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The showers might be to remove any contaminants from the hazmat suits.
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Mar 23, 2018 16:31
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My computer died so there will be a delay in comment posts. Edit: I think the solution might be some syringe trick again. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Apr 1, 2018 |
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Mar 23, 2018 17:23
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 Episode 11: Doctor Death Notes The Saints I'll discuss the Saints later, but for right now, note the obvious male gaziness of the cutscene and the racialized accent of their leader, the "Mother Superior". Bear it in mind when we actually see them in gameplay. The Saints are supposedly headquartered in "Crestones, Panama", but there is no such place. Instead there are a set of mountains called the "Crestones" in Colorado, which makes more sense plotwise from a couple directions. The Saints got a weird intro promo trailer during the runup to the game that suggested that they had done work in Central America, which may be why this cutscene supposedly takes place there. I'll post and discuss it down the line. No, the stripped down dead guy never gets explained. It's ~*~gritty~*~! Lobby Presumably this is a transitional zone intended to set up the plot and motivations for the rest of the level. This area before the secret door is special- it's not scored, even though a score pop-up appears, and aside from your player state, nothing in this area effects your score in later areas. If you select Test Facility from the options available, you start up at the end of the elevator ride in the test facility. Notes You do actually need to pick up the notes in the interrogation room before you can open the secret door. Canonically, the notes contain the door code- they belong to the tied up guy, who is a journalist investigating Dexter's inhumane research practices. The guards are threatening him with a massive lawsuit and not just offing him for some reason, despite working for War Crimes, Inc. The notes document that Dexter Industries is horribly unethical, experimenting on the homeless, children, etc. This provides a motivation to kill the scientists and destroy their research, I suppose. Maybe I'm insane I thought there was some sort of interaction where, if you kill the guards, the hostage will wonder aloud who you are, ask you to free him, etc, but I can't get it to trigger. Cut content I strongly suspect that there was an entire factory level here at one point- there's that absurdly complex automated assembly line visible in the intro cutscene and through the window by the map start, and if you hang out there the PA system has several different lines for people going on tours of the facility, suggesting they stop by the factory restaurant and get a Dexter Burger, etc. Given the strange way this level connects to the next, something is definitely missing here. Keycard tease Note that 90% of players will pick up a keycard while traversing this area. The game practically slaps you with it. This comes up in a bit. Test Facility The test facility serves as an ok bit of visual storytelling that is mixed with an introduction to Dexter Industries mainstay product- land mines. Throughout this video a real emphasis is put on mines, which are apparently the main product in Dexter Industries' "home defense" line that actually get sold (no wonder they're going broke). Mines The mines are a bit weird mechanically- they emit a red glow that gets more pronounced in instinct mode, and beep when you get close. They're also an instakill and can be shot and destroyed from a distance, an act that attracts a lot of attention. The mines come up once more in the entire game, in a setting where you really don't get the chance to experiment or learn about them, so their introduction here is nice, in principle. In practice, the player never has any good reason to go near them because the main testing floor is so exposed, and there are so many routes around it. And, you know, they're active mines in a test area, cordoned off with fences- players avoid them instinctively. Oh, remember Hidden valley from Hitman 2? How there was a chance a random guard would be run over by a truck halfway across the map, ruining your SA run? Guess what happens with the mines on this level. "you just make a little bit of noise and they're on to you" Basically anything but the fiberwire will alert NPCs enough to at least turn around and look in your direction at a distance of ~10 feet. Melee weapons like the knife will also leave a permanent blood pool which will instantly trigger NPC suspicion. Identity blowing and AI states While I'm at it, here's what I know so far on blowing your identity, and why it's terrible. If an NPC observes a crime- in particular, someone dying from a gunshot- they will instantly see through your disguise. This is true even if the NPC can't see you, say, if there's a wall in the way. There are exceptions, but they seem to require sniper rifle range. Here's the worse part. Hitman Absolution's levels are like HITMAN 2016's levels- beautifully, intricately, perfectly tuned clockwork. Complex, scheduled and designed behavioral systems that you can study learn and navigate. Except if anything goes outside the developer's plan in Absolution, the clock stops, grinds, then explodes- there's no adequate recovery or fallback logic for just about anything. This extends to alert states. If an NPC discovers a body, or a pool of blood, or a gunshot impact, and they're not almost instantly pacified or killed, NPCs go into a permanent panic behavior and guards all start randomly sweeping the map in teams of three, making conventional stealth impossible. I'm not sure of the details of the different "guards alerted", "guards suspicious", etc states, because in practice, the only thing you can safely do is lure one person at a time to a silent area and kill them, then hide them, then repeat- over and over and over. And hope that in doing so you're not borking some other opaque script. "really?!" As you say, Dr. Green is written in an attempt to make killing the scientists seem natural. His gratuitous backstory is pretty definitely a reference to the character of Mason Verger from the Hannibal series, but Verger was some sort of pedophile serial murderer autocannibal. The level has a bunch of NPCs who talk about how horrible he is, but his lines just make him sound high-strung and neurotic. Did you notice? Green's artificial leg gets reused for a target in HITMAN's Colorado mission. A Note on Reap what you Sow You can, of course, feed Green to the pigs, or dump him in the inexplicable lake of pig corpses in the back of this...cave...lab complex...slaughterhouse...thing. Doing the latter with 5 researchers in a single run is required for the second iteration of Reap what you Sow, a challenge I found harder than any of the other ones in this level. I had a tremendous amount of difficulty getting kills to register. Why? Because, although it's mentioned absolutely nowhere, you have to dump all the scientists and escape the level completely unnoticed. That's not even in the checklist of tasks for the challenge when it's completed! The security system You can kill Dr. Green practically from the start of the area by shooting out the glass floor under him, dropping him into a pig-pit. So, of course, the devs put a security system you have to deactivate in the back of the lab. This system is another example of forced exposition in Absolution- there are two guards sitting in front of the system, having a conversation about Sanchez's upcoming cage match. They only start when you get close, and when you finish, they gently caress off forever to other parts of the map, leaving the security system permanently unguarded. Good Game Design. The keycard door There's a keycard-only door in one corner of the test area. Behind it are 8 explosive charges- they aren't useful for any challenges or anything, but they're there. Now, remember how I said basically everyone has a keycard from the intro area? Well, the game throws two more at you, sitting out in plain sight along the path leading to this door. Presumably you'd originally get the key elsewhere, but the devs realized the door would be unreachable if you started the area from the level select, no keys would be available. So they threw a bunch at you. A Note on lost and found Lost and Found completion requires apicking up one of every weapon, item, and disguise in a given mission(as well as completing all challenges). You don't have to carry them out, you just need to find one of a given X and pick it up briefly. It's clear that in some levels, the devs hid items in obscure, useless places purely to make players scrounge around for them. One example of many is the gascan in this mission: it only appears tucked in a corner of the minefield. I'm mentioning that one, but there are at least 20 similarly obscure items that I've already passed over. Easter egg In one corner behind the testing area backdrops (that exist, for some reason), there's a pig waiting for you in a crate. Shoot it in stealth and see what happens. Decontamination The Decontamination area actually has a pretty good layout, with a forced intro to the steam valves in the shower area and a mostly clear route to the exit if you study things. This is only slightly marred by the security system, which is immediately next to 5 guards watching Sanchez's match on TV (previewing it again). It does not look at all like you can safely access it in a suit, but somehow you can. For more fun, the evidence is directly in front of the TV. Getting it suit only is a nightmare. Pointless challenges The stripper/cake thing was probably originally a kill opportunity. As was the case with many othe challenges in the game, it's pointless and actively screws up a stealth run- although thankfully the room is far enough away from other NPCs that the alert doesn't usually spread. Bonus fun fact: there's a knife on the counter in the cake room that doesn't appear anywhere else in the whole mission. More Lost & Found fun! R&D Presumably this former missile test silo has been repurposed for R&D, but if you look up, though, you can see they've still got a missile in the top of the thing. The R&D Silo is basically a line of rooms with kill ideas the developers didn't want to discard. The layout does some interesting things, but you can bypass a lot of it by going down the stairs in the first room- and as others have observed, it's imposible to SASO because of the test subjects in the last room (I've confirmed this was a bug and not intentional). I think the setting is referenced by the tutorial of HITMAN 2016, which also takes place in what I think is an abandoned, repurposed silo. Canonically, this place is called the "Omega Facility", which is only redeemed because some NPCs make fun of how stupid the name is. Despite being supposedly top secret, NPC discussions indicate knows about the place and they just pretend not to so they don't get in trouble. Costume Complaints The cleansuits are for the folks messing with pigs. They're not permitted in the silo, which is, well, the even more secured area past the decontamination setup. This bit makes perfect sense- it's why the game gives you a few chances to get researcher outfits in Decontamination. A Note on Research and hidings I didn't find it too bad. You have to work your way down from the top of the map, knocking out civs and guards and dragging them back into previously cleared areas. The mostly linear layout helps a lot with this. Needing to then finish the mission unnoticed is, indeed, a dick move. Chavez soundfile There's a computer you can interact with in an otherwise empty room halfway down the silo- the game's only example of an in-level audio log. It basically establishes that Ashford mutated Sanchez by experimenting on him with a supersoldier growth formula when he was a small child. The gigantism was an unintended side-effect, and meant he had to be kept in the lab. No word on how he got a bunch of stereotypical Mexican traits growing up in a South Dakota research lab, though. Fire Extinguishers "Disappointing", you say? Well, as it turns out...they do nothing if shot aside from emit a small cosmetic wisp of vapor. They will keep doing this no matter how many times you shoot them. whyyyyy Doctors Valentine and Ashford are both named after Resident Evil antagonists. Plotwise, all three scientists are justified as targets ingame because their total lack of ethics means they are a threat to Victoria. Somehow. Despite the first guy not even having access to her. Smoke There's a valve by the bridge control that fills the area with smoke. In practice, the smoke lasts way less than the 30 seconds the game claims to give you- it's really about 10, I think. I think the bridge was, like other elevator waits, intended to make sure the player isn't in loud combat. The server room As you noticed, there's a dental drill sound in this room, just to make it feel invasive and uncomfortable. Ashford's lines, aside from talking about what a find Victoria is, also re-reference the creation of Sanchez and that Victoria's work lives up to the rumors of the "legendary Ort-Meyer". A pic on the wall in the room:  I'm not sure who the other figures are, or what's going on in this image- the composition slightly resembles Caravaggio, but my best guess is it was originally going to appear in the recording screens, to accompany the voice recording from earlier in the level. whyyyy 3: Tokyo Drifting If you get to the base of the silo in stealth, You can hear a conversation between an irate Ashford and some guards- Sanchez just came through moments earlier and whisked Victoria out through the back entrance, due to word that the facility was compromised. I'm willing to accept the possibility that Birdie clued Dexter in on this somehow, so at least this bit makes sense? sort of? We're getting close to the reason I'm not trying to 100% Hitman Absolution. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 02:38 on Jan 15, 2020 |
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Apr 2, 2018 14:07
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Apr 4, 2018 02:45
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   Hitman: Absolution 12 - Fight Night (Commentary) Hitman: Absolution 12 - Fight Night (Cut Commentary)
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Apr 6, 2018 01:05
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Wait, why did 47 unmask himself? In front of so many witnesses? Also, what the gently caress was up with that stupid fight? What kind of My Little Pony-rear end 'grindhouse' films were the devs watching to inspire this scene?
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Apr 6, 2018 04:10
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With the way he was clipping through that mask, i dont think it was an adequate disguise no matter how you spin it
Jobbo_Fett fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Apr 6, 2018 |
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Apr 6, 2018 04:27
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Oh man, this mission. I really like the idea behind it, but the execution is loving bad. I like the subversion of the typical assassination, where no one sees anything, and instead have everyone see it, but they don't care or believe something bad is happening. After all, wrestling is all fake anyway, right? And of course 47 breaks kayfabe and removes his mask. And the funny thing is, a similar mission is in Blood Money, Curtains Down, where you can literally take an actors place and shoot a target on stage in front of a crowd and get away with it. But no, absolution has to have the lovely gritty stupid of a grindhouse movie.
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Apr 6, 2018 13:13
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Sanchez had such weird proportions. His limbs looked to short and small compared to his torso.
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Apr 6, 2018 20:59
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White Coke posted:Sanchez had such weird proportions. His limbs looked to short and small compared to his torso. Something something DNA Manipulation  UNLOCK YOUR FULL POTENTIAL!
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Apr 7, 2018 04:33
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Something something DNA Manipulation That or Danny Trejo has some really weird body proportions that we just aren't noticing.
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Apr 7, 2018 04:51
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White Coke posted:That or Danny Trejo has some really weird body proportions that we just aren't noticing. Those directors of photography earn their pay when Danny Trejo is on set!
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Apr 7, 2018 05:34
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Those directors of photography earn their pay when Danny Trejo is on set! For all we know Sanchez could be a smaller Danny Trejo.
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Apr 7, 2018 17:38
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White Coke posted:For all we know Sanchez could be a smaller Danny Trejo. What if Sanchez was his stunt double?
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Apr 7, 2018 18:43
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Jobbo_Fett posted:What if Sanchez was his stunt double? Move over Bigger Luke.
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Apr 7, 2018 20:32
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I'm probably not going to get to do the fight night infopost before attack of the saints (still finishing the death factory post), so let me just say that an issue with a challenge from that mission is why I stopped 100%ing the game. And I 100%ed Assassin's Creed 3.
Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Apr 11, 2018 |
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Apr 11, 2018 23:08
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Discendo Vox posted:I'm probably not going to get to do the fight night infopost before attack of the saints (still finishing the death factory post), so let me just say that an issue with a challenge from that mission is why I stopped 100%ing the game. And I 100%ed Assassin's Creed 3. Stay safe, Absolutio Vox 
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Apr 11, 2018 23:29
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Shadowplay has corrupted my recording for this ET, so I can't get a video out this time. 
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Apr 15, 2018 02:52
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Part 12: Fight Night Notes "Why are we in a ring now? I thought we were at Dexter Industries" This seems to take place at a hangar on the company grounds, and is a public secret for the locals and the staff, who bet on the outcomes of these...uh, death duels/boxing matches/wrestling fights between normal humans and the obviously misshapen grotesque mockery of the human form/Danny Trejo impersonator. Keycard You need to get the keycard to get through to the other half of the level if you're not dressed as the Patriot. Getting it takes like 15 seconds once you know where it is, though. "If you garrote too early, does the next guy come immediately?" Yes, usually. I do recall this generator is especially irritating for it. "I don't know if I should take these guys out" You were safe, technically. The game uses the "search for missing keycard" bit to move all guards out of any area the player needs to be, and it's permanent. A Note on Flashlights Flashlights are a common and potent way to signal vision cones for enemies in stealth games, but for them to work, a number of different assumptions have to be considered in their design. Is the whole beam visible as a sort of lit cone, or does just the place it hits light up? Does it glitch through walls or have an ambient glow in addition to the beam, which gives way more warning to players? How closely does the scope of the beam match the vision cone? Does the guard move or rotate quickly, and does the beam match or forewarn this behavior? Different stealth games handle these questions differently, and there are a lot of options that depend on the underlying design. Payday 2 gives its guards a pocket flashlight that doesn't match the guard's line of sight very strongly- but it does pass through walls, offering a massive indicator when a guard is coming, and where the guard is. Hitman Absolution gets every one of these questions wrong, basically; aside from a "transition to backhand" animation that's used to signal that a guard is transitioning into or out of a stationary state, the flashlight effect is hard to see, nonrepresentative of the guard view, and generally not indiciative of anything. It's very pretty, but it's also pretty garbage. I dunno, seeing the guards in this map just made me think about it. Melee sounds Yup, only the garrote is completely silent. Announcer Notice that, like the previous level, the announcer for this one has lines that are reused in the intro and in the level itself. The announcer goes silent during your fight with Sanchez, though , if you take that route. Teddy The Patriot has a teddy bear that's a good luck charm of some sort (also the devs wanted several jokes about how the Patriot is a feminine incompetent whiner, which, you know, synergizes great with that "target locked" on the back of his pants). Stealing the bear makes the Patriot send his entourage off to find it, leaving him alone- in principle. I've never been able to choke the Patriot out and maintain stealth. One of the other NPCs seems to wind up close enough to hear, and the others turn around and return really fast. "Fighting" Sanchez It's pretty anathema to the idea of social stealth. I'll leave it at that. Like many other Absolution levels, it's clear Fight Night was built around this really contrived and terrible "opportunity". My favorite part is the jiggle physics applied to Sanchez's stomach. What a complete waste of a character. Sanchez has a lot of potential, on a thematic level, as a sort of "American excess" version of 47, and he's also interesting in that he's a compliant follower of Dexter, despite being, you know, a child lab subject of horrible inhumane research. Nothing is done with this, and the relationship and identity is unexplored. I am so embarrassed and disgusted by this bizzare "giant inexplicably Mexican stereotype" that he was written as instead. It does raise the question of what a good "boss" in Hitman might look like, but more on that later. Pro strats for SA The path less traveled Using the keycard sends you through an elevator shaft, then through a vent where you can witness Sanchez on the phone with Dexter in his dressing room (which, of course, has a bunch of Santeria material in it). Sanchez apologizes for leaving Victoria with Sheriff Skurky on his way to the fight, promising to pick her up immediately after. This is to accomplish the same exposition that you otherwise get from the fight cutscene. Other Options If you take the other route, you wind up in the arena crowd, still carrying your weapons. There are a handful of not-too-interesting methods to kill Sanchez- mostly dropping the lighting rig on him, a task that requires navigating an annoying upper level area with a lot of blind corners and tight rooms. The nastiest challenge is probably "Wingman", which requires sniping Sanchez without alerting anyone. How do you do that, if he's in the middle of a fight with the Patriot in the arena? Why, simple- you shoot him as the patriot punches him, of course! A bullet to the head's just like a punch, y'know. There's a specific room overlooking the arena to do this from. To add insult to the whole thing, my run of this took three shots to execute- with guards temporarily suspicious after each one, including Sanchez. After being shot in the head, he'd pause, look around for a couple minutes, then go back to fighting. Cleaning up If you try to be cheeky and knock out the Patriot, then enter through the keycard door, Sanchez will just stand in the center arena looping some celebration/crowd appeal animations from the fight. It's nice that they considered this. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Jun 17, 2018 |
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Apr 17, 2018 06:20
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 Hitman: Absolution 13 - Honeymoon (Commentary) Hitman: Absolution 13 - Honeymoon (Cut Commentary)
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Apr 20, 2018 05:02
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Ok, so I mentioned earlier on about the biggest middle finger challenge in the game and this level is where it is. At the end of the level, you may have noticed the multi-part challenge called Angel of Death. This challenge is utterly ridiculous and I wanna take the time to apologize to Discendo Vox for putting him through that challenge. At least you had the good sense to abandon it though. So what is this challenge that makes it so terrible? Well, Part 1 is simply take out 2 of the Saints at the same time. You use the gas station in the second area to take care of that. Part 3, you have to kill 7 of the Saints with the fiber wire. Notice that I didn't say all 7 because you can easily cheese that one by hiding in that freezer at the beginning of the level, killing the first one, restarting the checkpoint and repeating 6 more times. Those 2 aren't the issue here. No, the problem is Part 2 of this challenge. For Angel of Death Part 2, you have to kill EVERY. SINGLE. ENEMY. on the map silently, without being seen and without a body being discovered. I don't remember the exact number off hand but I think it's somewhere between 50 to 60 enemies in total. Oh, and you can't do it piecemeal either by doing one section at a time. No, you have to do it in one continuous run of the entire level. You make it to the cornfield and have a body discovered? gently caress you, back to the beginning. You have an unfortunate power surge that wipes out your progress on a run? gently caress you, back to the beginning. You wanna be a good guy and rescue the two civilians being held hostage by the grunts? They'll immediately see you and ruin a run so gently caress you, back to the beginning. Recently, I was rewatching Artix's LP of the FF13 trilogy and they talk about a trophy in the first game where you have to get one of every weapon and accessory in the game and how if you do this legit, the game has beaten you and nothing you do afterwards will ever change that. This challenge is that same thing. If you do it, you've lost. There's nothing else to say at that point. And if you had even a shred of goodwill towards this game, this challenge will make you lose it.
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Apr 20, 2018 12:23
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Oooohhhh, attack of the saints, my favorite mission in absolution. And I'm using the term "favorite" quite wrongly here, because this is probably the dumbest mission in the whole game. Such a stark contrast to Hitman 2016, eh?
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Apr 20, 2018 17:37
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Slow_Moe posted:Oooohhhh, attack of the saints, my favorite mission in absolution. And I'm using the term "favorite" quite wrongly here, because this is probably the dumbest mission in the whole game. Such a stark contrast to Hitman 2016, eh? The fireworks display in Paris wasn't nearly as good 
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Apr 20, 2018 17:53
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It seems like winning straight gunfights is astonishingly easy in Absolution.
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Apr 20, 2018 17:59
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Night10194 posted:It seems like winning straight gunfights is astonishingly easy in Absolution. Ehhhhhh, not all the time.
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Apr 20, 2018 18:07
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Jobbo_Fett posted:The fireworks display in Paris wasn't nearly as good Ok fine you win this round 
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Apr 20, 2018 20:52
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Boardroom Jimmy posted:This challenge is that same thing. If you do it, you've lost. There's nothing else to say at that point. And if you had even a shred of goodwill towards this game, this challenge will make you lose it. You have no idea.
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Apr 21, 2018 14:56
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Episode 13: The Honeymoon Notes "Just another character to add to the list of people I don't like" The game has several of these "wow, what a dork" characters that are introduced to be vaguely unlikeable, so that you can enjoy it when they get brutally murdered. It says something really unpleasant about the writers that they not only find this sort of incredibly shallow punching down funny, but that it's a trope they keep going back to. Shower scene/Saints intro I believe the shower scene has some cut flashbacks and shots intended to show off a) 47's scars, which aren't healing because he's old and broken, and b) flashback recaps, like previous hotel room/shower flashback scenes. Generally, note that this whole cutscene is an ingame reworking of the Attack of the Saints trailer. Across the board, there are shot mismatches and pace issues in this intro that make me think the scene was reworked. A particularly clear sign was the cigar the Mother Superior is chomping on in one shot, that's missing from all the others. Now, why would this cutscene be so heavily reworked? What else happened with these weird, iconic, terrible characters? A lengthy diatribe about The Saints The Saints are a pretty emblematic example of the game's development. First, I'd like you to watch this trailer, the famous "Attack of the Saints". Attack of the Saints Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65gcndvshAY This was one of the first trailers for the game, and established the "fetish nun" controversy that IOI was likely intentionally courting at the time. Notice, of course, that the Saints are on their own, and that there's a lot more "run down/scarred 47" shotwork. At this point, I don't know if the Saints were even going to have the ICA as backup- though my guess is that was always going to be the case. Next, there's this trailer, which came out in the long delay period between the big splashy one above, and the game's actual release. Saints ICA Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjDLBCtda6Y Paints quite a different picture, doesn't it! But if you freeze the frames here and there, you can see the devs still spent a lot of time coming up with absolutely grotesque grimdark "training" stuff, including seduction training and "this time around, the interrogation target doesn't have any information to give! How long will it take them to kill him?" bits, plus an internal ICA complaint letter that appears several times saying something to the effect of "the fetish nun outfits were their idea, also lol". It also kills off "Boo", one of the assassins appearing in the first trailer. In gameplay the saints are normal guards with with different "sexy" animations, and target coding. Their voicelines that are all professional and quasi-military, and for the most part they're pretty subdued. This is a pretty clear contrast to the Torture Church. The ingame target descriptions have all sorts of Deep Lore about how some of the Saints have these tortured psychological backgrounds, some are former Olympic athletes, etc. Pretty much none of this is reflected in behavior, voice lines or kill opportunities, unlike some other targets. The details of the Saints, their backgrounds, their names, their appearances, hell, how many of them there are and what they do ingame, clearly changed several times. Why? My best guess is that publisher agents heard about the controversy after the first trailer, asked what was planned for the game,  'd and forced a rewrite of the characters. This rewrite was half-assed, though, so the characters were still a horrible grimdark mess in the Files material. When the publisher came in and cleared house late in development, many of the cutscenes had been finalized, so all that stuff was just minimized and any ingame material that could be overwritten, was overwritten. LeSandra Dixon (the Saints leader) is a pretty good example of all of these inconsistencies. She's voiced by the actress who played Vernita Green in Kill Bill, which was likely her original inspiration. In the game's materials, though, she's a mess of inconsistencies. Her background in the ICA files have her as a former police officer who went to ICA mid-FBI recruitment, but she appears in all media with a gang-based teardrop tattoo (which is on different sides of her face in different depictions). In cutscenes she's both sexualized and has suspiciously racialized lines (I've got zero benefit of the doubt left for the game here, OK?). In actual gameplay, though, her lines are entirely professional and she's basically just a generic enemy leader target, barking orders. With unnecessarily "sexy" idle poses. In a leather fetish nun outfit.  The ICA files and other cutting room floor material also show Dixon being interrogated by 47 and in a hospital bed post-mission, so she was going to be yet another plot thread.Deep down below all of this is a theme that's actually kind of interesting. One of 47's few personal character traits, aside from being a professional killer, is his temporary embrace of Christianity. The Saints, one of Travis's projects, are a perversion of this, and do seem like they were intended as a representation of what he would do with Victoria. That's mostly lost under all of the other poo poo going on, though. There was an opportunity to make the Saints interesting as a "boss fight" of sorts for a stealth assassination game, something that's very tricky to do, but has been done (the Ocelot Unit in MGS3 stands out in this regard). Well, given the material, it's not too great a loss. Oh, yeah, most of the kill challenges for this map have misogynistic "heh, you're killing a woman" titles, too. Command, we have a parcel in the parking lot If you are trying to ghost this mission for, say, a challenge, you pretty much have to hide in the icechest at the start of the level, wait for the targets to walk upstairs, exchange several lines and canned animations, and let them pass so you can attack the first Saint. If the challenge were to require a lot of repeats because, say, it was permanently bugged, these lines and animations, this ~minute-long wait, might be completely ingrained in your brain, replacing your SSN. It's just another case of making players witness something with no exceptions, but it's almost the worst one in the game. Almost. "I sure as hell did not look for a parcel." It's a dead body. They're being "professionals" and using "code words". Absolution's "writers" are "hacks". "You could make this into a 2016 map" I agree, though it definitely needs a lot of work on the targets; most targets have one giant glowing signposted kill method, or you're just supposed to garrote them. "Who comes up with this stuff?!" Bad writers. Really bad writers who also don't understand their medium, and a studio culture that seemingly encourages them. The content of the ICA files trailers should be a giant warning sign; the people writing for Hitman don't just have a terminal case of Quentinnitis, they also make no attempt to manage the scale of the material, or the amount of detail. The devs had completely written out, detailed training and individual backstory elements for every target, many of them contributing nothing to the product or its effects. Long, open plot threads that go nowhere and contribute nothing to the game or its themes, purely for "worldbuilding," are a really horrible sign. The devs were basically writing a bunch of fanfiction about a collection of OCs that they wanted 47 to bump into. While 2016 still makes me a bit nervous with the amount of background and extraneous detail, at a minimum the devs clearly cut material that wasn't ultimately useful for the game, which is ultimately their job. Could I be a videogame writer? Hell no, but I do know I at least wouldn't make some of the cringe-inducing structural errors I see in games like Absolution. "what's with this bar area?" There's a blender one of the targets drinks from on their patrol, and a nearby convenient icebox to dump them in. Radio Power You pass a radio on the way out of the first area. I'm not sure if I'd mentioned it before, but the Radio is the undisputed best lure in Absolution, because you can place it and reuse it an infinite number of times. It also gives just enough additional delay to make navigating to deal with or avoid a guard lured by it safely. Reception Desk shenanigans The second area starts with an ICA grunt having a conversation with one of the targets immediately in front of the reception desk, which is a wall of waist-high cover. In my many runs of this map, I found out that you can pretty consistently grab the guard over the desk, mid-conversation, and the target won't notice. I have no idea why this is possible, but my best guess is that it's because the targets on this mission are an unusual combination of unique animations, combatants, guards and targets, and their alert AI in this scripted conversation isn't fully set up. "Civilians are a nuisance" If you're stealthing this mission, both living civilians you encounter ( guest in the first map, the receptionist in the second) will eventually be killed by the ICA guards as they beg for their lives. The civs hide nearby and become invisible to the guards if you save them. This isn't...terrible, because plotwise it signals the escalation of the scene, and you're not penalized for their deaths (in fact, you can hide their bodies for Bonus Points!) What is a problem is that you're forced to stand there and watch the first execution before your route is clear if you're going suit-only, and if you do try to save the civilians, it's basically impossible to not have them "spot" you- which does ruin your ranking. Also there's a challenge for saving both of them, another "ruin your ranking for no good reason" challenge. A note on sound and AI Navigation The desk area you start in has several entrances to it, all in close proximity. If you sound a lure against a wall, or nearby floor, or a slightly different piece of floor, NPCs will take very different routes to enter the area. I'm sure there's an internal logic to it, but in practice I found a place that got people all coming in the same door and just kept using it. To be fair, Hitman 2016 has similar issues, but its instinct system and map layout really mitigates the problem. "Why can't that guy see me, when that lady could when I was, like, diagonal to her" I really can't tell for sure, but I think detection cones in Absolution aren't based on head position or torso position, but a magickal arbitrary space that's tied to current animation state. I think the main issue this time was you were readying a weapon, which raises your head a lot. The area behind the desk is usually very safe. The Gas Station uh, wow. That bug's a new one. The gas is pretty easy to get to if you're disguised. It's the intended way to kill two targets with one explosion, which is the first level of the infamous "Angel of Death" challenge. The sight isn't modeled on the gun At a guess, this is because it's an Agency shotgun. The Agency shotguns can get upgrades, such as a sight, iirc, by spending money you earn in Contracts mode. A lot of money. It's a horrible grind, which is why people found a mission/target combo that can be farmed with a variant for every costume. A note on ICA decor As discussed before, instead of being an assassination org, the ICA seems to have their own private army with internal protocols, custom uniforms, and most bizzarely, weapons with the ICA logo on them in fluorescent yellow paint. The enemies in this level are the least nutty of the ICA NPCs we'll be seeing in the game. The Scarecrow Oh, man, passing that up...the scarecrow makes you invisible if you're stationary in the cornfield. It goes from being an area with iffy, kinda weak concealment to requiring an enemy literally walk into you to detect you if you're standing still. Using the cornfield to wreak havoc in Absolution is its high point, a reversal of the power differential this level creates as the hunted becomes the hunter and you ghost around killing the ~40 enemies searching the map. There's a reason people got so psyched about the scarecrow outfit in Hitman 2016. but soft Go to about 14:54 and admire the moving clouds at twilight. Look up at the stars. Walk to the edges of the map and observe the painstakingly laid out gradual urbanization of the buildings down the road into Hope. This level, especially this area, is gorgeous, and it's a damned shame that it's wasted on this. Cornfield patrols When stealthing this area, guards actually in the cornfield use awkward, semi-random triangular patrol routes. There's a lot of almost complete 180s in these patrols, which is really dicey, but if you're, say, spending 20 hours trying to get a challenge that's permanently bugged, you eventually memorize all of them. "This map seems like it would be miserable to stealth" The cornfield helps tremendously. Although there are all those complicated patrol routes above, you can just move around all of them to get to your targets. The exception JobboFett mentions is Jacqueline Moorehead, whose route has no special kill opportunities and involves a cornfield patrol route of her own. If you have to, say, completely depopulate the map in complete stealth, then you wind up making a lot of trips, luring away patrollers that stray from the rest of the group, killing them, and dragging them to a corner of the field that's empty. Answer the Phone My favorite part about that cutscene is that, however they cut it, in the last zoom-out shot you can see 47's shadow over the phone, just standing there. I think it was originally a zoom-in from the start of the original scene that they cut and reversed. Why I am not 100%ing Hitman: Absolution under construction, I need to get a drink. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Jun 17, 2018 |
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May 7, 2018 18:20
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Awww yeah thats the good stuff
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May 7, 2018 20:55
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Discendo Vox posted:Why I am not 100%ing Hitman: Absolution I can't wait to see how you deconstruct this challenge. And I never knew about that glitch that prevents it from unlocking but I think that might only be on the PC version. I played Absolution on the PS3 so I may have avoided it but feel free to make your own jokes about playing Absolution and actually doing this challenge in the first place. I don't remember how many attempts it took me to actually get this challenge but I actually pulled it off. It's all the problems of the stealth genre rolled into one challenge with the trial and error game play, poorly indicated vision cones and unpredictable AI that conspires to ruin a run at this challenge. Anyway, there are videos on Youtube showing off this challenge if anyone wants to see just what we're dealing with.
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May 8, 2018 03:19
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Why I am not 100%ing Hitman: Absolution OK, so to give some context here, I have a thing about 100%ing games. I like to do it, it's a powerful distraction. I do it for fun, and I spend quite a bit of time on it. I've got a bunch of lego games completed, all the Batman Arkham and Assassin's Creed games...I edited driver text files to get models to render in Lego Harry Potter. I even restarted my save file from scratch in Assassin's Creed 3 three times, because the game contains completion bugs that will permanently screw up your total, and you have to replay the beginning of the game until you get lucky and they don't occur. I've got an appointment with another goon to help me with the poker system in Watch_Dogs 1. I've done everything and gotten everything in all the other Hitman games. I'm not 100%ing Absolution, even though by now I'm about 90% of the way there. The last 10 or so challenges, the last million dollars in Contracts, I'm not touching them. Angel of Death Level 2 is why. I'll repost Boardroom Jimmy to provide some context: Boardroom Jimmy posted:Ok, so I mentioned earlier on about the biggest middle finger challenge in the game and this level is where it is. At the end of the level, you may have noticed the multi-part challenge called Angel of Death. This challenge is utterly ridiculous and I wanna take the time to apologize to Discendo Vox for putting him through that challenge. At least you had the good sense to abandon it though. So what is this challenge that makes it so terrible? Actually, Boardroom Jimmy didn't quite capture the problem I was having. I'd run the mission successfully, ghosting completely and killing everyone, several times before this LP even started. I'd always assumed I was missing something, since the requirements were so vague. Had I made someone suspicious? Did all the kills have to be with the garrote? did it need to be suit only? Did I need to garrote the civilians without being seen? I ran it many times, and completed it many ways. I think 20 hours of attempts is probably an exaggeration (I am actually very good at Absolution stealth, so it didn't take many tries to do all this), but it certainly felt that long. The level and I became old friends. I did it on professional. I learned about the AI. I memorized the NPC dialogue. I recognized the voice actors. There are 56 enemies on the level on Normal, counting the 7 targets. 5 of them have pistols. 8 of them wear balaclavas, but 13 of them are bald. Convenient, and fascinating, to a certain sort of completion-diseased mind, but not helpful. In desperation, I searched the internet. Absolution was not a well-loved game, and most of the information online was false or wrong or outdated. But eventually, I found the solution staring at me in the menu interface. It took me a long time to figure out why I wasn't getting the challenge. The truth, my dear friends, is that during the period of development and support for Absolution, IOI was a great company full of good people, who are very competent, and when they heard about the issues with Angel of Death Level 2, they stepped into action to fix the issue. A patch was released, one of the last ones during active support for Absolution. It changed how Angel of Death worked. Instead of having one objective, to depopulate the whole level in one run in stealth, it was split into three objectives- depopulate the parking lot area quietly, and it was saved. Much friendlier. Much kinder. Much easier for poor percentage chasers like myself. But, um, they unfortunately managed to miss something. And here it is:  See this picture? Can you see what's wrong here?! hang on, let me give it to you bigger: Can you see it now? The little lock icon next to the challenge? That shouldn't be there. Whe IOI patched the challenge, they reset its state. They did this independent of all other challenge states. So if you had finished the level 1 challenge and had level 2 unlocked and incomplete, it was locked again. And Level 1 was still complete. So I can't loving unlock Level 2. That lock means it never actually reads or checks my input! It's permanent! And since there's no separate progress or profile system, the only way I can unlock the challenge ingame is if I search through the system files and locate and delete my save data. And start from scratch. And I'm not doing that. Boardroom Jimmy posted:Recently, I was rewatching Artix's LP of the FF13 trilogy and they talk about a trophy in the first game where you have to get one of every weapon and accessory in the game and how if you do this legit, the game has beaten you and nothing you do afterwards will ever change that. This challenge is that same thing. If you do it, you've lost. There's nothing else to say at that point. And if you had even a shred of goodwill towards this game, this challenge will make you lose it. honestly though AC3 and Watch_dogs are way worse that this would be, I just find this game too offensive and there's no Uplay achievement attached to 100%ing it With all that said, here's a video of someone else completing it. Note the video length- a complete run of this challenge (with my much more conservative playstyle, hiding all bodies in unused areas) takes about an hour and ten minutes! PS: this completion bug actually effected every multi-level challenge that got patched in the game, it's just that Angel of Death is the one everyone recognizes. Reap what you Sow is the other case where it's effected people, that I can find. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 14:58 on Jul 22, 2018 |
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May 8, 2018 03:47
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[ Hitman: Absolution 14 - Due Process (Commentary) Hitman: Absolution 14 - Due Process (Cut Commentary)
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May 11, 2018 01:32
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Man, this level is probably my favorite concept for a level in the entire game. Infiltrating a courthouse/jail combo to reach a target is a good idea and I wouldn't mind seeing the current team take another crack at this type of level. Having said that, I think it should be pretty obvious why they failed in the execution of the concept. But that seems to be par for the course for Absolution. Maybe the next Hitman game will have a better take on something like this. At least there's nothing as ridiculous as Angel of Death part 2 in this one but the multi part challenge is fairly obtuse in it's own way. So the multi part challenge for this one is called Judgement Day. Naturally, it revolves around the Judge outfit. For part 1, you have to subdue one of the court ushers (the guys in the tan vests) in the upstairs library and hide the body. For part 2, you have to do this with 3 court ushers. They don't have to come from the library but you have to do it unseen. It's tedious but not that bad. Part 3 is the fun one and also the easiest. All you have to do is kill the tin foil hat man with the gavel as the judge. What makes this easy is that once you disrupt the trial (and you can do that from the judge's office as well as the balcony), the tin foil hat man will go into the bathroom where you can take him out. This level also has a challenge called One Man Riot where you have to kill 10 enemies with that glass shiv from the evidence room unseen.
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May 11, 2018 02:21
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Thank god, I have so much less to say about the next 3 or 4 videos. They're still going to contain the Worst Lost and Found item in the game, though.
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May 12, 2018 15:08
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 Hitman: Absolution 15 - Cease and Desist (Commentary) Hitman: Absolution 15 - Cease and Desist (Cut Commentary)
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May 26, 2018 01:11
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If Absolution wasn't available as a comprehensive lesson in what not to do, would 2016 have been as good?
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May 26, 2018 08:22
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White Coke posted:If Absolution wasn't available as a comprehensive lesson in what not to do, would 2016 have been as good? Probably not, if only because it got so much of the devteam fired.
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May 27, 2018 17:45
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White Coke posted:If Absolution wasn't available as a comprehensive lesson in what not to do, would 2016 have been as good? It would have been much better, duh!
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May 27, 2018 18:29
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Discendo Vox posted:Probably not, if only because it got so much of the devteam fired. Jobbo_Fett posted:It would have been much better, duh! 
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May 28, 2018 05:38
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Episode 14: Due Process Notes "Samuel L Jackson in this timeline really looks rough" More loving Birdie plot lubricant. Except this note, uh, never comes up or gets followed up on. Faulkner as a character does nothing and contributes nothing to the entire plot of Absolution. "His bluetooth headset is going to short-circuit any moment now" To say nothing of his loving hand. I believe both of these scenes were intended to manage/justify both the Blackwater and Hope ICA plot beats, but they're really not needed, and don't convey any meaningful information. Across the board, there are a lot of these "characters talk about a thing/place" scenes that accomplish nothing for moving the plot along. My best guess is that it's tied to why one of the credits on Absolution was for "screenplay"- that material for it was originally meant for a different medium, or was pulled from one of the execrable Hitman novels. I suspect the writers were going with some sort of time-of-day/weather theming, since something similar is done in the 2016 game- but in this case it's all opaque. "That guy was trespassing and this guy was trespassing, seems kinda weird" The prisoner who was murdered was trespassing on the Dexter Armaments factory grounds (I'll go back and check, but I think it was the journalist whose notes you swiped). The point of the scene is to establish that Skurky effectively works for Dexter (and that he has a bunch of gross inconsistent sniffing and snorting tics to let you know he's a gross weirdo). Ethan Hawke, the judge and the courtroom You cover the scope of the level well, so I'll just reiterate. Most of this level revolves around opportunities to disrupt the court proceeding and assume the identity of either the Judge, or of Ethan Hawke, the mentally ill defendant. I'll set aside the whole mocking the mentally ill part, or the pointless expense of inserting some lolgoofy live action footage of a dev wearing a tinfoil hat- the general idea of the setup is pretty strong, and it's mostly pretty well communicated. The Judge outfit has free reign through the whole map, and there are fun extras, like being able to dismiss the case against Hawke. It's clear they started with the costume and worked their way backward-there's an over-justified, overemphasized layer of characterization in several NPC dialogue instances and disguise descriptions that explains why a US judge is wearing a British powdered wig. It's a good setpiece, even if it's kind of arbitrarily shoved in here. There's one big problem, though... A note on the cut live footage TV system I'd forgotten about this, so I'll re-add it here. The live footage of Ethan Hawke is left over from a plan by the devs to have live action footage on every TV screen in the game, with its own parallel meta-fictional plotline, sort of like Max Payne 2. Obviously the resource requirements to do this would be obscene, but hey, that didn't stop IOI from building it out and leaving its bloody stump in the game! This is why the footage on many TVs is either just a picture of a horse, or a very short clip from a cutscene. It's also why a couple of the TVs with horses have voiceover describing some sort of eldritch murder mystery plot. The radio distraction objects throughout Absolution will also play flavor radio shows, occasionally building the world or tying in the plot. It's a fairly nice idea (and one used a little bit in Blood Money), but another example of the hirrific scope creep Absolution went through. "hey, you can't open the stalls!" I have no idea why- you actually have to dump Hawke in a utility wardrobe, the stall is completely unuseable. A Note on the Judgement Day challenges - "can you tell I was bored?" It's all in black and white, English, French, Chinese and Tex-Mex! So here's the problem with interrupting the court proceeding. There are two ways to do it. First, you can use a monitor in the courtroom back hall, navigating via the parlking lot (dealing with about 5 police guards in the process- as you say, it's not worth it.). Second, you can wait for the guard on the upper level to move away from his computer (you'll still need to navigate the parking lot to get to the judge, though). Either way, you have to wait through the entire initial scripted courtroom dialogue, which has no random variation, and takes several minutes each time. Anytime you want the judge outfit (such as to attempt one part of the otherwise pretty ok Judgement Day challenges), you have to wait for this whole process to be over. It gets old really fast. The librarian The librarian is just another person with a court page outfit- they have somewhat expanded access, but as is usual with Absolution, there are enough of them wandering around that you can't do much with the disguise. "This guy is super disgusting" The generic "fat balding lawyer" model used in two places in this level is the same guy from the lawyer billboard seen in the Run for your Life video, in the train station. He's meant to look extremely slovenly, even though it makes no sense why a prosecutor would ever look like that. Chloe In a nice touch, many police officers have radio calls to "Chloe", the Hope police dispatcher, which is used to handle the various conventional stealth game barks. We will meet (and I've not watched the video yet, but, I assume, kill) Chloe in the next video. In that area, police use different lines so there's no contradiction. It's quite well-handled. The Lockup and the Shiv The shiv is a unique melee weapon in the "evidence lockup" immediately next to the door leading out of the level. Because the lockup is past a court usher and a police officer, there's no way in without burning a ton of instinct. On top of that, the area itself is tiny and has several of both NPCs. While nominally you can use it to bypass the keycard lock, why would you? The shiv is needed for a challenge in the prison where you must kill 10 guards without being seen- a fairly annoying feat, made more obnoxious by the need to get the shiv and carry it down there. Holding Cells The holding cells are a pure transition area meant to justify not letting any disguise work in the prison. If you show up as the judge or as Hawke, you are given some excuse as to why the prison is closed off (in reality, because Victoria is there) and you are either invited to walk around (if disguised as the judge) or placed in an easy to open cell (if disguised as Hawke). The AI hadn't bugged out, and you would've been able to see all that- except boredom, and the red mists, descended upon you. It's a tiny area with the bare minimum of elements- some halls, a side utility room, the exit, four guards, and a vent for suit only runs) that works to do what it's intended to. The prison uses guards with a different "sheriff" disguise, to ensure your outfits are all suspicious in that area. "why was crazy guy on trial?" He both trespassed, and destroyed a bunch of gnomes at a garden store. Kane Cameo If you pass through the vent, you can peek into a room for one last cameo from Kane, sitting in a cell and writing/reciting the note to his daughter that he's known for from the first Kane and Lynch game. Prison You can clear the prison suit only in about two minutes- it's a set of three setpieces (police beatdown, locked door, fight club) in a chain, and there's not even anything to interact with in the fight club part- you just climb into the rafters and circumvent the whole thing. There are only three elements of note: First, dialogue from the guards about how Skurky is a gross pervert who gets mad when his "sessions" are interrupted, second, there's some nice dialogue from a guard to justify why they don't re-close the prison gate when you open it, and third, saving the first prisoner gets you a code for the safe in the main office, which contains a shotgun and some other weapons. Like elsewhere ingame, these weapons aren't very useful for anything, but it's a decent touch. Locks and Keys A gate at the end of the prison is locked with a padlock. You can either get around it via a hidden tunnel in the cells, shoot the lock, or use a nearby sledgehammer to knock the padlock off (making a loud sound). I believe this mechanic comes up exactly one more time in the game. Backup and alert lockdown I'm gonna be that guy- it's not that bad. Stealth games usually lock exits in a live combat situation to prevent cheese- you've just repeatedly reactivated loud combat by the specific way you've played. For the record, each map on Absolution does have an upper limit on backup enemies. You just managed to attract them to your location, in loud combat state, several times. As soon as you'd hit "hunting", you would've been able to leave. Down for the count I forgot just how stupid that scene is. Yeah, I'll discuss Skurky and Ms. Cooper in the next video. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 04:37 on Jun 17, 2018 |
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May 31, 2018 04:16
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