you can wear his suit through to the end of the level and pass by everyone safely. The arms dealer is a corrupt hypocrite, which is not a big deal in a game as grimy as this one. It's not why he deserves special mention. The reason he gets special mention is he's the place where the developers of Absolution went so far with their bigotry, that they tried to censor themselves. To set up a situation where you can get his outfit, the Arms Dealer walks off to the side and has a phone call. I've taken the time to transcribe it below. quote:
Yeah, so. They yiddish loanwords in that transcript? The ones delivered entirely in an NYC/long island accent, while the character discusses finding a way to squeeze a cheaper price out of Dexter? After talking about how he was able to profit from "the New York thing"? Not in the subtitles. Everything else is accurate. People don't believe me when I talk about the poo poo this game pulls. Atom Bomb: Aside from some of the live mines in the lobby, there's also a WW2-styled atom bomb hanging from the ceiling (visible at about 18:59). Shooting its end will give you a special game over scene, with a nuclear cloud, and with another Kane & Lynch appearance thrown in for good measure. The elevator: If you reach the elevator in stealth, there's actually a guard in it who walks out first. Also, that camera glitch you experience is something that occurs every time. Also, there are no controls inside the elevator. Also, making this update nearly broke me. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 01:52 on Jan 7, 2023 |
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Mar 12, 2018 23:07
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Mar 16, 2018 01:40
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Damnit now i gotta record the nuclear option.
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Mar 18, 2018 07:25
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Yesss suffer- also record the arms dealer if you get the chance, no one believes me that he’s an anti-Semitic stereotype. It's the most pointless bigotry in the whole game, the absolute nadir.
Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Mar 18, 2018 |
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Mar 18, 2018 16:39
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Discendo Vox posted:Fun Fun Happy Time!: Oy gevalt.
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Mar 18, 2018 17:52
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Mar 18, 2018 18:22
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 Hitman: Absolution 11 - Doctor Death (Commentary) Hitman: Absolution 11 - Doctor Death (Cut Commentary)
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Mar 23, 2018 04:31
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Good thing you don't bother with these challenges because this level has one of the bigger bullshit challenges. In the end of level screen, there's a challenge called Research & Hidings. To do this, you need to subdue (not kill) and hide the bodies of 7 scientists all without being seen in that third area (the tall silo sort of place). Now, there are only 4 hiding boxes for bodies in that entire area so good luck with all that. Also, if you believe the Hitman wiki, this level is impossible to complete with Silent Assassin/Suit Only without being spotted. The reason why is those test subjects near that long bridge. Despite the fact that their eyes are closed on their models, they can still spot you and ruin an unseen run. And there's no way around them either so you're screwed. Hitman: Absolution everybody.
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Mar 23, 2018 14:24
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