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I know way, way too much about the Hitman series, especially its rich and engaging plotline. This most recent game actually, for a change, has generally very good writing, with a lot of subtle stuff thrown into it. If anyone has any plot questions, hit me up. For example, the devs confirmed speculation online that the secret ICA base that training occurs in is located in North Greenland. The ikea set instructions are on a table on the bottom deck of the ship, in pretty much the one location you didn't search. You can silently take out the Sparrow while his client is facing the window, then stash the body in the bedroom immediately behind him. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Mar 9, 2017 |
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Mar 8, 2017 23:37
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double nine posted:whut? I found Hitman 2016 to be mostly devoid of interesting meta-plot. The missions themselves were fine but the connecting dots were a bit ... dull, cliché. There's a bunch of detail that's only in incidental conversations in the levels, not in the cutscenes. The main plotline has some cliches, it's true, but it's still miles better than the rampant bigotry of Absolution.
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Mar 9, 2017 00:06
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wiegieman posted:I can't believe they showed us Diana's face, game already ruined. They showed it (and, ugh, more) in Absolution.
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Mar 9, 2017 01:44
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CommissarMega posted:I know nothing of Hitman: Absolution- what made it so bad? Hitman Absolution's direction and development teams did a few horrible things. 1. It's the most offensive and bigoted AAA game I've ever seen. Aside from outright white supremacism, which is largely absent(because almost all minorities in the game are ripoffs of hollywood actors), the range and bluntness of the hate in the game's writing is breathtaking, especially its misogyny. The bondage nuns trailer is the tip of a very large iceberg. One level is set up to get the player to drop the body of a murdered stripper on a police officer as a distraction. It looks a lot like the previous two stripper-themed levels were built entirely to set up that moment. There's even a little antisemitic stereotype included off in a corner of one level for no reason partway through! The devs said they were pursuing some sort of Tarantino-esque thing, but Tarantino's tame by comparison, and this is just undirected bile. 2. The directors seem to have squandered their time and money building out about a million prototypes for different new directions of gameplay and, especially, style. Watching the bonus stuff DVD on youtube was eye-opening. They would repeatedly build out entire levels or systems around an idea they had, to beta level playability, then scrap them entirely. It looks like the publisher bringing down the hammer was the only reason the game ever launched. I think the team had something like 16 writers- two of them, who worked on incidental dialogue, are still with IOI, and wrote Hitman 2016. 3. Most of the game designers had no idea what they were doing. It looks like two or three people in lower level positions (who I believe kept their jobs) were responsible for all the good ideas in the game, like the general conceit of instinct mode, refinements to the crowdgen and the contracts system. The finished product was, well, unfinished, with a bunch of bugs in scoring and systems that were never patched. Many levels were tiny corridors, glorified cutscenes, or stealth sections where every NPC is an identical ICA "soldier". I think more than half the levels in the game have no actual assassination targets. There are two proper sandboxy assassination levels, both of them reusing the same location. On all of this, the cut content was much worse than what we actually got. e.g. 47 was going to go through the game as an alcoholic suicidal homeless man who cuts himself. After Absolution launched, more than half the devteam were fired. It's really, really bad. edit: one level of Absolution takes place in an entirely unique, resource intensive deadlands desert environment. It consists entirely of one character, Lenny, a harmless NPC, who you brought there in the trunk of your car, and about 18 ways to kill him. Lenny is affiliated with the villains and is a jerkass. He's also implied to be mentally handicapped, has a speech impediment, and walks with a limp. All of the other NPCs in the game mock him. He offers you a reacharound if you spare him. If you just get in your car and drive off, you're treated to a ~30 second audio clip of the NPC realizing he's going to die of exposure. It's not a pleasant game. edit: Also, it had really weak easter eggs. Hitman series easter eggs are comedy gold. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Feb 6, 2018 |
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Mar 10, 2017 01:33
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I'll prep a less ragey Hitman Series Plotline Summary Effortpost when it becomes relevant to the LP, which is probably in about 3 videos.
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Mar 10, 2017 02:19
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CommissarMega posted:Ye gods, what the hell? It basically looks like Square Enix gave IO a ton of money and very little oversight for an extended period, then checked back in as deadlines started to near, recoiled in disgust/panic, and brought in fixers to get the game out as close to on time as possible. The released game's plot was rearranged and cut to shreds just to present a semi-coherent narrative and be nearly feature complete. oh, right, forgot to mention: quote:On 4 December 2012, IO Interactive faced heavy criticism for releasing a Hitman: Absolution Facebook app that allowed users to identify and threaten Facebook friends for assassination. Methods of identifying female friends included "her hairy legs", "her muffin top" and "her small tits". Methods of identifying male friends included "his ginger hair", "his poo poo hair" and "his tiny penis". Users could choose a reason to kill their friend, such as the fact that they "smell bad" or were cheating on their partner. Friends received a personalised video on their Facebook wall identifying them as a target. Signing up to watch the video presented recipients with a mixture of their own photos and Facebook details merged into a video of Hitman character Agent 47 shooting them. IO Interactive admitted the promotional app was in bad taste and removed it the same day.[68][69][70]
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Mar 10, 2017 05:18
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Right so, when I say the writing in hitman 2016 is a massive improvement...anyway, I'll stop derailing things now. I'm really looking forward to your coverage of the rest of training!
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Mar 10, 2017 05:32
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ChaosArgate posted:Discendo Vox, I'm gonna link to some of your posts in the OP because they're really good with conveying how this game is a decisive step back in the right direction after Absolution. I'd be totally down. Hitman has pretty much always had some of the best trailers in the business- I can help collate things.
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Mar 10, 2017 17:11
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Some notes:
I have a ton of  about the trailer, which is indeed a series of kills from the previous games. I'll write up a brief series synopsis post that will also break down those kill references.
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Mar 15, 2017 17:55
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Hitman History Effortpost Click the title of each entry for a representative sample of the game's storytelling/cinematography, which was generally excellent for its time from Silent Assassin onwards. There's some bottom line plot stuff at the end if you don't want to read the Rich Hitman Lore. Hitman: Codename 47 47 wakes up, knowing nothing, in a padded cell, in a murky, unreal facility. A strange voice comes on over an intercom and instructs him to sneak out of the strange asylum he is in, kill a guard, take their clothes, and escape. Sometime after his escape, 47 becomes an agent for the mysterious International Contract Agency, working under novice handler Diana on assignments to gradually weaken and assassinate a set of world-renowned crime lords:
All of the crime lords have seemingly superhuman abilities, and seem unnaturally fit for their ages. They also drop letters referring to the "Five Fathers", harvesting "fruit", and the French Foreign Legion. After the four are dead, 47's client sends them after a doctor at an asylum in Romania. The place is disturbingly familiar- and once 47 arrives and corners the target, someone contacts Romanian special forces to raid the facility. 47 discovers a massive facility beneath the asylum filled with medical equipment. The intercom crackles to life and the client reveals himself- Dr. Otto Ort-Meyer, his creator and a cloning super-prodigy. Ort-Meyer reveals that he met the four crime lords in the French Foreign Legion years ago, and they pooled their resources (and gave DNA samples) to fund Ort-Meyer's research into cloned organs (used to extend the crime lords' lives) and perfect clone supersoldiers. Ort-Meyer decided he didn't want to share, so he released 47, his "greatest son," and hired him through the ICA to kill the other four of his partners. Ort-Meyer releases a series of brainwashed, supposedly superior "# 48" clones, but 47 mows them down with a minigun and ultimately kills his creator. In various missions in the game, 47 also meets two recurring characters: Agent Smith, a bumbling CIA agent who is always getting caught and freed by 47 in exchange for intel, and Lei Ling, an unwilling prostitute who flirts with 47 and gives him intel for freeing her. Codename 47 was considered a fairly inventive and fun game during its time, but as others have mentioned, the game looks terrible by today's standards, and is missing a huge range of quality-of-life features that we've all gotten used to, like detection meters, knocking out guards, and generally being able to tell what is going on. It's a very frustrating game to play. Hitman: Silent Assassin Russian crime lord Sergei Zavorotko is searching for information about the man who killed his brother, Arkadij Jegorov. With the help of a well-informed, unnamed assistant, Sergei heads to the Romanian lab and finds out about 47. Together they hatch a plan to take revenge, steal a nuke, and make 47 do all the work for them. 47 has retired. Living as a gardener at a small rural church he has restored with the last of his money, 47 is shaken out of his peace when mafiosos kidnap the priest running the church. He is forced out of retirement to take contracts from the ICA again. In return, the ICA help him track down the priest's kidnappers. This turns into a sort of "World Tour", with 47 heading to
The agency realizes Sergei has been using them to get a nuke and accepts a contract from the UN to take him down. Returning to Russia, 47 is ambushed by another clone from the asylum: "Agent 17", an older version of himself that Zavorotko and his mystery friend took from the asylum. Killing him and tracing his steps, 47 returns to Italy, confronts Zavorotko in the church, saves the priest and gives up any hope of living a peaceful life, returning to the ICA full time. The mystery man who told Zavorotko about 47, led him to bring 47 out of retirement, and sold him out to the UN, disappears. Gameplay-wise, SA was considered the best in the series for a long time. It introduced pretty rudimentary elements of the game, like being able to knock people out, and a (borderline useless) detection meter. The varied locations, relatively strong visual design, and fun gameplay of the first few missions are what a lot of people remember. At the same time, SA was still an incredibly janky game by today's standards. The game feels a lot like entirely different teams built the different sections of the game, with different world locations representing wholly different design approaches. After Russia, the game has some really unpleasant moments- the highlight being the infamously garbage Hidden Valley map, renowned for its snipers, useless disguises, tremendous length, lack of objectives, and worst of all, the "Truck Glitch". Trucks driving through the map could randomly kill off an NPC at the other end of the map due to a poor scripting, ruining your mission ranking. With that said, it's still where a lot of the standbys of the series were established. Hitman: Contracts 47 has been shot by one of his targets, a police officer who somehow knew his identity and was waiting for him in ambush. Stumbling into a Paris hotel room, he fades in and out of consciousness, reliving distorted, darkened memories of the lives he has taken. Contracts is a sort of best of/remake game, with remade, vastly improved versions of almost all of the missions from the first game, interspersed with new missions. Among them is a remake of the Fuchs hotel mission, starring a new kill opportunity that gets used for the Legacy trailer. In reality, a back-alley doctor sent by Diana sews up 47 and he recovers just in time to evade a massive police raid of the hotel and take out the police chief that shot him. This final mission is heavily inspired by the climax of Leon the Professional. Reconnecting with Diana, 47 finds out that simultaneous attacks have started on all of the ICA's active agents. About to cut his ties with the ICA, 47 finds out that the entire attack appears to have been orchestrated...to get to him. Contracts is my favorite game (aside from the one in this LP). It oozes polish and style (watch that intro cutscene), and is the only one in the series that doesn't have a design-breaking bloodbath or forced non-SA mission somewhere in it. Jasper Kyd's soundtrack really shines, and the effects of 47's coma are integrated into the missions with rain, distortion, and shared imagery from the hotel room. In particular, if you hear a distinctive flickering fluorescent tube sound in the current Hitman, that's an intentional callback to its use as a motif in Contracts. Contracts also had the best progression system of the series in its time, letting the player both unlock weapons in missions by taking them out of the mission, and other weapons by getting an SA ranking on each mission. It's not as well-liked because it's mostly remakes, and wasn't available on steam for a long time due to IP issues with a song in a particular level. Hitman: Blood Money This...gets complex. I'll give the short version. Blood Money was rushed through production and a ton of stuff was cut or rearranged, so bear with me-this is going to be disjointed. Before the events of Contracts, 47 carries out a mission in Central America to take out the leader of the Delgado drug cartel, a renowned cellist. This scene is used for the Legacy trailer. You then play through the Paris mission immediately before being shot, with slight retcons- the police chief who shot 47 was no longer a target, and just ambushed him as he left the scene. Skipping the events of Contracts, 47 arrives in the US, encounters some really offensive African-american stereotypes in a tutorial level, and sets up shop in their former base. His purpose: to hit some mans, to track down who is targeting him and the ICA, and to find out why. In cutscenes between each missions, a reporter interviews Alexander Leyland (urgh) Cayne. Cayne is a former FBI director who was partially paralyzed and put in a wheelchair in an assassination attempt, maybe. Cayne is not trustworthy, and most of the cutscenes are a combination of lies and a plot recap of the games. Among the lies, Cayne talks about how Ort-Meyer's cloning ability has been completely un-replicable, with the nearest match being albino clones that die in a handful of years. In reality, Cayne runs a rival assassin group, the Franchise, that makes albino assassins, and is responsible for the attacks on the ICA. During the missions, which are mostly unrelated, 47 encounters Agent Smith, who is investigating some sort of high-level corruption in the US government. A fake death pill and antidote McGuffin are introduced. Very little happens regarding the whole "attack on ICA" thing aside from Diana mentioning that she is perturbed by it in some mission briefings. Newspapers and side conversations mention the death of the current President, and several references to a strange albino man. 47 stops the assassination of a politician, killing a team of snipers that includes an albino who is running the hit. Eventually, Diana reveals that the ICA is going into hiding because everyone with any public position has been hunted down and killed; she wishes 47 the best and disappears. Agent Smith hires 47 for one last mission- to 1) stop the Franchise's greatest assassin, another albino, from killing the President, and also 2) to assassinate the VP, a Franchise agent. 47 infiltrates the white house (a mission that got IOI a secret service visit), has a very forced "we're not so different" confrontation with the albino clone hitman, and prevails in a weird quasi-forced-loud combat segment. Later, Diana suddenly appears in 47's hideout. She injects him with poison, revealing that she has betrayed the ICA to the Franchise. (47 calls her a bitch, which is just swell). It turns out the Franchise is a segment of the secret shadow gubmint, Alpha Zerox, who attacked the ICA just to get 47's body to create a better breed of clone, and whose other actions throughout the game have had the same goal of exclusive control over cloning tech to make a clone hitman army. Cayne and the reporter arrive at a "funeral" for 47, whose body will be dissected for research. Diana puts on special lipstick and kisses 47, who comes back to life- it was a double cross, and she injected him with the Macguffin earlier. Immediately after she leaves and locks the gate, 47 comes to life. He kills everyone in the building, and disappears. The ICA comes out of hiding and seizes the Franchise's assets. Alpha Zerox disappears to wherever horrible edgy secret society ideas go, never to return. Or will it? Gameplay-wise, Blood Money is well-remembered for its spectacular kills, and for introducing several systems that were demanded by fans, but didn't work very well: customizing weapons and newspapers that adapted to your performance in missions. Blood Money also introduced bullet time shooting and human shield mechanics that would be dropped in the 2016 game, since they incentivize non-stealth gameplay. Every part of the game is rushed, and it really shows. It's very popular, but I found it dull, because there are usually only a couple ways to kill targets, and they're signposted with giant flashing neon lights. You also have infinite coins, which can break the hell out of NPC AI. The game is also the place where the misogyny really begins to shine through- all female characters are supermodels or hags, which is played up for laughs/titillation. The game did begin IOI's interest in crowdgen tech, though it was only used in one mission in this game. It also introduced accident kills, which were probably its most notable design contribution to the series. Hitman: Absolution  Here's the attack of the saints trailer, while I'm at it. Enjoy! Ugh. OK. Again, the plot of this was sliced and diced, so bear with me. I'm...going to skip a lot of this because almost all of it doesn't matter or is a crime against nature. Parts of the plot are a follow-up/sequel to the execrable Hitman novels, in which the ICA is apparently SPECTRE. Bear that in mind. 47 is hired back by the ICA, this time one of the "Division Chiefs", a guy named Benjamin Travis who mostly heads their R&D. His target: Diana Burnwood, his old handler, who has betrayed the ICA somehow and kidnapped a girl they want back. 47 infiltrates her heavily guarded home and surprises her in the shower (because of course). He totally shoots her to death (he doesn't) and takes the girl, Victoria, who was the result of an unapproved attempt by Travis to replicate 47. This makes no sense. Don't worry about it. 47 forms a special father kinship thing with Victoria, which is totally in character, and hides her in a convent/orphanage thing. At this point, unrelated arms dealer Blake Dexter, written as someone who Trump would appoint to run the Peace Corps, interrupts and kidnaps Victoria. What follows are a series of missions involving following people somewhere, evading the massive army of secret forces and heavily armored troops the ICA has now for some reason, repeatedly getting knocked out in cutscenes, missions the size of broom closets, and very little man-hitting. One of the missions takes place in a strip club; a target kill there is used in the Legacy trailer. 47 eventually kills Dexter and several other characters that were ripped off from 90s movies, saves Victoria, and kills Travis, who never had the approval of the ICA to use all their stuff in the first place. 47 returns Victoria to Diana (who is alive!), with whom she will lead a normal life and hopefully not appear as an insult to the writing of female characters ever again. Diana is established to have become one of members of the ICA board of directors for handling the Franchise mess, ousting/getting rid of Travis, and generally managing 47, their invincible murder machine. Several lingering plot threads are left open and will not be resolved because they are all horrible cliched garbage. As I mentioned elsewhere, the game we got was remarkably far less offensive than what was planned. Gameplay. Gameplay. Absolution had really, really pretty graphics and mostly broken gameplay. The only other things that were good were the contracts mode, IOI's groundbreaking development of crowd tech, and some specific improvements to aural signposting that were squandered on a flaming dog turd of a game. One especially infamous problem was the decision to make it so that a given disguise could generally fool anyone not in the same outfit- and then to have many of the missions only have one kind of NPC. As ChaosArgate mentions, Absolution had a finite instinct meter that could be expended to bypass suspicious NPCs (by literally holding a hand up to cover your face), and a point-shooting mechanic more common in action games. Both are gone in the 2016 game, because they are dumb and because going loud in the 2016 game is meant to be a sign you screwed up. Bottom Line plot stuff:
A caveat on all of this: IOI has been willing to rewrite and retcon old plot elements, so some of this may change in HITMAN 2016. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 15:55 on Apr 21, 2019 |
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Mar 16, 2017 10:14
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Fish Noise posted:I wonder if IOI's big takeaway from Absolution was like "Let's make the comedy intentional this time." Yeah, I think that was the case. Reviewing the old games, it's remarkable- the Hitman 2016 devs went all the way back to Codename 47 to find interface and design choices that worked best. These people went through a practically forensic analysis of the series to figure out what would make the ideal Hitman game, including the writing, visual design, everything. I can't see them substantially improving on Hitman 2016. It's an incredible game. For folks who are only experiencing the game through the LP, bear in mind that the Jasper Knight tutorial level is still less than one tenth of the size, complexity, and detail that go into all of the actual missions in the game. The new game also has some things in it that take the piss out of bad decisions in Absolution. edit: A couple more examples of how very on point the IOI trailer game has been: A story trailer for the tutorial levels of Hitman 2016 (no spoilers) A trailer explaining/hyping disguises for Absolution. Note the large number of "joke disguises". A trailer explaining/hyping combat for Absolution. Note the emphasis on combat- and the use of human shields, a mechanic very intentionally dropped for the new game. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Mar 16, 2017 |
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Mar 16, 2017 19:57
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MadScientistWorking posted:Wait what the hell? Please don't tell me the goofy Colorado costume was an Absolution reference. Yes. The scarecrow section was one of the few decently-handled parts of Absolution. The game's still considered canon, technically. Yvonmukluk posted:All your talking about Bond (and yeah, it definitely seems this episode was a glorious Bond homage) makes me wonder why nobody's tried to make a kind of espionage sim like this before. I mean, there was Alpha protocol, but that seemed a lot more conventional action game. There have been a number of others, but this is a genre that's incredibly resource intensive and difficult to make good.
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Mar 22, 2017 18:14
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Ep 3 notes:
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Mar 22, 2017 19:16
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berryjon posted:Yeah, I noticed. Are there levels where drowning isn't the safest bet? Later on there are a couple methods of almost completely safe portable accident kill. Additionally, in many settings targets will go to vomit in a trash can instead of a toilet.
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Mar 22, 2017 20:49
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Mar 26, 2017 04:56
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Jobbo_Fett posted:I know I said I'd LP Absolution for the thread but please don't actually make me do it. I expect informative commentary and 100% completion. That includes getting the inventory items that are glitched into the level geometry and completely beyond reach, and the weapons that are unobtainable because they only appear in levels that are a single quicktime event.
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Mar 30, 2017 05:48
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I worry about the ethics of some of the Hitman social media promotion, given IOI and square's history in the area- but at the same time, the people responsible for actually creating their content are unrelentingly excellent. ChaosArgate, I encourage you to post a certain music video and soundcloud page in advance of a later mission. Heck, posting trailers for future mission eps might generally be a cool way to tease things, given how well they're done...
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Apr 2, 2017 23:18
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I'm phoneposting and will be out of town for a bit, thus unable to do the usual wordsplurge on Sapienza. The voice is not MackDadi, just the face I think. He won a contest involving the hitman absolution sniper challenge, a ground zeroes style teaser for absolution.
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Apr 14, 2017 10:43
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Let me tell you about Murphy's law and multiverse theory.Added Space posted:I'm still pedanticaly irritated in that toilet bowls are specifically designed to prevent people from drowning in them, accidentally or intentionally. 47's just that good.
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Apr 14, 2017 23:47
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Back to the subject of HITMAN's offensive marketing, I had a mini-for-fun contest in the main hitman thread when the game first was coming out:Discendo Vox posted:Thread challenge: Come up with your own tone-deaf advertisement for [HITMAN]! TacticalUrbanHomo posted:47 exsanguinating an anti-FGM activist with a scalpel Zulily Zoetrope posted:47 garrotting a black dude overlaid with his laptop displaying $200k being wired to his account. Brazilianpeanutwar posted:Pictures of real life dead people with the tagline : Silent assassin above them, dotted around high streets and playgrounds for all to see.Guaranteed complaints and controversy. Brazilianpeanutwar posted:I call this one Pussykiller Nckdictator posted:Blood Money had the worst advertisements.
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Apr 28, 2017 20:35
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I guess?)
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CommissarMega posted:What's the boat one? I know the dude below's some British noble who hosed off to Australia. Google sez actress Natalie Wood died on that boat under suspicious circumstances.
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Apr 28, 2017 21:28
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IMJack posted:Who are the not-poo poo publishers willing to take a chance on non-typical games anymore? Bethesda? Starbreeze.
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May 15, 2017 06:27
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There is no other keycard in the consulate basement- the one you pick up is the one the guard leaves there. All guards in the escape tunnel (except for the enforcer in the meeting room) have patrol routes. The guard was taken out before any of those patrol routes, though. Some soldiers are allowed on most of the lower floor of the embassy. There's a keycard sitting on a table that will let you use the side stairs to the basement (or you can walk out the front door). The wineglass is indeed for Strandberg.
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May 17, 2017 16:58
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I'm not the biggest fan of Thailand- its design and layout are quite restrictive compared with any of the other maps, and it has the most scripting bugs of all the missions in Season 1. In particular, detection by roadie NPCs in Jordan's tower is really spotty, which is a problem when there are several rooms full of them.
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May 31, 2017 23:13
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I so, so, so wanted to have a mission infiltrating Cross's island stronghold.
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Jun 16, 2017 18:11
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My beef is this is at least the second one of these illuminati groups the game's had.
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Jul 26, 2017 21:33
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Oh, oh boy. I missed that this was starting. I know much, much too much about Absolution, especially its development, mechanics and the unbelievably awful plot. Ask me anything about the Deep Hitman Lore, or the many, many ways this game is broken, or all the somehow even worse ideas that didn't make it into release. I'll try to go through the LP episodes so far and explain things as best I can when questions are raised about the plot. I'll be out of town for a week in a couple days, but I'll try to get up to speed in the meantime.  Episode 1: It Begins Notes "why does 47 look old?" One of the planned plot elements of the game was that 47 was basically aging out of his Clone Powers, his body was deteriorating and starting to age. "why is Diana giving us a tutorial?" The first mission of the game was hastily rewritten a bunch of times due to the jigsaw mess that was this game's writing. I'm not clear on where it appears in the intended order of things, but the lines from Diana were added later to explain the interface. It does appear that the safehouse was always intended to be a tutorial mission. "I can't believe they implemented VATS in hitman" Most of the systems in hitman are taken from other games and implemented worse, without considering how they'd mesh with a social stealth game. This is at the core of the instinct setup, which was basically a vehicle for bad mechanical experimentation. "Ellen Page needs a longer skirt" Why was she wearing a schoolgirl outfit in the first place?! The scripts for Absolution were originally a snuff film of this character- the story is of 47 watching her get mutilated, tortured, raped, and killed and going on a grindhousey murder streak in response. It was dire, and although 90% of that was excised for her character, they treat almost all the other female characters in similar fashion. Really, every character in Absolution acts like they were written by an MRA south park fan- punching down, casual bigotry and toilet humor are universal. Part of why I talk so much about absolution is because it's a great rhetorical hammer in talking about representation in game writing; no one can be confronted with what the game does and straightfacedly say it's not problematic. "Extended Big Bad Helicopter ride" The tutorial level's plot was one of the things I know was rewritten- I think almost all of the shots of Travis were hastily recut using the helicopter model to explain the revisions. In at least some drafts, 47 has a firefight at the house with Travis and blows off his hand. This is also why Travis' other hand doesn't appear in those suspiciously narrowly shot Helicopter scenes. Travis is also supposed to have an artificial ear; this gets replaced with a bluetooth headset piece thing in later cutscenes. A Note on Lost and Found Lost and Found has entries for all challenges associated with each level, as well as an entry for every item 47 can pick up in the level. For a long time it was impossible to 100% the lost and found system because a couple levels have items glitched into the geometry, removed, or otherwise inacessible. Months after launch, the offending items were removed from Lost and Found on PC. The challenge system can be 100%ed, but it's horribly opaque, like most of Absolution's gameplay mechanics. Generally, Absolution takes a lot of cues from the Hitman novels, which are a thing that exist and are uniformly godawful by all accounts. A lot of the plot and characters from this game are based on one named Hitman: Damnation. One of the most noticeable effects is that the Agency/ICA goes from being an impartial, mysterious assassination contractor that mostly targets criminals (to not destabilize the world too much, which would be bad for them) to something resembling SPECTRE, with a huge bureaucracy and multiple directors, tiers, committees- all after supposedly being mostly wiped out in Blood Money. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 14:39 on Jul 22, 2018 |
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Dec 23, 2017 19:22
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Night10194 posted:Please tell me about the worse ideas that did not make it into this awful thing. god, where to start. To avoid stealing thunder, I'll wait on posting the "making of" documentary that's my source for most of this. Things that stand out from a writing perspective: 1. Victoria was going to be raped by one set of targets, then murdered by another set of targets, all pretty early in the game, probably roughly where the LP is at this point. Most of it was going to be a revenge plot grindhouse thing. Victoria was going to narrate the whole game, as a ghost or something. That's why you hear her in the main menu. The hitman series has always had gender and representation issues, but even as released, absolution was like a bazillion times worse than anything that came before. 2. 47 was going to be a) homeless, b) alcoholic, c) prone to self-harm, d) losing all of his clone abilities and aging/dying/not healing properly, oh, and e) was going to kill himself at the end of the story, which was going to be the opening scene. Gonna do the ol' Solid Snake barrel swallowing routine, iirc. This is why 47 looks old and has dumb scar tissue cutscenes. All of these were going to be true, simultaneously. 3. The whole game was going to be conveyed with the narrative conceit of being sung by a lounge singer. Those are the bits that are most abhorrent at first glance, in a "why do this" way, but they're also just the tip of the iceberg. edit: watching video 2: "I admire a man with the courage to poo poo where he eats." Really? Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Dec 23, 2017 |
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Dec 23, 2017 19:34
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 Episode 2: What Could Have Been Notes The King: Oh yeah, nail meet head- this was a vertical slice proof of concept. That's why nothing about it matches any other part of the plot, why Birdie tells you to do it to get information from him, then wants 47's guns as a price for information in the next scene. The level has a whole heap of unique behaviors that aren't present in any other mission. In particular, if you get near the King while disguised as a cop, he'll turn around and make vaguely ironic insults at you. Repeatedly. At random. With a variable cooldown. Through walls. "Why the pigeons?" Carrier Pigeons. Like most characters made for this game (none of whom appear again), Birdie is a copy of the classic hollywood action movie type, "crazy pigeon man who is also connected informant". Most of the other disposable stereotypes the game trades in are also likenesses that are "Why is there vaseline smeared on the screen?" Grindhouse. Grindy grindy grindy grindy grindhouse. This game approaches stylistic conventions, narrative, visual, everything, like dumping Quentin Tarantino in a sewage vat filled with broken glass. Which, coincidentally, is also something you are encouraged to do to guards in a later mission.  the game."Why does Birdie want the guns?" So that 47 can be symbolically lowered/weakened by having his iconic guns-he-should-never-use taken. Plotwise I think he's planning to sell them, which doesn't really have a coherent motivation. Birdie generally lacks any consistent motivation aside from "is a scuzzball with a lot of vocal fry". He's used as plot lubricant. "This feels like 2016" A bunch of NPC animations, like the King eating at ~11:50, are reused in Hitman 2016. I have to assume the people who came up with this playground level concept are some of the only people who stayed on at IOI after Square axed ~75% of their employees after Absolution. More on that whole relationship some other time. "So, sniping him is a trap" Worth noting that many of the challenges throughout Absolution are traps- not only do they break SA, they also send out a massive alert. There's a tremendous amount of cases where "check out this sweet/funny kill" wasn't integrated into the game at all. "Wow, they really rendered the blood on him" A lot of Absolution's excesses are actually because fans demanded it. Absolution is way more unpleasant than previous games, but the reality is that there was always a line of weird gore sadism running through some aspects of the series, and an associated audience that was always demanding more gorn get added to the next game. On the hitman forums, one of the ongoing complaints was insufficient blood, bullet wounds, or dismemberment with kills. I remember a "why doesn't the shotgun decapitate" thread all too well. This isn't everyone of course, but this minority of users were vocal. In many respects, Hitman Absolution was the game these people wanted, and what they deserved. It does underscore that a lot of effort went into the Absolution graphics, and the game's graphics, especially light and transparency effects, were praised as one of its best features at release. "That outfit looks goofy on him" Many disgises in Absolution are completely useless- they were made for content that was cut, or for jokes, and then mashed into the game somewhere. It's clear that one of the design meetings was simply "what silly outfits can we make 47 wear", and the producer or designer took the list they generated straight to the asset team. A note on pathing and triggers Many events in Hitman Asolution, like Hitman 2016, occur only when the player is able to see them. Unlike Hitman 2016, these actions are often one-time scripted events intended to give the player a specific opportunity. This makes many levels a sort of funhouse ride where small deviations from the designer's intended script will break everything. Even looping behaviors require the ability to read the designer's mind. A great example in this level: right near the exit there's a hanging pallet you can shoot down on the target when he goes to urinate near it. The problem? There are two police standing right nearby. Clearly you have to distract them, or knock them out, right? Well, it turns out if you go to a specific area with a nice line of fire on the pallet opportunity (fully in view of the cops), the pair of police just...walk away. And if you step out of that area? They immediately turn around, midstride, and walk back. No reason, no motivation, just "the player is in the event zone, clear him a magic path". And you have to know this to succeed at the event. There's a lot of this mindreading bullshit required in hitman absolution. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 03:58 on Jun 17, 2018 |
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Dec 23, 2017 23:46
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I’m stuck phoneposting into the new year, but when I get back to my computer I’ll try to get caught up with the absolution play through and my “what is going on here” posts.
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Dec 26, 2017 23:25
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Nalesh posted:Also stereotypical texan dudes face reminds me of someone but I can't put my finger on it. Whah Ah’m shore yew can!! small bit of correction: I said that there were glitched items that made 100%ing the lost and found impossible. It turns out that sometime long after release, these items were finally patched out and the system can be 100%ed. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Jan 6, 2018 |
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Dec 29, 2017 02:33
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 Episode 3: End of the Line Notes "I'm going to point out two things I didn't like about this": The hotel room scenes are recut from the self-harm alcoholic 47 plot material- this is why some of the shots show empty liquor bottles, etc. Cutting off the barcode really, really doesn't make any sense, but it's meant to be some sort of symbolic separation from 47's past as a hitman. No, it doesn't work. Voiceover shenanigans: Birdie mysteriously tells 47 a hotel and room number over the phone in a cutscene, then ingame he has a bunch of additional expository "mission guidance" stuff. Why? Because the cutscene was set up way in advance of the game mission and the two were never clearly reconciled. A character like Birdie (or Diana) is normally used as a VO guide to tell the player what to do, a role that they sometimes play in this game, when 47 isn't monologuing to himself instead. This is an ongoing problem for pacing or explaining objectives in the game. It's made worse because the whole order of missions was scrambled, so they had to re-justify Dexter's insertion into the story at this point. Hence 47's search for Victoria's backstory leading him to the hotel for no reason. Hotel Missions: Hitman as a series is known for iconic missions taking place in hotels, and Terminus was meant to be one of the big setpieces of the game to reflect this. I suspect the dilapidated state of the hotel is meant to mirror 47's state, but that may be giving them too much credit. Without writing an essay on level design, big hotels are actually pretty crappy for social stealth (or most other gameplay purposes). This is why past and future hitman hotels have other defining features, like gardens, thermal baths, casinos, or recording studios in them. Terminus is just a hotel- specifically, a hotel in which 40% of the level is trespassing for all disguises because only guards are allowed, and guards see through other guard disguises. It's meant to act as a parallel to other later missions, but in practice it's just...bad. Pink Flamingoes easter egg The loud phone rant you witness contains several quotes from Divine in the John Waters film, Pink Flamingo. "That guard never moves": Scripted behaviors in Absolution are almost always triggered by player proximity. While 2016 levels are clockwork that partly runs on its own, the linear, more simple nature of absolution means you approach most behavior scenarios from one direction, and the level design is meant to reflect this. I'll point it out in other cases. In this one, the game doesn't anticipate you trying to get through the door from this direction, so the guard, whose animation is meant to have him conveniently facing away from another route, never moves. There's...a lot of this. "This map kinda sucks": The minimap in absolution is basically a transitional relic from previous hitman games. That's...about all I can say in its defense, though. The Z-casted arrows make every area with multiple levels an absolute clusterfuck to parse- as you say they fade to reflect people on even a slightly different level, but it displays all NPCs at all times, so it's a forest of arrows that provides no information. "You have three guards right in front of you": You're actually started on a floor that's not locked down, so your suit is safe in that area. You go up a floor to reach Dexter's room. The projector: The reel is in the room with the projector, as well as in a storage room on the 7th floor (down the fire escape). It plays a censored porn loop that gets reused in several places in the game. Because Absolution. Evidence: It's pure points and an extra challenge for the hardcore. Evidence in many levels is in a hub of enemy activity, to be as difficult to reach as possible without killing or subduing someone- sometimes, 12 or 15 someones. "You still have to pick the lock, which is a little annoying": Hitman loves lockpicking and keycard processing as an area transition. This is done to try to force the player to subdue guards or use a disguise, as well as to buffer the next area- enemies frequently patrol or stand practically on top of these transition doors. Wait, we didn't kill anyone!: Absolution is not the first hitman game to have transition levels with no targets you have to kill; it just has way, way more of them, with many functioning as glorified cutscenes. Of the 20 multi-segment "missions" in Absolution, 8 have no actual target kills- and in missions with targets, many segments are just transition areas, and the targets are just people who are along the route with a very weakly contrived reason for killing them. This is mostly notable because even in past hitman games, such "transition" stealth levels were already regarded as the very weakest in the series. "How many times are we going to repeat that the story and tone drop the ball"?: So, so so many times. Such as in the next cutscene! A note on Hitman Absolution challenges: Each mission in Hitman Absolution has some routine challenges: pick up all disguises, clear undetected, clear suit only, clear the mission, complete a set of other challenges/all challenges. There are also challenges for killing targets in various ways laid out through the level, some straightforward, some moderately obtuse or unhelpful. Unfortunately, some challenges in Hitman Absolution also involve performing actions unrelated to skilled execution of core gameplay. Some are set in your path- all are designed to show off some "cool" moment the developers added that the player might otherwise miss. There's a challenge for pulling the guard receiving good health news out the window in the first mission, for example. Others are extremely obscure. These are made much worse because the requirement for completion isn't stated. The player just gets the title, an icon, and some flavor text. These "hidden" challenges can be fairly obtuse. For example, Terminus has "Housekeeping", a challenge for killing 10 goons without being seen. The hint is "It's time to take out the trash.", but hiding bodies isn't necessary for it. Many of these are very frustrating to identify without a guide. They're not the big problem in Absolution's challenges, though. The big problem is the multipart challenges. Each mission in Absolution has a multi-part challenge. For example, Terminus has The Electrician - Part I ("A tool of many uses") and The Electrician - Part II ("They never knew what hit them."). The latter can only be completed after the former, on a subsequent run of the mission. Here's what they require: Part 1: Kill an enemy using the screwdriver, whilst wearing the Electrician Disguise and remaining unseen. Part 2: Kill five enemies using the screwdriver, whilst wearing the Electrician Disguise and remaining unseen. This is one of the least obscure of the multipart challenges. While missions with targets often use these challenges to try to signpost a particular approach (The King of Chinatown used them to show the player they could disguise themselves as the drug dealer), these challenges don't actually explain what they require, and in missions without targets, often require running around the map killing everyone, or doing something dumb you'd never want to do otherwise. This is a general trend at several levels of Absolution's design. The producers/designers didn't seem willing to remove something if it seemed "cool". I'll point out some of the other really abusive ones. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Jul 4, 2018 |
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Jan 8, 2018 04:22
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That's fair, Dabir. I was just really frustrated by how many of them there are. A lot of them are just "kill several enemies undetected with X unhelpful weapon/disguise combo" with some added element at the final stage. It's almost, almost like they were trying things that would become escalations.
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Jan 8, 2018 17:26
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I’ Try to catch up with my write ups tomorrow, sorry for the delay.
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Jan 27, 2018 04:24
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 Episode 4: Catch and Release Notes: Ugh, this and the next one are going to be really long. Much like the game's missions, these are going to be uneven in length. "How do you feel about Danny Trejo?": Danny Trejo here is not licensed. They also went all out with the Mexican stereotype with this guy, which you'll see eventually. Getting caught in cutscenes: Having the player character gently caress up and get knocked out/fail in a cutscene is almost always a sign of bad writing- it's particularly bad in games where the player avatar is both a) ranked on their performance and b) generally supposed to be perfect. This issue was really apparent during the period around when Absolution came out, as Thief 4, Batman Arkham Origins, and, of course, Absolution, traded in hamfisted cutscene failure as a plot progression mechanism. Note that what triggers this failure by 47 is that he blindly tries to kill a guard that's obviously inhumanly huge. 47, the perfect assassin, fails because he's suddenly an incompetent moron, even if you perfectly ghosted the whole hotel. "By the way, if the game hasn't been offensive yet..." : The casual sexual harassment, Not-Danny-Trejo, the hispanic hotel cleaner stereotype- these are all really, really mild compared to the stuff that's coming. "If he's a ghost or a myth how does anybody know about him": We actually do have a canonical explanation for this one. The "Hitman Sniper Challenge, a teaser game that was used to promote Hitman Absolution, stars 47 taking out the head of Stallion Armaments, a Dexter Industries competitor. According to teaser "ICA files" trailers, Blake Dexter was the client for that job. A note on character: Remember how Dexter's secretary behaves, and her characterization in this scene. It's not going to match any of her later appearances. Blake and Sanchez also change character and behavior over the course of the game, but Layla Stockton (the assistant) is by far the most egregious. I think this comes down to VA work being recorded at different times, and more importantly, the devs not bothering to keep their scripts coherent. "The timeline here is not going to make any sense": As you say, this scene (like most of the cutscenes) was really hastily put together to remix the entire order of missions for this game. They needed a way to justify the hotel being on fire and the police chasing 47. Everything else was just to get to that point. The dude in the door: Note that the african american figure in the door is a prominent character in the plot of Absolution- but his voice isn't heard coming from behind the door when the scene transitions to gameplay. Even more than Birdie, he's consigned to cutscenes. More on his IP-infringing rear end later. Useless Disguises: This level is a strong example of the like-sees-through-like disguise system in Absolution: Every single armed enemy and "guard" in the next several areas is able to see through the police disguise, which is also the only thing available for most of it. In principle, Instinct can be burnt to get past them, but it's not consistent or clear. It gets better, though: the whole like-sees-through-like? It's bullshit and it's ignored for many outfits. If you grab a SWAT uniform when it's available, all the police can still see through it! "I try not to ask questions at times": The library and following setpieces were another set of areas used to demo Absolution during the runup to launch. This is another particularly polished and atmospheric area, though the heavy scripting of the transitional bits is still really noticeable. The levels are ultimately a series of corridors, and if you're trying to sneak through there are a number of points where there's only one path you can take. In general, these were meant to be impressive setpieces, and making their existence coherent never occurred to the developers. Mysterious frame drop: I can't be sure, but the problem may be because the game is simultaneously trying to get all the police in the level to path into the back area you're in, which is also undergoing a scripted set of lighting flashes that do shiny, impressive atmospheric things to the light coming in through the windows, reflected off of every surface in the room. Under normal circumstances you'd be off on the edge of the room at this point, and there would be much fewer enemies here. "So, what is that icon": Hitman Absolution's developers used placeholder assets made out of concept art for their HUD. "Not gonna go down that hole?" Wow, I never knew that was there. It's not really possible to ever go to that side of the map while stealthing- there's no way forward over there. I think that hole must be for stashing bodies? "That's kinda cool, but also why would you want to do that?" Yes. Exactly. "The Helicopter- hold forward, the level" Gosh, that sure is a lot of cover being blown perfectly into place to avoid that helicopter! Well, there's a reason: in the demo, the helicopter is actually constantly firing at you (as police choppers come equipped with miniguns). In the final game, it only opens fire if it gets to detect you. If I had to guess, this level was originally going to tie in with Birdie somehow, seeing as how it's a pigeon coop. But who knows. "Were they trying to make a stealth game, or what?" I don't know, either. How many more segments- urggh, this mission is so lonnnnng...huh, I never knew that little vent was there. Other people in the elevator: This was in the demo version of the level. It was cut because they couldn't get it to make sense- the missing person poster in the elevator depicts the elevator operator (who has a unique model and lines that the devs spent time on, for some reason) as an easter egg reference to that. The Train Station: This is actually my favorite setpiece in the game. You missed the tooltip, but the crowd is actually very strong cover for 47 as long as you're standing still. This creates some really nice social stealth, and the final wait for the train creates a great sense of escalating tension as police move through the crowd checking faces. Trainstation Bonus Image  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 14:43 on Jul 22, 2018 |
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Feb 5, 2018 05:10
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Sorry, I actually knew that one, but I screwed up the description of the helicopter behavior. I'll revise. I'll do a writeup of the Especially Horrible Episode this evening.
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Feb 6, 2018 22:57
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Trigger warning: sexualized violence Episode 5: 1 Forward, 2 Back Notes Wade: He is indeed wearing braces, has a bunch of weird style elements (like his clothes and car) taken out of a Tarantino movie, and is intentionally unpleasant. Like most of the other male antagonists in this game, in earlier versions he would have raped and/or killed Victoria. As it stands, our friend here doesn't have enough time in the game to be well-developed as a character. Lenny...well, I'll leave Lenny for later. "It's a villain sure, but it's for the wrong reasons" covers a lot of it. "I- I didn't like this guy" That homeless man you knocked out for no reason (he doesn't even effect your ranking) was probably meant to be a recurring character based on some of the other cut material. He actually delivers a lot of exposition about the next few levels, Wade the Vixen Club, etc if you don't attack him out of the blue, you monster. "I had completely forgotten about this level" This sums up the material from this mission nicely. It manages to be simultaneously highly offensive, and ultimately forgettable. I honestly forgot this whole starting alley area, and I'm not sure I ever encountered that completely contextless shrine. Setpieces, locations, moments, and Hitman "what was the point of this level, then?!" Many games are largely constructed of setpieces and cool locations that are justified and strung together by a plot after the fact. The Hitman series does this a lot, and it's not necessarily a terrible practice if done well- HITMAN 2016 used this approach to some degree and almost entirely gets away with it. What makes Absolution "special" is that the effort to justify and include these setpiece levels fails so catastrophically, but the levels were still left in. The vast majority of the game is tiny significant pieces, characters, kills, and moments that the developers thought were cool, that were fully developed and built out, with no justification whatsoever, or only the barest minimum. The entire content of this video likely started with a meeting where "47 kills target through viewing booth at strip club" was added to a list, and then other things were attached to that single moment to pad out the level. This episode, even more than other Absolution sections, is a junkyard of abandoned concepts. I think that to no small degree, these abandoned elements had to be left in the game, because otherwise it would be about one sixth of its actual length. Many scored areas of the game have one or two flimsily put together pieces in it, and is otherwise a corridor leading to a door to be lockpicked. It's a bad look. The Vixen Club Note that the main floor of the club is completely useless as a game space. There's nothing you can do there because you're surrounded by people. It exists only to display the strippers, a really bad disco ball kill, and for an opening cutscene that I think was cut. "I'm really anoyed by these lockpicks" These were added to levels to keep the player from rushing out of the level by distracting guards. They also act as a buffering period for the area past the door. The problem with this is probably immediately evident- worse computer, longer loading time, longer lockpick, harder to actually clear the door in stealth. "That seems really contrived and kind of stupid" I'll not bring it up again, but just remember that every single element tying any level to the next one was created at the last second, out of whole cloth. "Hawaii," writing, gender, etc Other stealth games that have a female daughter proxy character being held in a pleasure house, like Dishonoured's Golden Cat level. The general writing trick is the same- here's your daughter proxy, here's her in danger, here's her implicitly threatened with the corrupting influence of this den of debauchery, and oh, we get to show scantily clad women in trailers. This isn't a particularly good way to go about writing a game- it's hamhanded and obvious, and sometimes it's vaguely exploitative of the sexuality of a character that's often a minor and also coded to be related to the player-proxy character (Bioshock 2 and infinite got criticised for the weirdly male gazey aspects of the daughter proxies in those games). Hitman Absolution, though, breaks bold new ground in its approach. A large contingent of NPC conversations throughout the material in this video is about Hawaii- most of them are walked past or interrupted with violence in the video, which is just fine by me. You thankfully just shot all the police in the area after the scene with the safe, so I get to fill you in! These police spend time debating the voluntariness and morality of stripping as a job, discussing the value of the women who disappeared...meanwhile, in the abandoned area you were in is a room with a "Hawaii" photo backdrop, a chair with restraints, a video camera, and a collection of sex and torture instruments.  You can tell that someone was really happy and proud of the concept of a strip club where performers were being raped and killed for snuff films in a side building, with a euphemistic name. It appears extremely probable that at one point this was going to be what would happen to Victoria, too. I don't know if she was going to die there, or if that would come later, but the goal was to use the level to establish the revenge motivation and really make the player hate Wade and the other creepy male villains. Of course, the devs of Absolution are also trying to titillate the user with the environment. Kinda...hard to tell how that would work. If you're stealthing all of this, you wind up going up some stairs. Shortly before the exit there's a set of police who are blocking your way- the guy who is "sure there's a dead body around here somewhere" and his team. While it's possible to just sneak past, your intended solution is to find the dead body of the stripper who had been raped, tortured and killed in this area, and drop her corpse immediately behind him from the upper level. This leads the police away.  Note the partial decay, bruises and ligature marks. Someone had to texture that. I hate this game. The fireworks They fill the whole area with smoke, iirc. It's a similar effect to the smoke on the rooftop of the Terminus escape, and comes up a couple more times in similar "transition" maps further on in the game. That whole level is just there to show off that opportunity. Chinese New Year This is the other fairly sandboxy level with some amount of variety. The problem is that several opportunities are one-offs that are effectively on timers from when you enter the level. There are a few other maps with interesting/semi-fun design choices, but this is the last really large sandbox level where social stealth really comes into play. As others have said, the different opportunities are on scripts that don't sync well. There's also a lot of invisible border pathing that makes no sense. By far the most egregious bit, though, is that the target with the gas leak opportunity pretty much solely hangs out in a small area with two entrances. Both entrances are right next to each other. both of them are watched, to varying degrees, but a chef and a police officer. The frustrating part? The entire area is considered trespassing for both outfits. The only way to get in cleanly is to abuse the fact that instinct gives you a degree of detection immunity if you're burning it while you enter a trespassing area, or to take advantage of a weird "spin in place" move that the chef does when his routine resets. Paging Boardroom Jimmy I'm going to guess that Swordplay - Part III is the challenge you were thinking of. Am I right? would you like to do the honors of explaining what it entails? I need to go take a boiling shower after this video. Have you seen this duck 22:40. "six maps!" Seven, actually- this was the longest bit of the game, and it makes you feel every second of it. Like many ubisoft open world games, Hitman's first and second acts are interminable, and the last parts are tiny and rushed by comparison. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 14:41 on Jul 22, 2018 |
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Feb 7, 2018 04:44
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Boardroom Jimmy posted:No, the one I'm thinking of comes much later on.  well, reinstalling now to refresh myself on this and related stuff.
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Feb 7, 2018 19:22
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I've got some more design notes, but mostly I just want to vent. Since you can't see enemies aside from watching them directly or by burning instinct yo see their path, and since most disguises don't work, there's no way to see and know and respond to enemy movement patterns. Navigation of just about every single level in Absolution is trial-and-error. Infuriating, and especially so when paired with inconsistent behavior scripting and difficult-to-parse vision cones for enemies. I started into getting the challenge Boardroom Jimmy mentioned, but I ran out of patience pretty fast. edit: oh god I just realized something terrible about that challenge, curse you Jimmy now I have to get it. I'll preach about it when we get to it in the LP. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 04:52 on Feb 16, 2018 |
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Feb 9, 2018 02:03
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 21:40 |
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  Note the partial decay, bruises and ligature marks. Someone had to texture that. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Feb 9, 2018 |
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Feb 9, 2018 19:44
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