Drowning, with options - Let's Play HITMAN 2016

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Drowning, with options - Let's Play HITMAN 2016

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Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

CommissarMega posted:

...yeah, someone should ask the cops to look through the writers' basements

I don't have the time to look up the whole credits set now, but if I remember correctly, there are something like 25 writer credits on Absolution. Like 3 of them, mostly working incidental dialogue, weren't fired and went on to do all the writing for HITMAN 2016.

Ah, here's the post. Don't go to its source, it has a bunch of Absolution spoilers and stuff I want to contextualize further down the line:

Discendo Vox posted:

Oh, they had a writer. Specifically, they had three writers, five people doing "additional writing", a scriptwriter, four people on additional scriptwriting, two people who wrote a "screenplay", and a separate dialogue writer. Only one of the dialogue guys, one of the scriptwriters and the third writer (who appears to have been brought in for damage control) is still with IOI. It looks like a publisher or a producer finally looked at it at the eleventh hour, 'd and axed a ton of poo poo to get it out the door. The plot was rearranged several times, which is part of why it's so bonkers.

I need to emphasize that although it's in vogue to blame publishers, as best as I can tell all fault for Absolution belongs with IOI. Square-Enix were left holding the bag after the devs burnt through their whole schedule and budget, and had to cobble a game together from what was left. Think Kojima, but without the prior cultish body of goodwill to keep the project afloat and funded past any sensible limit.

edit: god help me I'm playing through again to get 100% completion. the sightline, pathing, animation design...it's all so, so, so bad...

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Feb 10, 2018

# ¿ Feb 10, 2018 08:25

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 03:06

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I am trespassing, in a suit. This guard cannot see me. There are no special "it is dark, reduced sightlines" effects going on here.
I am completely safe.

Completely safe.

edit: sorry for posting so much, I'm just falling out of love/onto door handles with this game all over again here.

edit: I'm 100%ing Hitman Absolution. May god have mercy on my soul.

...just completing the weapon customization takes about 40 million dollars of playing contracts mode.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 02:28 on Feb 16, 2018

# ¿ Feb 12, 2018 00:10

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Episode 6: Shitman Absolution Notes

That outfit: fwiw IOI has been trying to get priest outfits for 47 for some time, he also wore one in Blood Money. The devs really like their nonspecific christian imagery. No clue why Birdie just happens to have a priest outfit in 47's size in his bus. As always, the devs had to retrofit a justification for each mission leading into the next.

"well that's convenient because something terrible's about to happen here": Yeah, they needed an excuse to get rid of the kids in the violent setting, while still doing the whole "creepiness and violence in children's setting" schtick. BTW, no, there's never a stated reason why the leader of the nuns knows 47, though given past games, maybe it's that he paid for the orphanage or something trite like that.

A Note on Settings There was a tremendous amount of time and money spent on so many of the locations and environments in Absolution, and I don't want that to be overlooked. There's a bunch of unique drawings and a "GET WELL VICTORIA" banner in the background used only in this one room, that does some nice storytelling work. The game has a lot of these touches, and that's a significant resource cost. Even the boring alleyway levels have a lot of time and effort put into them. It's really tragic that so many of these carefully crafted details were in service to such a hateful, wasteful product.

Daughter issues The whispering "one will harm you ever again" carrying scene is atrocious. This behavior from 47 makes no sense and doesn't sync well with any of his characterization elsewhere in the series. 47 having a magical soft spot for daughter proxy NotEllen Page is a core plot element of the game, but it makes no sense and comes out of nowhere. Like the whole "getting knocked out in cutscenes" bit, the use of a daughter proxy to undergo sexual and physical threat is a cliche that a lot of games from this period use, but none of them mangle it as badly as Absolution does.

"The power is cut- I don't know why" Wade's people cut it.

Fuses: I took a look around the level; the fuses are canonically in their positions because they're going to be installed in their respective locations. Each one has a small clipboard (which is also used as a color contrast to highlight its location) with installation instructions.

The Guard: he was gutshot before you arrived.

A Note on Syringes Syringes gently caress up the game's scoring, due to an oversight. A stealth kill with a syringe counts simultaneously as a silent kill and a pacification, and it kills the target, but doesn't apply the non-target kill penalty. As a result, the best score in this level requires jabbing every enemy to death with the syringe, then hiding every single one of their bodies.

Oh, also all the innocent victims whose deaths you have nothing to do with. You can hide their bodies for bonus points, too.

Rosewood and Fuses: This place is nominally an orphanage, but it's set up like it's more of a hospital than anything else. Idk. It's clear that the fuse objective was created to give players a goal and let them experience the vicarious violation of the orphanage without any actual, you know, killing targets. The devs came up with a cool environment and set of enemies (Wade's men are junkie lowlife criminal psychos) and just...made it. Without really fitting any of the core gameplay into it. Since there's a unique "leader" guard model, I think originally you were going to kill some of Wade's lieutenants in this area before moving on- they might have been holding the fuses.

Lenny Let's just keep experiencing the joys of Lenny's character. It's going to keep getting worse. The scene where he shoots a nun in the face is the closest to cleanly sympathetic characterization he gets.

Wade Bye Wade. What a detailed character you were. I'm so glad those other characters in other levels talked about how you were a brutal rape-murderer. My guess is that the original drafts really, really leaned into the rape material with Wade, and that's part of why he's such a nonentity ingame. The "fight level" against him, of course, exists only to remove him and have a spot for that "iconic" Press E Kill. If you go forward instead of turning the wheel, you're locked into a point shooting attack. If you ignored the sidepath and just walked straight up to his location, he and his remaining crew will ambush you in a point shooting moment. That one's at least a bit amusing, because after all the other enemies attack (though weirdly they fire no bullets), Wade flies into view sideways in a John Woo dive.

Addendum on Syringes There are three challenges for using the syringe to get silent kills on the level. The first two are straightforward, but the third apparently requires you get 1 silent kill, then 4 more within ~2 minutes of the first. There's no information about exactly what the challenge requires, unfortunately, because the description says nothing different for the third part. There's a trick to it, though. Take the syringe with you to the hospital basement. For some reason, the requirements glitch out and you no longer have to get silent kills to get the challenge.

Rosewood Image Bonuspost

The aforementioned clipboard used to highlight/explain fuses.

Another clipboard, in the room the fuses are placed in.

As one of Wade's crew, you can hide at these banks of pamphlets. This makes no sense, and suggests the level was once going to be more social stealth-y.

...yes, they went there. Are you surprised at this point?

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 14:47 on Jul 22, 2018

# ¿ Feb 17, 2018 03:52

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Fish Noise posted:

So you can just

play a game within a game of Viscera Cleanup Detail?

Yes. There are a couple other levels where this happens too.

Btw Jobbo, just to be sure you're aware,

The first in a series of bonus videos for ChaosArgate's great Hitman (2016) thread

# ¿ Feb 17, 2018 16:39

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I'm at like 80%, aside from the miserable contracts mode grind, and I keep finding more reasons to loving hate Absolution. All this time since I first posted about it like a year ago, I was worried someone would challenge me on the game's use of an antisemitic stereotype in one of the levels. I'd needed to squint a bit to realize what they were going for with that one. I just replayed it, and I had nothing to worry about- it's a fuckin' lot more explicit than I remembered.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 02:38 on Feb 19, 2018

# ¿ Feb 19, 2018 02:33

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Boardroom Jimmy posted:

No, the one I'm thinking of comes much later on.

Dear Boardroom Jimmy,

gently caress YOU

kindest regards,

Discendo "I just spent 40 minutes on that run, there were fewer than 10 enemies left, now I have to wait forever for a pair of goons to walk down a balcony again" Vox

While I'm at it, have some "amusing" background images and details from the LP so far. This won't be a regular thing, I just need to vent more. I'm also going through and adding details to previous writeups.

Rosewood

The aforementioned clipboard used to highlight/explain fuses.

Another clipboard, in the room the fuses are placed in.

The high score board at the shooting range.

Trainstation

This image appears along one train platform, and in one room that the player never needs to go into, as far as I know. Again, a lot of characters, concepts and assets got generated for this game and then cut- then were positively fetishized by the devs in a thousand easter eggs and incidental references.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Jul 4, 2018

# ¿ Feb 21, 2018 03:58

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Hey, no fair doing multiple eps in one video, now it's going to take me even longer to catch up!

Yes, Lenny offers to give you a "real good reacharound," I forget the cause.

Just...think about how much time and money went into that last scene.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2018 18:33

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Episode 7: Angry Barfly Notes

"Custom Keyfob":
Yup, it's a skull.

The drive:
They're going for a whole "these images and stress are reminding 47 of his murder of Diana" with parallel cuts bit, here, but it's as tasteless as possible, using sex ad silhouettes to cut to a woman in a shower being shot.

Special shoutout to about 2:50 in the video, where Blake is compared to the presidents on Mount Rushmore while he waxes on the American dream. God the writer was so full of themselves.

Millions! Millions!
Like the Austin Powers joke, in this game universe, "millions of dollars" is a lot of money. Also casually calling Jade a "bitch". This is a theme.

"even the editor got tired of flashbacks":
Spoiler alert. The editor will never tire of it.

WHY
Rather than waste time talking about the gameplay of the bar (there's really nothing y'all didn't cover), I just want to point out that 47, after a run-in with Blake Dexter, needs to use Lenny's name, which is on a matchbook for some reason, to go to a bar in Hope, SD to find out who was behind the kidnapping. Remember that he had to go to the bar to get this information, to know to go into town after Lenny. Remember how little sense this makes. (of course the reality is that the devs wanted a barfight level, in contradiction of the rest of the game design ethos, so they inserted it).

The if you wanted to do the Hundred Percent collection run" defense:
Not really. Even Lost and Found (which I'm planning to get into later) is really dumb and simple in this level. Kane has a smg, there's a billspike by the bartender...you have to clear the mission without getting in a fistfight. That's about it. As deep as a puddle.

Episode 8: Range Day

Travis:
Tavis Benjamin is a Division Chief for the International Contract Agency. He has a long backstory that's mostly irrelevant, except that he had a history of moderate psych problems when he started out, is "ambitious", and personally came up with a number of programs and initiatives for the Agency while in a tech/research role. As you can tell, the Agency is basically SPECTRE meets COBRA in this game, what with their Mobile Lair Command Yacht. That will intensify. Absolution makes a number of references to ranks, systems, etc in the ICA that make no sense or are never mentioned again. Travis's tie pattern is stylized ICA logos. I like to think it's standard issue.

Like the robohand? As I mentioned earlier, 47 was originally going to shoot Benny boy here during the opening mission, hence the cybernetics. Of course, actually rendering something like that hand in-game is resource intensive...I'm sure the eventual confrontation with Travis will do it justice. He has a robot ear, too, in theory, but it mostly looks like he has a bluetooth headset.

Jade:
You pretty much cover her. She's female, hence a subject of abuse, and asian, hence stereotypes. At 1:03 in the video, you can see her dress has the agency logo on the collar. This nonsensical branding of a secret organization will also intensify.

The Hitman Novels
The ICA's depiction in Absolution is at least partially taken from the Hitman novels, Enemy Within and Damnation, which I haven't read but which are apparently execrable even by video game novel standards. These books were also the basis of much of the plot of Blood Money. It appears that Travis and Jade were both introduced in those novels, and that they were intended to be canon. Thread, let's be serious for a moment. I love you. I respect you. I long for your approval, as a substitute for the emotional distance and abuse doled out by my mother. I don't love you enough to read the Hitman novels for you. That would just be perpetuating the cycle of abuse.

"this huge puppetmaster":
Birdie's a combination of plot lubricant and a mary sue; an incredible spy/information broker former Agency employee who can reach anyone, anytime, via magick, and plays all the other characters off of each other for no clear reason. He also has an inconsistent hispanic accent.

"he shows up in this random spot":
This bit is explained- Birdie sent 47 to this store with a phone call in the last mission. Gosh, I can't believe you're not attending to the Deep Plot of Hitman Absolution.

Microphone Man:
Hey, a deformity as a personality trait! I sure do love Quentin Tarantino! The laryngyal voicebox is hard to render, so he talks fine without it in the main level.

"there's stuff you can do, I guess..."
This level actually has a fair amount of depth and options; you can knock out Mic Man and pick up the key for the silverballers from his safe with the combination he drops. There's also a side range shooting gallery, some easter eggs (a set of references to the latest tomb raider game, for instance, such as a range bag with Croft's name on it), and a bunker in the back of the range with an Ultramax (a boxfed LMG that's this game's poor substitute for the classic Hitman Minigun) inside, etc. The range is a nice concept, sort of, but of course, it doesn't support a level design. It's a lousy, shallow fairground attraction- it's just had more time put into it than the previous one.

Up your arsenal Challenges
These three get a special mention for being so obtuse. Each requires beating the range challenge with certain weapons, but there's no indication which. The description is just "Stick to your guns. All of them." For the first level, you actually have to use one of the less common pistols. For the second, you have to use the Ultimax. For the third, you have to use Lynch's shotgun, and maybe you can use the sniper rifle hidden in the back of the range (I can't be sure, because the game is so reviled there isn't a consistent set of challenge descriptions). I, of course, thought I had to clear the range challenge with every gun in the level. I also didn't realize that using point shooting with some guns swaps you to your pistols, which inconsistently invalidates the run with the other weapon. fun.

Birdie's Gift Bonus Image

The high score board at the shooting range.

PS Boardroom Jimmy, I know you said it was bad, but...I think it may be bad in ways you hadn't considered. I...I don't know what I'm going to do to deal with this, now...

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 16:00 on Nov 13, 2018

# ¿ Mar 1, 2018 01:19

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Jobbo_Fett posted:

If Absolution was a good game I'd be more thorough in the vids.

You're giving the game the LP it deserves.

Boardroom Jimmy posted:

And as far as that other challenge is concerned, I can think of one thing that could ruin a run at it. But really, it's just a terrible challenge all around for oh so many reasons.

God. You've got no idea what you've done, do you.

Edit: I was driving toothpicks up under my fingernails (as it�s a Thursday night) and a complete reworked Hitman Absolution, plot, design and gameplay, sprang into existence before my eyes. When this LP is over, I�ll share my vision with you all.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 06:47 on Mar 2, 2018

# ¿ Mar 1, 2018 04:29

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

ChaosArgate posted:

Oh my god what have we done to you

It's now five pages of notes. It's like 50/50 game mechanic and plot revisions. I am a thoroughly broken man. I'll wait to share until the end of the absolution run.

edit: 9 and a half pages, 5000 words. It's done. If you were playing Hitman Voxolution, it'd be over by now- it's got a total of 9 missions.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 05:34 on Mar 6, 2018

# ¿ Mar 5, 2018 17:20

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Episode 9: Two-Bit Villain Notes

Jade/Intro:
Jade has virtually no characterization aside from, as you noted, being a broad Asian stereotype. She was probably meant to set up a parallel between Travis and Dexter, two powerful male antagonists with female assistants, but that goes nowhere.
This screen shows up briefly- it's pretty comedic that a figure like 47, normally supposed to be top secret even within ICA, would have a giant profile pic displayed on the wall like this.

Note the "Death as business" at the bottom, a lovely translation of "Merces Letifer", or "lethal trade", the motto of the ICA. For comparison, here's the ICA logo(warning, huge):

Note the IOI. It's based off of the original emblem for MI5.

Let's get the setting out of the way.
Hope:
Located at the intersection of Arizona, Texas, and South Dakota (the latter being its canonical location), Hope was one of the biggest resource sinks of Absolution's development. The basic idea is that Dexter's company came and revitalized a failing town, with the trade-off being that it's now a company town: Dexter controls everything through Lenny, Sanchez and the corrupt sheriff.

Hope is an interesting concept for a game, especially one that wants to dwell on themes from latter-era Western films- the role of industry and the frontier, etc. It's also completely inappropriate for a game like Hitman-nothing about the layout of a smallish, flat town filled with armed modern midwest stereotypes works well for a social stealth assassination game. Hope was going to be the setting of the entire game at one point in production, and like everything else there's a metric ton of assets developed for it that were cut. Cutscenes, levels, dynamics, plot arcs- the whole shebang. IoI actually sent some of their creatives to South Dakota to travel around and take photos of things. They generally did the same thing they did with the Chicago areas. Someone hit on a group of general themes and a setting, then just...sort of messed around in them. A huge number of ideas and assets were made and dropped, wasting money and time for months with no plan. Of particular note on the cutting room floor are:
1. A massively obese troglodytic old lady stereotype. "Big Momma" was going to sit on a porch with a shotgun and be a sort of super-sentry- probably the porch you enter at 5:05. This charming fixture had her assets reused for some other NPCs we'll see in the next video, and the whole game is replete with references to her. You pass by a photo of her at 11:18 in the video (there are at least two variants with romantic captions), but there are a ton of other references.
2. A chili sauce factory that reached almost full beta status before being cut, wasting weeks, if not months, of man-hours. There's a chipmunk mascot costume in a couple levels of Absolution- it's a joke "trespassing everywhere" outfit that's used in some challenges, and it was originally the chili sauce's mascot, taken from this cut level. There are a lot more of these.

On to the regular level comments.

"too late, they're already here"
idgi.

"he has a bunch of high schoolers for his crew?"
The Cougars, Lenny's gang, are normally Dexter's enforcers in town. They're all nebulously adult-age, despite wearing outfits and having a bunch of traits right out of Grease. They all despise Lenny.

"I don't know that we ever meet Darien"

(It's implied that Darien was a Cougar who angered Dexter somehow and was beaten to death, possibly by Sanchez).

High Wire Act:
if you look at the power lines running along the main street, you may see them flopping around oddly. The game does a really weird thing with any sort of hanging wire asset- it's effected by physics (wind, gravity etc), but in an apparent attempt to save memory it unloads the asset when you look away, then reloads it in a default state whenever you look back. So every time you look up, the wires pop in and suddenly flop downward, effected by gravity. This happens everywhere there are wires. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

Weird dead end (one of many)
There's a keycard door underground in the entrance to the junkyard- just past a vat of tar you can push one of the targets into. The keycard is, annoyingly, all the way across the map in the garage. Your reward upon getting in is...a save point, a wrench, and a mechanic's outfit. I have no idea why it's there, unless this was originally a different way into the second half of the mission.

The car lift thing:
You can also use it to kill one of the targets.

"There's no reason to kill these guys":
The game actually does provide a mostly cromulent reason to kill the Cougars. We're killing them both a) to get to Lenny, and b) because they're planning to steal Victoria and sell her to a rival arms manufacturer, Stallion Armaments. This is actually conveyed in the car conversation cutscene from the beginning of the level. It's a weak contrivance, but it's been there for a long time. These two Hope levels are some of the most internally consistent and coherent in the game, because they were released very early on as more demo material. Now, in connection with everything else, no, they make zero sense. But internally their reasoning mostly works.

Note the "I'd do her!" under Victoria's image and the note to kill Lenny. The Stallion Armaments contact on the right is a generic civilian NPC wearing an american flag jacket, presumably used in some cut content.

Level Layouts/Transitions:
It might not seem that way, but it's pretty close to consistent. You're heading into a back outbuilding on the barbershop grounds (which have been taken over by Lenny's gang as a clubhouse). The front window is wrong, but I think that's about it. I suspect that Shaving Lenny and Streets of Hope were originally one map that were split up pretty early in construction due to resource limitations. As it stands, most of the exterior is consistently modeled in the Streets level.

A note on the switch:
In the area next to the clubhouse with all the buzzing wires, one of the targets will periodically urinate against a wall. You can electrify him there, but you have to loosen a wire, something you can only do if you're holding a wrench. There's a wrench right there, but there's also no other sign that this is required, this sort of item key scenario never comes up again, and the prompt is just gone if you don't have the wrench out. :shrug:

Once you do it, then you can use the switch nearby to get the kill.

A Note on Thrown Objects:
Thrown objects in Absolution are either things that embed in and kill the target, or they're only good as destractions. No knocking people out with thrown items.

Pizza and Kidnapping Lenny:
The Pizza's only eaten by Lenny- it's his "special #2 pizza, Chicago Style" (the other Cougars took a dump in it). Charming. It's a much harder, less effective way of kidnapping him than putting on the barber outfit, which makes him travel to the uninhabited shop area after you put on the disguise and walk into line of sight.

You can technically drag Lenny all the way to the entrance of the level- there's a slightly modified escape scene with a different background if you do so.

A Note on Notebooks:
For months after release, it was impossible to get 100% Lost and Found in Shaving Lenny. The level had an item, a notebook that explained the whole pizza thing above, but it was cut late in development. This would be fine (the notebook was useless), except they left it and its entry in the completion system. The notebook itself was just moved into level geometry, impossible to reach. It was properly patched out much, much, much later.

"beyond perfect"
You've covered the basics. This was a plot device to make sure Victoria doesn't just kill everyone and leave, while still making her have some sort of plot importance by having superpowers. It's horribly delivered, ill-conceived, and I suspect it was added when it was decided that the game wouldn't start with her death/rape and move forward from there. I'll discuss Skurky and Mrs. Cooper later.

Lenny:
Lenny has a limp(implied to be from being beaten by his father), and a speech impediment, and may be cognitively deficient, and may be gay. He's called "limp-dick Lenny" by everyone and is openly a source of narrative mockery, even as he's also made hateable by being egotistical, cowardly and, y'know, shooting a nun in the face. So, of course, we don't just kill Lenny - we get a special, expensive, unneccessary playground to do it in, with a lot of custom voicework and several easter eggs (you can make an ice cream truck hit Lenny, or cause the screen to gain a silent film filter). You don't have to kill him any particular way to get 100%, but you do have to find all the items hidden around the area- and some are really, really obscure. The worst of these is probably the poker, which spawns inside the abandoned stagecoach. You have to find and shoot an open crate of dynamite (you can't pick up the dynamite itself), which blows up the coach and flings the poker...somewhere. Good luck finding it.

What's really offensive about Lenny, for me, isn't that he embodies the "everyone and everything is terrible" grime-laden ethos of Hitman. It's not the homophobia, nor the gendered violence, it's not even the amount of resources that went into him- there are too many other examples in the game for that to really stand out.

It's the pointlessness of the whole exercise. The big reason we had these three levels and this "Kill Lenny" playground was to find out that Victoria is at...the giant factory complex that literally has Blake Dexter's face and name on it. Great.

Fun Fun Asset Reuse Bonus Round:
Lenny's limp animation is reused for the limping characters in HITMAN 2016, specifically targets in the Patient Zero Colorado level, and the Point Man in the base game Colorado level.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 14:52 on Jul 22, 2018

# ¿ Mar 10, 2018 07:08

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Episode 10: Slow Descent Notes

I have relatively little info about these levels, but you've given me much more material to cover because you've gone Rambo so often. Not that I'm complaining. Well, with some of the stuff I'm having to do at the end of this one, maybe I'm complaining a little.

"I love Johnny Cash"
I'm pretty sure this song was commissioned just for this game. More western scene-setting. The whole scene does vaguely tie into the location of Dexter labs due to the weird passing truck, but that's it.

That snake
The snake was a planned logo for the game for a lot of development- it appears in the main menu animations, coiled around the silverballers. The game also does an ambient rattlesnake sound when you choke someone out in these levels, which is the sort of great touch I'd love to see in a, you know, good game.

Dead End
If you're sneaking through, you usually have to cross over to the left side of the map to get to the end of this particular area, once you've disarmed the security systems. That said, this whole video consists of transitional areas- they're just corridors with guards. The only notable elements are a couple keycard-locked doors with guns behind them, and some mildly inventive stuff in the final area.

A Note on Security Systems:
I'm, um, not really sure what's going on with them. This gets done a lot through this video and the next. At a guess, these were going to be optional objectives at one point, but were turned mandatory to make sure players couldn't rush through the content. On the other hand, there may have at one point been some sort of plot hook about deleting all computer records of Victoria's presence. On the third, mutant hand, their locations mostly make no sense (especially in the next video) and the objects for the security servers look like they might have been placed in a hurry, so maybe the whole set of them were just added to give players something to do other than move from entrance to exit.

Old Mill
Basically, after the devs developed the run-down mill exterior, and the descent level that would follow, they realized "oh wait, we need something in the mill itself!" So this single room with a video game distraction was tossed in. My guess is they had the concept and needed a spot to place it.

Descent
For what it's worth, the start of this level at 5:49 shows a nice reveal for Dexter Labs- behind a country-styled, run-down exterior, a massive, gleaming weapons lab completely hidden in a canyon. It doesn't make much sense, but it's a cool enough concept that I'd be willing to excuse it- if the level were well done.

"so this is probably one of the more fun maps"
I know very little about the Descent level, but there are several spots in it, and at the start of the Factory Compound level that begins afterwards, where it looks like intended play areas were hastily blocked off with props. My guess is the entire descent was going to have additional branching paths, and maybe even alternate exits that wouldn't involve the elevator. A separate mine level might have been cut, it's hard to tell. In any case, the level has several branching paths with nicely varied scenery- the video shows off the one that's probably hardest to complete in full stealth. I agree that it does some relatively interesting stuff with verticality. The "Resident Evil cameras" were probably used to make sure the player could see the path forward when it was a ledge crawl of some kind- playtesters probably found it hard to spot in testing, because the cliff face would otherwise limit the angle of the third person camera.

"Did I mention you can use human shields?"
This is a feature also present in Blood Money. As you identify, it's not a very good match for the base design of the Hitman series. Taking a hostage is a sign that something's gone very wrong, and there's never a clean way to get out of the situation when you do wind up taking one. It doesn't help that it's mostly only possible to do it in stealth, so...why do it? It's basically only used when it's an element of a challenge.

"We're sorry Discendo Vox"
I entirely understand. The game is bad. I don't blame y'all at all.

Mines:
Here's how I think it works: mines are completely safe until you "arm" them, or pick them up. They're automatically armed when you pick them up, though- so don't use a mine as a melee weapon! Oddly, I think you can throw them safely.

Those Dudes:
The guys you shot just before the keycard gate at about 9:20 are a fantastic example of the hand-holding, forced narrative approach to level design that Absolution does way too much of. The intended approach to the level is to make you follow just behind these two guards as they slowly walk through the gate and down a hill, listening to them converse about the plot as they head to a meeting with the patrol team leader, who you then also have to wait for. It's like an Assassin's creed tailing mission, except there's no risk of discovery if you just move slowly. There's also no reason to it- you're safe purely because the guards never stop, turn, or look behind themselves, even though the whole route they take would leave you completely exposed if they chose to do so. You have to realize the designers want you to slowly follow and listen to these people. Notably, Hitman 2016 has almost none of this at all- because in a game focused on replaying levels, having to listen to the same conversation over and over again is agonizing.

Other guard conversations in the level reveal that they are betting on some sort of cage match to occur later between Sanchez and a wrestler called "The Patriot".

"Games can't all be MGS2 or else we'd all die of happiness".
Let me get the thread a bit more active by coming out of the closet on this- I hate MGS2. I hate just about everything about it. Fight me, goons.

A Note on the Elevator Switch:
I don't know why this is here, either, except as another victim of map cuts, or as a way to block rushing to the end of the map. It's worth noting that all Absolution levels that end with elevators have some sort of "throw a switch/press a button" action, followed by a wait for the elevator. This is either to buffer loading, or to heighten tension. Many better stealth games use the "call the elevator, wait as enemies search area" trick a lot, but this one doesn't seem to pull it off. This one has an added gently caress you for hardcore Absolution players (yes, they exist): if you throw the switch without going to the elevator first to get the "restore power" objective, you don't get the several thousand additional points for completing the objective.

drat it, this is gorgeous:
Look, I just want to pull back for a second here and note that even with Absolution, IoI had a bunch of asset and design team people who made some really excellent stuff. the bridge, the factory, the cliffs...this level, and many other Absolution levels, are really beautiful to look at. This is, again, what's so frustrating about this game, and why I fixate on it so much. It's a really tragic waste of resources, of good effort, money, time, years of people's lives. It's still worth stopping to admire the effort that went into things, though. Dreaming of the well-made, narrative-driven, more action-oriented Hitman that could have been. The underground lake at the end of the elevator ride is a great example of this. There's no reason to spend any time in the area, and you start the level facing away from the lake, toward the steps leading forward. That's downright tragic; the room's a work of atmospheric art. The canyon you cross over immediately afterward is similarly beautiful and detailed. God, what a waste!

Factory Compound

Under the Bridge:
The 3-part Under the Bridge challenges are actually pretty fair and fun- you have to knock guards off the bridge, using the sniper rifle you used to clear out half the area. It's an example of the challenge system done mostly right.

Blood pool found:
This flashed up briefly, so just to explain, blood pools were a thing in Blood Money and Absolution, then were cut. Killing an enemy with a gun or sharp object leaves a blood pool, which triggers the same amount of suspicion as finding a dead body- permanent caution, increased multi-man patrols, etc. This was removed because, well, it's really limiting to gameplay. Hitman 2016 still creates a blood pool when you kill someone in a gory way, but NPCs ignore it.

Sniper damage and dismemberment:
To briefly note, Absolution has a much more detailed hitbox and damage system than the 2016 game does. Enemies like the guards on this level have accurately placed damage resist areas on their torsos to mimic their flak gear. This is an element first introduced in this level. I do not believe the game has weapon damage falloff, at least not for sniper rifles, nor does it have scenery penetration. The damage calculation is mostly obscured, which is fine- it really shouldn't be a focus of play in the first place.

There is no dismemberment, astonishingly. Dismemberment was something that a particularly psychotic division of hitman players had been asking for since the first game. In practice, the main reason it likely didn't happen is because it's really time-consuming and processor-intensive to do well, and it'd cause problems for that whole "hide bodies" thing.

Dogz:
There's a dog behind a fence on the far left side of the compound. It will bark as you get near, briefly attracting a guard. This is the same bulldog model used in the intro cutscene, in various signs, and similar ones appear in the Streets of Hope levels. You can throw a bone into the dogs' cages to get them to stop barking, although it's not a significant obstacle. There's a reason these guard dogs are so prominent in the game's imagery- they were originally going to be a whole separate enemy type, but were cut into basically stationary noise alarms.

Of course, the devs couldn't leave well enough alone, so they still show up in a couple levels and in a bunch of signs. In the Cougars' clubhouse level, there's a cage off in a corner with a pair of dogs loving. No reason for it, they just wanted to show two dogs loving in a corner.

"I don't get the level design here" and Secretaries:
You wound up bypassing/murdelizing the secretaries, but there are two of them, based on the "Big Mama" body type, in different parts of the complex. The level layout doesn't make too much sense, and there are some side routes which are just included so that they can exist (like the dog above, a mostly useless canteen and skylight route, a keycard area with guns and a chipmunk costume, etc). Parallel paths do exist, so I can't be too sore about it. There is an attempt at storytelling with environment, too. There's one lousy, run-down area for truckers and employees working for the company, and a separate, sleek, luxurious area is for the people buying weapons from Dexter Industries. Speaking of which:

Fun Fun Happy Time!:
Right at 20:02 you spare a guy in a suit near his sports car. This is the "Arms Dealer". Nearby guards mention they saw him on TV, a peace negotiator working to end a South American conflict. if you knock him out, you can wear his suit through to the end of the level and pass by everyone safely.

The arms dealer is a corrupt hypocrite, which is not a big deal in a game as grimy as this one. It's not why he deserves special mention. The reason he gets special mention is he's the place where the developers of Absolution went so far with their bigotry, that they tried to censor themselves. To set up a situation where you can get his outfit, the Arms Dealer walks off to the side and has a phone call. I've taken the time to transcribe it below.

quote:

Yeah, I'm outside Dexter's now. Have the putz Mexicans paid yet?

Good, OK. Well, start shipping the hardware. Hey, has Davis been briefed on how to get it over the border?

All right, OK. Everything is on track. When I get back tomorrow, we'll celebrate. L'Chaim.

Yeah, yeah, but I don't think we should underestimate him. Business might not be as good as just after the New York thing, but under that eccentric exterior, I'm sure he's still a shrewd businessman.

I'll do my best to squeeze a good price out of him. Just gotta find the right angle.

All right, call me back in 5, see what you can find. I don't think I can keep him waiting much longer. I'm serious.

Yeah, so. They yiddish loanwords in that transcript? The ones delivered entirely in an NYC/long island accent, while the character discusses finding a way to squeeze a cheaper price out of Dexter? After talking about how he was able to profit from "the New York thing"? Not in the subtitles. Everything else is accurate. People don't believe me when I talk about the poo poo this game pulls.

Atom Bomb:
Aside from some of the live mines in the lobby, there's also a WW2-styled atom bomb hanging from the ceiling (visible at about 18:59). Shooting its end will give you a special game over scene, with a nuclear cloud, and with another Kane & Lynch appearance thrown in for good measure.

The elevator:
If you reach the elevator in stealth, there's actually a guard in it who walks out first. Also, that camera glitch you experience is something that occurs every time. Also, there are no controls inside the elevator. Also, making this update nearly broke me.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 01:52 on Jan 7, 2023

# ¿ Mar 12, 2018 23:07

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Yesss suffer- also record the arms dealer if you get the chance, no one believes me that he�s an anti-Semitic stereotype. It's the most pointless bigotry in the whole game, the absolute nadir.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Mar 18, 2018

# ¿ Mar 18, 2018 16:39

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

My computer died so there will be a delay in comment posts. Death factory is doable SASO, iirc you can knock out the patients or take a weird route or something.

Edit: I think the solution might be some syringe trick again. Y'all were right, not possible by any means I can identify.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Apr 1, 2018

# ¿ Mar 23, 2018 17:23

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

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

# ¿ Apr 2, 2018 14:07

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

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

# ¿ Apr 11, 2018 23:08

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

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

# ¿ Apr 17, 2018 06:20

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

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.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2018 14:56

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

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, :catstare:

'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. :sigh:

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

# ¿ May 7, 2018 18:20

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

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?

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.

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

# ¿ May 8, 2018 03:47

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

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.

# ¿ May 12, 2018 15:08

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

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.

# ¿ May 27, 2018 17:45

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

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

# ¿ May 31, 2018 04:16

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Jobbo_Fett posted:

You dirty tease!!!

I'm sorry, I too am feeling the burnout, plus I've had houseguests this week that are taking up most of my time. I should be able to knock out both this and the next videos' notes.

# ¿ Jun 5, 2018 01:49

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Episode 15: Cease and Desist Notes
Intro cutscene
No particular notes, except that the acoustic guitar strumming they pull when Victoria appears on camera is so freaking cliche it's painful.

County Jail
I can't tell if this whole "get caught in jail and break free" segment was always meant to be here- a lot of the assets in this first room are suspiciously reused and cobbled together. The final station reception area has some nice foreshadowing and dialogue that you missed, but because (as usual) there's a single guard disguise in the whole map, it's a pain and a half to play. Retrieving your guns (again) is especially dicey.

"quote-unquote 'control room'"
Yep, that's one heck of a forced start with the ropes and the alarm box.

Power Cord at 3:36
I don't remember if this is the first time it's happened, but there are two or three places where you can pick up a fiberwire replacement in the game- almost all of them are electrical cords, and they all work just like the fiberwire. In this case, if you fail to pick it up, you don't have a fiberwire for the rest of the chapter. Not too egregious, though, because it's placed to be obviously visible/available for a sneaking player.

The Evidence Board
Hoo boy, this board at 3:54 turned into a rabbithole. "Maybe someone will be interested in this" indeed.

I can't tell exactly what it was, but there was at one point some sort of material in the script discussing the hunt for a serial killer, running through much of the game. It's the basis for evidence boards you'll see in the Hope police station (they definitely used to be used elsewhere, in Chicago). Based on leftover information and a throwaway line from Ethan Hawke, I think one of two things was planned. Either Cosmo Faulkner was going to be revealed as the killer, or the idea was Faulkner was mistakenly attributing all of the Hawaii Room deaths to 47- serving as his motivation to follow 47 from place to place. In any case, after this subplot was cut. Faulkner's role was diminished, and he became a locus of promo materials for the game. Faulkner has a ton of leftover faked-up police reports and documents that were released on thriving social media platform google+ to "flesh out the plot". It's impressively overwritten, and it has leftover sequelbait hooks that I don't want to spoil.

A decent shot of the evidence board. Note the repeated references to "hands", and there's text references to Terminus and Rosewood.

And yeah, "victimes" is totally just the devs loving up.

Chloe the dispatcher
For the record, that was her you iced at 6:13.

Outgunned/Hope is Burning
The exploding gas truck, the suspiciously out-of-nowhere helicopter appearance by Travis, and the sudden influx of ICA grunts frames the inclusion of "Hope is Burning", a big 'ol setpiece that was one of the earliest unifying themes of Hitman Absolution. Early drafts of the game had "Hope is Burning" as a subtitle, and the destruction of Hope was going to be a a massive symbolic loss of innocence meant to parallelize with Victoria's...you know. It was at one point the core concept; the game was originally going to take place entirely in Hope, and would center around a dying 47's corruptive, influence, culminating in it, and his, destruction (and maybe rebirth, that's not clear from my notes).

As the project scope continued to overinflate, as it became simultaneously a military sci fi mystery action thriller crime noir Western horror tragedy with comic overtones and characters from Se7en, Desperado, Hard Boiled, the Dukes of Hazzard, Grease, and every single film Tarantino's ever awkwardly focused on the feet of, with scenes and homages in Chicago, Not-Texas, Not-New York City, and Mount Rushmore, with themes of water, sex, rape, violence, christianity, redemption, industry, Americana, parenthood, sacrifice and doves, it became difficult to keep the old concept in. It's not clear there was ever a distinct rationale for why Hope would burn, or what it meant- or how it related to any other characters or scenes.

Ultimately the devs wanted to have it both ways- an image of conflict destroying the town, and of 47 fighting the corrupt sheriff, and of ICA escalation, and of Dexter working with the ICA, and of the ICA betraying Dexter. This was how they tried to split the difference. It's obviously tacked on, and it doesn't work- but this isn't a problem unique to Absolution. There are a number of infamously bad B-movies that have this issue. Such films cram together the stolen plot elements of a whole bunch of popular films, producing an incoherent confusing mess. It's more surprising to see this in a AAA game like Absolution because it's from an established developer, and because even more than with film, game making is really money and labor-intensive.

At root, in film or in games, this issue occurs when the people at the top
a) don't know what makes the ripped off material successful,
b) in the case of a sequel, don't understand the core material that made their own IP successful, and most of all,
c) don't have a clear vision of what they want the game to be.

HITMAN 2016 still owes a lot to other films and material. Many of the best moments of the series have been (to be generous) homages to existing film. The principal difference is that HITMAN 2016 has a strong, narrow sense of its own identity that is translated into its plot, design, and promotional materials in a consistent way.

In terms of gameplay, this is weaksauce. You just crouch-skulk to either edge of the map and, like any number of other levels, wait for patrols to move so you can get to the shoe store and move on. The gas truck will explode on its own when you reach the right spot, triggering another scripted set of NPC conversations and movements that clears the path to the exit.

Burn
I really like the Burn setpiece, despite myself. Like Attack of the Saints, there's room here to establish an intimidation factor for your enemies- and even though it's a tiny four-room setpiece, it's executed pretty well. The emergence of the Heavy Troopers is foreshadowed, but not too foreshadowed. You see their shadows rushing past a window moments before, but they're not mentioned by NPCs and their appearance is a surprise- and the initial view you get of them is intimidating, with the raging fire, nicely framed door, sweeping lights, and gas mask breathing sounds (even if in practice the smoke makes the room easier to work with). Burn also has a really fun challenge, Misty Eyes, where you use the smoke and chaos to ice 10 of the Heavies without being seen. In general it's a great setpiece, even if not perfect in a game like Hitman.

Agency Heavy Troopers
Agency Heavy Troopers are the "ultimate" guard/enemy NPC, only used here and in the final mission. As such, aside from their entirely normal detection rate, they have some neat features and design elements. I've never actually seen their radio beep alert people in stealth, but that's because, for whatever reason, it doesn't happen if you garrote or choke them- and for me it's always been completely silent kills, or all loud, whereupon there is Much Beeping. Heavy Troopers wear more extensive armor based on military gear, and are the most heavily armed non-unique enemies in the game. The heavy troopers also do a decent job of conveying their armored areas, which are extremely bullet-resistant. In particular, they're the only enemy with an armored helmet, so if you go for headshots, you have to aim for the lower half of their face.

The Trooper is generally a pretty darn well-made model, one that effectively conveys "badass enemy":

In practice, almost all Heavy Troopers use the masked models that show up on the sides of this render, and Trooper armored areas are darker compared to the unarmored parts. The lighter facemask below the bulletproof helmet has the effect of highlighting the weak spot on the Heavy Trooper - I can't tell if this was intentional or not.

The Heavy Troopers were designed and modeled by Tom Isaksen, a character artist for IOI. He was fired after Absolution, and has decidedly landed on his feet: he's now lead character artist at Ubisoft Paris. Isaksen was a character art lead for the series for a long, long time, since Contracts. As such, his portfolio site, http://tomisaksen.com, is quite interesting.

Unfortunately, although his work's quite good, like half of Isaksen's online portfolio is women in bikinis or underwear, which doesn't bode well for his role in Absolution (he did the stripper models, of course). His site's Absolution section (which has a bunch of renders and is worth checking out) does provide some insight into development:

quote:

After I finished working on Hitman Blood Money back in 2006, I started working as Lead Character Artist on Hitman Absolution. I worked with the talented programmers at IO Interactive to develop the entire production pipeline for characters and created 100s of characters for the game. Creating characters for a Hitman game poses many challenges that most other games don�t have. Besides creating a living, breathing world with 100s of characters, Agent 47 has the option of taking the clothing of the other characters in the game as a disguise. This means that unlike most other games Hitman has 100s of possible hero characters. This created a huge challenge for the very small character team to manage. The work displayed here is just a small part of the work I did for IO Interactive between 2006 and 2011.

[...]Each character [in Absolution] is about 12.000 faces (triangles) and uses 120 bones. [...]

In order to create all the characters on time, we tried to keep a maximum of 10 work days spent on each, which included up to 5 variations, different faces, hats, etc. but also an undressed version in underwear and a version with Agent 47�s face and body. The work also included rigging and skinning the characters. It was great fun to work on the Hitman games, I�ve spend more than 9 years working with the bald assassin, Hitman Contracts, Hitman Blood Money and finally Hitman Absolution. I�ve since then moved on to different things, but Agent 47 and the Hitman games I will always remember as something special.

The portfolio site includes a gameplay version of Cosmo Faulkner's model, and a partial shot of an obese gang leader and his crew that, iirc, were an early planned target in Chinatown. Which, of course, went all the way through the asset pipeline before going unused.

I've said it before, I'll say it again. A tremendous amount of work went into this game. It's tragic that the whole is so much less than the sum of its parts (and that so many of the devs are so skeevy).

A Note on Surgical Precision
Surgical Precision's levels require 3, then 5, then 7 headshots in a row- with the last level being on some sort of time limit ( I couldn't find a good source for the exact value, or if it's all within x seconds, or if it's effectively a combo timer). Some mentions online say that the headshot combo had to be completed without being spotted, but it appears that was patched out. Of course, since it was patched out, it's another multi-level challenge where google searching will reveal a number of players, confused about why a higher tier didn't unlock properly...

In any case, it's not too bad- the challenge descriptions ("The collective IQ is dropping...fast", for level 3, for instance) make the task fairly intuitive. The Hope Fair section is where you're supposed to get it, though there are videos of people doing it anywhere.

Hope Fair
Under better circumstances, this sort of "evade a well-equipped, well-trained force" would be exhilerating, like the cornfield segment in Attack of the Saints. They have patrol teams, a massive force of heavy troopers, even a dude on a roof sniping position. Unfortunately, the Hope Fair (with its impressive crowd AI) is immediately evacuated as soon as the player arrives, so it's more of the usual diving behind waist-high cover, waiting for and moving past a fairly linear set of guard patrols. The only "advanced" part is that one set of NPC guards makes its way down the street toward your starting position. This doesn't functionally change your route, though- you either crouch/coverswap your way up the left or the right side of the street. Hope Fair is another map with no safe disguises- Heavy Troopers see through ICA grunt outfits, and vice versa, and the trooper on the roof will never spot you unless you go loud- and he's just equipped with a normal assault rifle, anyways.

Snipers, conveyance, games and Hitman
The Hitman series has a longstanding issue with sniper NPCs. The worst mission in the series (aside from Absolution), Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing, is infamous for its snipers, and generally, although the game has provided players with sniper rifles, but not truly resolved what role sniper enemies or guards should play- and whenever they're implemented, they've been a hot mess to deal with as a player.

If you think about it, though, these are also issues present in pretty much any game with sniper enemies. Snipers are an inherent problem for gaming and player enjoyment. Videogames require bending the rules to make the combat and navigation enjoyable, and beatable. Enemies are signposted, they do less damage at range, their AI has intentional weaknesses...in particular, enemy behaviors are heavily conveyed to the player so that the player can formulate a response. Snipers, in real life, are anathema (heh) to this whole process- the idea is that they hit you when you have no indication of their presence. It's the opposite of fairness, and not fun to deal with.

Different games have addressed the problem of sniper conveyance and player response in different ways- lasers, cones of vision, restricted cone of vision, secondary indicators, forced inaccuracy on the first shot...the list goes on. The question of how to a) tell the player where the sniper is, and b) still let the player feel smart for noticing, is an ongoing tension in games. It's not really satisfactorily resolved, even in other stealth games like MGS. This is likely why HITMAN 2016, and, in fact, every hitman game after Silent Assassin, did away with enemy sniper guards. Some enemies might carry sniper rifles in Contracts, but they actually have the normal range and behavior of conventionally armed enemies.

In any case, Rabbit, the guard on the radio in the starting bar, will never pick up his rifle and set up a nasty 45 degree ambush. He's just here to make sure players are aware of the sniper rifle- and to set up a location (stocked with C4, proximity mines, and extra ammo) for the player to complete the Surgical Precision challenges and generally turn the Agency soldiers into hash. Do note that if you spend about a minute in this area, the street patrols will get to, and eventually station additional guards in, the upper level of the bar.

The Worst Lost and Found in Hitman: Absolution
Lost and Found difficulty varies a lot in Absolution. The truth is, with some exceptions (many of which I've already noted), most of the levels are pretty OK about it. Worst case scenario, you wipe out everyone in the map and run around looking for that one wrench or knife you missed. Hope Fair is the exception. There's a single, unassuming weapon in the Lost and Found that requires an extra-special leap of logic to obtain.

The missing weapon is an Aries 24-7 pistol, a "lower tier" weapon which is normally carried by early game enemies. Wade's men carry it, Chicago beat cops carry it- even some of the NPCs in Streets of Hope carry it. The police in the Hope jail do not. Nor, indeed, do any civilians in the Hope Fair. It's not lying in a corner, or locked in a gun safe. The ICA soldiers don't carry them, they have Agency-branded gear. And Heavy Troopers don't carry pistols, right?

On the Hard difficulty and above, only, one singular Heavy Trooper in the Hope Fair map carries an Aries 24-7 pistol. What's more, this Trooper is not a normal guard. He spawns with the backup team. No, I do't know why this transpired.

I can't tell if this is a bug or not- but if so, it would indicate that the Lost and Found tabulation is automatically generated from all items and weapons left in the level. This would explain the other, patched, issue where inaccessible, cut items left in the level geometry were still tallied in the Lost and Found.

Reinforcements
I was wrong earlier- it looks like "Backup" is a finite set of enemies that spawn over time from predetermined locations- sometimes one at a time, sometimes in groups. The rest is just you just gradually pulling forward the AI of like 40 enemies that really don't want to leave cover.

"There was another gas truck, I guess"
Cool, I'd never seen that explosion. That building houses a distillery. I'd set it on fire, but I'd never blown it up like that.

Outskirts
It's, uh, a road. I'm pretty sure there are other roads into the town, this particular one just doesn't go there. Outskirts is weirdly coded in the game, set partially as a separate mission and partly as an immediate follow-up to Hope Fair. For this reason 47 will snap back to his suit and pistols when you enter this tiny cutscene of a "level". I suspect there was originally more going on- possibly a whole level set around the church. I really can't tell, though, there's nothing that lays it out explicitly anywhere.

Hearse Easter Egg
Getting near the back of the hearse will trigger the scratchy audio effects for being near an NPC.

The Church and the Preacher
Something was cut here- infiltration, a full level, a longer cutscene, something. When 47 comes into the church, Skurky is already partway up the aisle, limping, armed and bloody, but no one is reacting to him. All of the crowd reactions to Skurky also don't make any sense. The preacher you see for a brief second has a unique weird All-American Priestman outfit that doesn't show up elsewhere. My guess is he was a concept art that someone fully implemented in 3D, without any place for him.
...Did 47 just execute him in the middle of a room surrounded by witnesses, in his suit, and just...leave? In Requiem 47 killed every civilian in the place to keep his identity secret. Jeez, idk.

Skurky
Skurky's character role in hitman is basically to be killed, to make weird/gross mouth noises, and to be really into some sort of quite mild S&M (in the, uh, basement of his jail, for some reason- there's no indication he does it to prisoners), which is shoved forcibly into the plot for no reason other than Tarantino did it. At one point, though, Skurky was going to be one of the main characters of Absolution. A lot of the narrative, at least for a first act taking place in Hope, would be presented from his perspective, as he waits for 47 to kill him in his home.

Skurky's house would be mostly empty due to alimony from a recent divorce- which was played straight, to make him sympathetic. Yes, this was also in the drafts where Skurky was a participant in the planned Victoria group rape/murder. Skurky and his house were meant to tie in with the whole "Hope is Burning" plot and theme structure. That's why he dies in the church, with the Ave Maria swelling, and 47 walking in slow motion away from the burning town...before walking back into the burning town to steal the hearse. At one point, the death of Skurky was basically the game's climax. The cutting of this material was, uh, not a great loss.

Ultimately, Skurky was reduced to "gross perv corrupt sheriff guy". My guess is the grossness was implemented because a) Pulp Fiction did it and b) it continues the trend of trying to imply a sexual threat to Victoria without making it overt. The game does this a bunch.

I'll discuss Ms. Cooper later. Whatever happened to her, anyway?

A note on Skurky's Mustang Snub
Since the cutscene ends the level immediately upon his death, it's impossible to retrieve Skurky's unique weapon (which is a cosmetic edit of the other mustang snubs in the game, maybe with imperceptible stat differences). Since you can't pick it up ingame, you can only purchase it for a cool million dollars in Contracts mode- that's several mission completions' worth of money. There's another gun with the same "feature" later in the game.

A note on progress
Completing Operation Sledgehammer and finally leaving Hope ends the game's incredibly bloated third act and now leaves us in a relative sprint to the end. Thank god.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 15:00 on Jul 22, 2018

# ¿ Jun 5, 2018 17:27

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I'm still not done with Operation Sledgehammer's notes, because I found a horrifying rabbithole of abandoned plotlines and promotional material, and have gained deep, eldritch insight into Hitman Lore. Progress is being made, though.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2018 20:32

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I wish I could pretend this involved actual work or insight on my part, but it�s mostly just bothering to look. This new material is actually linked on the Hitman wiki!

edit: I'll post the Faulkner material after the LP ends, because it's spoilers.

And who would want to spoil the plot of Hitman Absolution.

edit 2: It's done! There are, as Jobbo predicted, a bunch of stupid things I'm gonna detail from the One of a Kind mission, but it's still way shorter. Everything remaining is way shorter. Home stretch baybee!

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Jun 11, 2018

# ¿ Jun 10, 2018 15:01

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Thank christ, that long-rear end level's over, I just have to do a writeup of one of a kind and I'll be all caught u-

dammit

# ¿ Jun 13, 2018 17:05

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

The main hitman thread reminded me of this tidbit which I've added to the Skurky's Law information post.

quote:

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, building the world or tying in the plot. It's a fairly nice idea (and one used a little bit in Blood Money and referenced in 2016's Colorado level), but another example of the horrific scope creep Absolution went through.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 15:31 on Jun 14, 2018

# ¿ Jun 14, 2018 15:27

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I have my work cut out for me. Please give me like a week to write these three vids up, add the Cosmo Faulkner material post, post my Absolution redesign fanfiction, and proofread everything.

vvvv Oh man wait til you hear what folks think was cut with the Praetorians.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Jun 15, 2018

# ¿ Jun 15, 2018 01:24

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

The Cheshire Cat posted:

This is why every lovely movie where the hero sacrifices themselves at the end has really blatant cross/Jesus imagery. It's not cliche if it's SYMBOLISM

You'll NEVER GUESS what one of the planned, cut endings for Absolution was, then! Or why the villain would be guarded specifically by the people who guarded Caesar!

edit: Oh wow, that shoutout was way too kind, thank you so much!

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 03:19 on Jun 15, 2018

# ¿ Jun 15, 2018 03:02

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Episode 16: Change of Pace Notes
Great screencap, btw. These last handful have been works of art reminiscent of the Great Homecoming LP.

"I bet it's the symbolism!"
This scene is meant to come full circle and represent 47's rejuvenation and return to form, symbolizing how both the character and the series are born again (I know, I know). Returning to Chicago in yet another death symbol car, 47 gets his an "upgraded, all-new" suit, and all of his scars and dirt are wiped away. In a better game with less of a kitchen sink plot, it'd be a big moment. As it stands, it's another "why did they spend time and money on this" scene, even if it's blissfully short. All the easter eggs don't help much, either!

All the Costumes
As you can guess, the costumes down here were originally planned for other missions. In particular, the Hot Sauce Factory Chef outfit(the one with a sort of feather boa made of chili peppers) were originally for a Chili Factory mission that got most of the way through production before being cut. Players could steal the secret recipe from a safe on the premises for...some reason, I forget. I suspect the giant pool of pig carcasses and meat-strewn conveyor belts from Death Factory was an asset originally developed for that mission. There's also a Big Bird outfit in a corner, referring to an infamous outfit from a Blood Money mission, The Murder of Crows, set during Mardi Gras.

All the Easter Eggs
Tommy must be a fan: In addition to the music in the shop (from the famous Opera mission in Blood Money), most of the material in the basement of Tommy's shop is also an oblique reference to Blood Money (I think they had a bunch of assets from it on hand or something). A devil mask high on a shelf was originally worn by target Anthony Martinez in the A Dance with the Devil mission in Blood Money, as well as several other places in that game. Other newspaper clippings referencing targets from that game are attached to the walls:

(not shown: five clippings about the tutorial mission from Blood Money that also appeared in-mission and are purely reused assets). Oddly, Martinez appears in a news clipping with his name retconned to "John Hardwick".

As Jobbo predicted, there are special costume-prop combinations. Wearing the bird outfit and carrying a book lets you leave without the suit, and triggers a canned laughter side effect as you leave. There's a clipping titled "Club-wielding thug terrorizes neighborhood", with a pic of 47 in the hot sauce factory chef outfit, with a club and the aforementioned devil mask.

Wearing the outfit and bearing the club will let you pick up the mask and leave without your suit, this time triggering a canned scream effect.

"I'm sure there's something cryptic"
It turns out there are some captions in braille in this level- on boxes in the basement, and in a big book open on Tommy's desk. Braille is, to put it mildly, not a friendly thing to translate, especially between languages- it's a kludge at best, and completely different between cultures and languages with few common rules. The Braille on this level nearly drove me insane before I decided it almost certainly wasn't valid, and was just random characters that were laid out to look like valid Braille text. The "text" on the book is the same on both pages, and I might have screenshotted it upside down. The text caption on the boxes in the basement is just a subset of the book text, too. For the record, here it is (oh godd it must mean something help me translate it I can't sleep). Hopefully it doesn't mean something, and I haven't missed Crucial Undiscovered Absolution Lore.

Blind Tailor
Tommy Clemenza is obliquely referenced again in HITMAN, where Jasper Knight, the target on the Russian airfield tutorial mission, uses the callsign "Blind Tailor" to attempt to talk to Janus, the KGB leader.

That loving coin
Why does 47 pull out a coin at the end there?! you can't use it for anything! what does it meannn (spoilers: it's going to be more symbolism, but even more nonsensical because it's mostly based on cut material).

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 15:05 on Jul 22, 2018

# ¿ Jun 17, 2018 03:08

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Episode 17: Man Eater Notes
Intro cutscene
I suspect that all of the cutscenes for Blackwater's were done really quickly, late in development, with less budget than other shots. The cutscenes have way more effects missing, and a ton of consistency errors. The bodyguards use low-def models, Blake wears spurs suddenly, the motivations make no sense...it's weird, because the roof of Blackwater, and Blackwater, definitely seem to have been under development for a long time. They're crowded with neat touches, like how the chopper lands on an unused tennis court. I don't know when or how the cutscenes were rearranged- my source materials are mostly silent on these issues. I can't decide if these out-of-engine cutscenes were made long before the levels, or long after...or some combination of the two. I'm used to weird cutscene-engine transitional mismatches (Arkham:Origins has a bunch of them left over from script editing), but the ones here are especially horrendous.

Ms Cooper
Yep, that's Ms Cooper in the schoolgirl outfit, not a murder sex nun. What a wonderful scene, with the upskirts and being shot in the head through an apple sack with "pure delicious" written on the side and the missing blood and bullethole and everything. As far as I can tell, Cooper wasn't intended to be an ICA agent, the writers just wanted an excuse to execute another character.

The only dialogue we get from Cooper is a sentence or two before 47's electrocution in the jail basement. We vaguely get the sense that she's...unpleasant? That's about it. I have no inside info on Cooper, and the internet is as mystified by this whole scene as anyone else. Was she written just so they could do a pointless hostage execution fakeout? Why did she come with Dexter? Why did Dexter kill her? I have only one idea.

It might have been the case, at the very early in development, that there was an intended parallelism between Blake Dexter, Travis Benjamin and Clive Skurky. At such a time, each of these three Strong Male Characters would get an equally Strong Female Character as an assistant, to draw thematic parallels between them. But then the plot got altered, Clive got iced, and they had a perfectly "good" objectified Sex Pervert Lady character they needed to "resolve".

"uhhhhh...plot hole!"
"split tail". Not twin-tail. I had to look it up. It's...a term for women. Dexter was telling Travis Benjamin to give him Jade. Yep.

"oh, now we're taking a taxi?"
I guess 47 needed the exercise- he is shown walking away from Tommy's place, I guess (it's because they didn't plan for this to be after 47 got a hearse).

"I guess because it's dark, the AI's that much worse at spotting you?"
As far as I can tell, blackwater has completely normal detection ranges. It's just lovely AI.

"what, just the one guy?"
That one civ was a plumber called to help deal with Blackwater's leaking SYMBOLISM problem. He's easy to get to and a great disguise...which is why IOI had to gently caress things up and make a challenge where you have to steal the plumber's costume and complete the whole mission undetected.

"Why are there so many civilians here? Where are we?"
Blackwater's an upscale apartment building, and Dexter Laboratories (lol, good one) just owns the penthouse.

I think the Blackwater building was at least conceptually developed for earlier in the game. What I can be certain of is the building is meant to be a structural and thematic contrast with the Terminus hotel.
You start outside the building, go through a flooded basement (there's a flooding car-park around the side that's the intended suit-only route), and ride to an upper level for the Big Confrontation. Blackwater and Terminus are really straightforward in their similarities and differences. I don't, um, really know how it was all going to tie together, given how much of everything was on the cutting room floor. Regardless, SYMBOLISM

Stylistically, Blackwater is meant to be a vaguely art deco looking building with a bizzare gothic spire, letting the devs fold in some Christian imagery out of nowhere later on. This poses some gameplay challenges, though, because the interior areas of Blackwater are all really samey. It's particularly easy to get turned around or lost, and it gets much worse in the later part of the level.

"I kinda thought this...was an underground passage that would lead me where I want to go"
You're actually going through the intended suit-only route (through the flooded utility area) in reverse. The NPCs here have a great conversation about how this city had a big tournament party weekend, so when plumbing broke down all the sewage flowed up into the streets and buildings...and then they managed to gently caress it up again later the next year, when the high water table filled the whole city with the same sewage again! Lol, what a bunch of morons! what backwater-rear end place did that?!

[I like to think this was a metaphor for the game's development.]

A note on the Lobby and the receptionist
The lobby actually does work well for social stealth- although it's open, NPCs are spread out and there are a number of disguises you can use to get in.

What marginalized groups hasn't the game directly stereotyped yet? Oh, I know, how about the LGBTQ community! The lobby receptionist is played up as a flambouyantly homosexual stereotype, from verbal affectations to unique "talk to the hand" gestures. Since you shot everyone, you missed it, but his dialogue is intended to convey important information about the objective- that the head of security has locked down the elevator with a retinal scanner only she can use, that she wants to see the hotel manager, that uniforms from the lower level won't work in the next area, etc. His behavior triggers when you get close enough to the elevator that the intended goal transitions from "get inside" to "get in the elevator", and he effectively tells you how to do it.

Of course, he also calls the head of security a bitch five times and aggressively hits on the guards, who also call the head of security a bitch, but they say "I'd still do her". Like with our Long Island friend, I come with screenshots.

The head of security's only role is to yell at people and confirm the receptionist's characterization, as well as serve as the main obstacle in getting to the elevator. Not a great depiction of a female character. In Hitman Absolution. What else is new. There are actually several paths forward here, though, and they're pretty clever.

Manager route
The head of security in the lobby wants the hotel manager to head to the 10th floor and give Blake Dexter's team access to the server room. Getting his clothes is the most effective non-suit-only route to level completion. Aside from, y'know, icing everyone and running around the map for several minutes because you screwed up the (admittedly very buggy) objective indicators.
The manager is hanging out in the room with the film projector. It's very hard to distinguish the manager's outfit- he's wearing a slightly different shade than the other hotel staff. He has no dialogue, so there's no indication (unless you see him walking away from the receptionist the moment you enter the lobby) as to who he is. On the other hand, if you dress as the manager, you can walk to the security head and she'll just let you out of the level- the manager outfit will also let you walk anywhere but the security office. The manager does stand near a security guard periodically in the back hall- I suspect it was planned that he'd have dialogue there.

Computer route
As you noticed, there's a computer in the security office that will override the scanner. It's hard to get to cleanly, and if the head of security sees it on her short patrol circuit, she'll immediately undo the override. You can distract the head of security with the filmreel, though, giving yourself more time. Even better, you can shoot the computer or monitor after you hack it, which prevents the head of security from reversing the override. Or you can shoot it in advance while going loud, which kinda screws you!

Knockout route
Of course, even then you can knock out/kill the head of security and use her to get into the elevator. Good luck dragging the head of security to the scanner and clearing the level in stealth, though. For the record, this is the "default" method for moving forward, and it's perfectly finely communicated...unless you immediately go on a killing rampage throughout the level. The objective info actually tells you about it, too! It's just a bit hard to identify the head of security among the pile of corpses you've made.

"What's the moviereel?"
In another parallel to Terminus, there's the training video distraction, which lures several guards and the head of security away from the lobby (and the security office, with the scanner override). It's actually worth the effort- like in Terminus, it's really effective at clearing your path. The training video, in addition to spouting 10 seconds of nonsense about leet martial arts, starts off with a sign indicating it's partly meant to parody incredibly timely hit TV show Jackass. The video uses the Patriot's crew, which is fitting I guess.

...why is it on a freaking film reel, anyways?

What happened in Hope?
The radio in the Blackwater back hall refers to "hundreds of casualties", and of witnesses reporting an "Angel of Death" (another sobriquet the game tries to force onto 47, the homeless people in Chicago and that loving CHALLENGE reference it too). NPC dialogue references Dexter's men locking down the hotel "because of what happened in Hope", (which has been covered up as some sort of terrorist attack), and how Dexter's son disappeared. Most NPCs on the lower level are attributing this to Blake Dexter being paranoid and having a swollen ego. There's a great bit of dialogue, "relax, we're here! it's not like someone's going to bum rush you!" ("You" being the maintenence worker you executed immediately past the staff door into the building).

Interregnum cutscene
Note the cutaway from in-engine to cutscene when the camera passes "through" the camera. regardless of costume, you show up in your suit on the guard's phone. And you guessed it, the camera's intact when you arrive (though note it's a model, also visible in the courthouse, that gets reused in HITMAN 2016). I don't know if it was another cut content or script reworking or what. The cutscene, like the others in this video, is suspiciously low-fi and rushed. The guard watching his phone acts as if he's directly talking to Dexter, but his lines don't match the scene with Dexter and Layla gloating over the money that then ensues. Nor was it some tricky interlay- it doesn't match the later call Dexter gets, either. Heck, the whole scene with Layla and Dexter doesn't match any location in the penthouse level- I'm pretty sure there are no pool tables there. Who knows when this was created, or in what weird cut environment.

"why was the cell phone made of glass?"
So you wouldn't notice it was the same model that the Agency characters were using earlier.

Game Theory: Two Isotopes
In trying to figure out how the devs could miss that Victoria and Blake are both wearing isotope necklaces, I had a stroke. Not of genius, I read some designer notes and had an ischemic stroke. Anyway, I have a possible explanation, beyond "the plot's all hosed up." It's possible that the reason Blake and Victoria both have isotope necklaces in some scenes (though not this initial one) is that during some other draft of the game's script there were two isotope Macguffins. Victoria's necklace makes her strong, but Blake's isotope is basically Victoria's Kryptonite, so by wearing it he can shut her down by getting near her. (have I mentioned how impossibly dumb this is?) That's speculation on my part, but it would explain the inconsistencies elsewhere in cutscenes with the two characters, and why Victoria's never just gone on a spree and freed herself. Blake would have gotten his isotope during the "she's completely perfect- she needs flair to live!" scene in Dexter's Laborato- I mean Death Factory.

"apparently Layla is this badass assassin or something?"
Layla sure is suddenly all in-control, isn't she? I'd like to think she was either submissive or coequal depending on the version of the script, on the contrasts being drawn between Dexter and Travis Benjamin, between Dexter's Laboratory and the ICA...but at this point who knows.

"I have a feeling I know where this is going and I don't like it"
ahahahahahahaahahakillme

The Sushi Ninja is another Dorky Unlikeable Guy Who is Killed. Enjoy the bad physics initialization on his stomach-"goofy versus stupid" indeed. My guess is there was going to be a ninja oufit at one point. I think he's also meant to be a reference to Mini Ninja, one of IOI's earliest projects. The Mini Ninja logo also shows up in sushi delivery trucks and carts in HITMAN 2016 (in Paris), and figurines of the playable characters are part of an extensive easter egg in the Hokkaido level. All of his material is completely in-engine, not in the cutscene. My guess is it was all added later in development.

Penthouse
The penthouse is really confusing in its layout- where HITMAN 2016 (and many parts of Absolution) use environmental color coding to help the player orient themselves, almost all of the Penthouse uses the same dark green and brown paneling, and there's a lot of prop repetition. The lower floor is laid out in a rough circle, with the elevator (and an offshoot from the elevator to a utility hall) in the middle. Stepping out of the elevator, to your immediate right is a keycard door- just past that door is the saferoom that is your ultimate destination. There are a couple keycards lingering around, but otherwise that door is a complete barrier- the illogical upper floor areas, which are all isolated from each other, come to a stop there, and there's no way to bypass the wall using the similarly weird outdoor balconies.

The Penthouse is also cluttered. Some rooms have big unique setpieces (dining room tables, a cool scale model of Dexter industries, a suspended whale skeleton, some uniquely arrayed doorway decorations that were supposed to aid navigation, a globe that was meant to signpost the saferoom), but these are combined with tons and tons of static and interactive models that are duplicated and repeated over and over and over again. I swear there are like 10 goddamn katanas in this place, and 10 live mines, and 30 shotguns, three (eye-searingly blue) samurai armor outfits, a handful of Ultramaxes... all on resource intensive glass podiums, freely available to one and all, in rooms with unique skylight models and shader effects and cowboy hats and stuffed eagles and tiger rugs and abstract paintings of Lenny, and paintings of Dexter with a whale he harpooned, or brooding, or paintings of Dexter's ancestors selling guns to cowboys and Native Americans, many of them copied multiple times in different rooms. Mine schematics that are completely new, different from the ones in Death Factory and much nicer looking. All sorts of detailed, time-consuming art that no one notices or cares about because YOUR GAME IS poo poo IOI OH MY GOD ARRRGHH WHY THIS LEVEL MUST HAVE TAKEN SEVERAL HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS OF DEVELOPMENT TIME.

Sorry, I'm getting pretty burnt out on Absolution. The charm of describing all of this waste is starting to sour. I'm going to post some screenshots here. That'll make me feel better about this huge wasted effort. I'm not even going to tell you about the hidden crawl vents.

"I don't know why this guy wasn't alerted"
There's something really messed up with the boundaries between the interior and exterior of the penthouse. It's as if it's a separate map for some AI purposes in some areas, particularly for sound. Line of sight works fine, though, which can make taking people out iffy with all the windows.

Layla's route
Layla takes three circuits of the lower floor before permanently entering the saferoom. Over the course of these three loops, Layla will stop at a series of locations once each, to berate guards or eat sushi or check a laptop. When and where Layla stops is the same on every run...except not. Like every other NPC script in Absolution, some of Layla's behaviors won't fire unless you're close enough to hear them. Others occur every time, but if you're not shadowing her, she'll practically sprint through the map on some circuits. The whole route also starts differently if you come into the level without skipping the transitional scene, versus hammering escape like a sane person, or entering the level from level select. This inconsistency and time limit are incredibly annoying, especially if you're going for a kill method that's only triggered early on, or very late, in her route. It's easy to mistime things and miss your shot. I suspect this whole one-off target behavior was an early test of the Instinct route-tracking tech, but that's a stab in the dark.

Layla kill challenges
Layla has five or so kill challenges which are fairly nice and clean, with really clear signposting- she stands somewhere (or you trigger a distraction for her) and you hit a big Interact With Me button, and she dies. Poison her with a neurotoxin and make her dive off the building, drop a whale skeleton on her, shoot her with a harpoon that launches her through a window...If it weren't for the layout and route problems the map introduces, it'd all be a be pretty clever setup. But putting the whole thing on a soft deadline, and setting it in a map that basically functions as a maze, really screws with everything. On top of this, a couple of the kills are really finicky. In particular, one requires that you grab a can of gas from the balcony barbecue grill and throw it into a fireplace when she stands near it. You have plenty of time (Layla stands near the fire on her last loop), but you get one attempt at the throw before everyone is likely to start shooting, and the target moves away from the fire. The throwing mechanics aren't great, the fireplace has weird hit detection, and you have to take several minutes to try again after each failed throw.

The escorts
The escorts actually can see through their own disguise, but their pathing is such that it very rarely comes up. If you rush the side exit from the start of the map and fire a silenced shot into a corner, you can lead one into the vent area for an easy kill and disguise. The escorts are purely tied to Layla's state with no fallbacks, so they bug out when anything even momentarily disrupts Layla- and if she dies without being noticed, they just go completely stationary wherever they were standing. It's remarkable how much we take the "Mr. Caruso, where are you, sir" of HITMAN 2016 for granted.

Lenny's room
A guard conversation outside Lenny's room tells the player that it's a trespassing area for everyone- even guards. Blake Dexter hasn't given up hope that his son will return, even though their only ingame interactions were less than compassionate. As with the jail interrogation scene, it is implied that Dexter cares about his son, sometimes.

Lenny's room is full of scenery-based storytelling: unique textures, girlie magazines, PUA guides, a Cougars jacket, a pinball machine, a disco ball- and, of course, a bong melee weapon (which inexplicably has a smoke plume coming out of it).

The radio in Lenny's room plays a weather report ("47 is the low tomorrow") reporting fog, which presages the next level's heavy use of a fog mechanic. This is mostly significant because the rest of the framing elements of Blackwater are so halfassed that I was sure the fog was a last minute addition until I heard this. The only reasons to actually visit are a save point, a keycard next to the bed, and a sniper rifle by the window. He was using it to shoot pigeons. Yes, there are pigeons. No, there isn't a challenge for shooting them. Yes, this game is replete with missed opportunities.

The Museum
Right next to Lenny's room is a really cool medieval weapons display, a room completely filled to the brim with melee tools of death. The centerpiece is a bottle of poison from the U'wa Tribe, an incrediracist native stereotype group from the first Hitman. (I like to think Dexter genocided them all to get the poison, it seems in character). The hallucination-casuing, neurotoxic poison is necessary to get one of Layla's clearer kill challenges....but what's that red glow, and that beeping sound? Shortly after entering the room, this flashes briefly into view.

Tripping any of the lasers will sound an alarm, putting any living enemies into hostile and sending them to the room. They're mostly pretty easy to avoid(only 3 of them move, and they're all visible in instinct mode without burning your meter), but...the timing for the poison kill on Layla is stupidly tight. You have about 90 seconds to get the poison and dose her sushi before she eats, and as mentioned earlier, she only eats once. I've only been able to consistently pull it off by cheesing myself an escort guard outfit as described above- it lets me at least bypass the two guards outside the museum.
This room is also obnoxious for Lost and Found, because there are five or six melee weapons only found in the cases in this room, and it's easy to overlook them. IOI really wanted to show off their seemingly endless asset budget with this space.

Atmospherics
Both the ground and penthouse levels of Absolution have a detailed looping car animation set in the skybox, which is a really impressive touch. Less impressive is that if you drop a body over the building edge, it's still visible floating a few stories up off the ground (though, if you poison Layla she apparently lands on a car- you can hear the alarm going off at the end of the kill, which is genuinely a funny moment).

"there's nothing that indicates there's a door here"
There's a slight outline, but it clearly wasn't enough.

Layla
"oh, she was such a great character."
"I didn't see where that was going at all."
What happens if you let Layla get to the panic room, then follow her in? Well, I have some bad news.
Yup, Layla tries to go all Femme Fatale. It was lovely when Blood Money did it, it's somehow even worse in Absolution.
The scene literally plays a track over it might seem like that's meant to evoke the David Rose orchestra's The Stripper... but although I can't prove it (the Absolution music production process is almost completely uncredited, with a bunch of "singles" produced just for ambience like Black Bandana), from the vocals, I think this might be one of the earliest tracks in the game development process, left over from when the whole story was going to be narrated by a lounge singer.

None of this...event...is helped by the engine parachuting Layla into the uncanny valley, replete with model vertex tearing in her face during her close-ups.

Look above and to the right of her mouth. That black line expands and stretches to let her lips move.

Mercifully, the panic room is soundproofed, so at least you can't alert the guards. Less mercifully, if you wanted anything earlier in the level, too bad- the door locks behind you. (I suspect the game handles the "soundproofing" by forcing you through the door and despawning the rest of the map).

Final cutscene
"I'm gonna breed you like a prize bull"? Seriously? I've said it before, but Absolution tried to do the "your daughterwife proxy is vaguely placed under sexual threat" thing that games like Bioshock 2 and Infinite do; the difference is they keep saying the quiet stuff loud.

I suspect the fight scene with Victoria, which is especially rough, was intended for earlier in the game's plotline, establishing Blake Dexter as a character. The whole scene looks an awful lot like it was made early with incomplete assets, and errors abound. In particular, the scientist at the start is meant to be holding a syringe, but it only materializes after she plants it in his eye. But why is the scientist here? Why is a (non)reveal happening here? I suspect that part of the answer is that at one point, Blackwater and the big Victoria reveal occurred immediately after Rosewood, and would transition the rest of the game to Hope- or that the entire scene didn't take place at Blackwater. That almost completely obscuring fog conveniently lets the scene take place on any rooftop with a heliport, and the geometry doesn't really match Blackwater...

As nearly as I can tell, in terms of stitching, all of Dexter's lines are delivered from off-camera. They were likely recorded for a different cutscene and then stitched in...badly, the sync is off. When dexter's head is moving at the beginning of the scene (as the camera zooms in over his shoulder), you can see his movements don't match his lines.

The most telling moment, though, is one line, "well done girl, looks like you might be worth the trouble after all" is delivered while Dexter's face is visible.

Go back and watch the scene, starting at about 18:43.

Dexter's lips don't move, and it immediately cuts away before he starts actually speaking again. The line has an echo effect added, so the devs can pretend he was thinking it (and the player gets to hear his thoughts somehow, which is totally consistent for this series). This whole scene was meant to depict Victoria's initial capture, or recapture. It was extensively recut and moved to the climax of the final act.

Remember, the order of scenes was all adjusted post hoc and hastily rationalized with Birdie Lubricant. The fact that this could contradict the earlier scenes or other theories doesn't really mean much, because there were so many versions of the script that were carried all the way into production.

Anyways, on some level it's impressive that they can have a character kill 5 people and still give them zero agency.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 04:12 on Jan 15, 2020

# ¿ Jun 18, 2018 19:20

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

This LP now rated T for Terrible.

Countdown and Absolution will take another couple days, but they're much shorter than Blackwater (I really went overboard with the blackwater screenshots, sorry). Beyond those, I have 3 more posts planned: one to provide my main sources, including a copy of the making of documentary, one to provide the weird rabbithole of Deep Plot I found on Google Plus (plus a summary of an ending cutscene you somehow lost), and one to "provide" my Game Design Fanfiction.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Jun 21, 2018

# ¿ Jun 21, 2018 19:24

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Garrand posted:

Along with the technical issues and just stupidity of the scene, why didn't they have her pull the gun out while she was saying the "send you to heaven" line and just not have her loving scream "DIE MOTHERFUCKER" like a moron.

Because the whole striptease has to happen in-cutscene: they couldn't model the clothes coming off in-engine. (that's also why her clothes are clipping through her, they're separate models very badly applied by the physics engine).

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 06:13 on Jun 22, 2018

# ¿ Jun 22, 2018 04:53

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Foggy Memories

There was
a whole
level here.
It's gone now.
Now that I've seen it with re-editing in mind, it's pretty clear the intro cutscene shows 47 getting onto the roof, and that the roof level was going to be foggy, but that the cutscene was created before there was this whole "countdown" gimmick added on top of it. The roof might actually have been intended as 47's first Blackwater area. Close examination reveals it almost completely matches the final level, but not quite.

It's quite possible that at one point the penthouse and roof areas were designed as a single cohesive area, and that all of them were heavily re-edited. I...I just can't tell. Little touches, multiple pointless dead ends, excruciatingly well thought out details like the disused tennis court, all suggest this was at a minimum, once a fully functioning, normally stealthable level- and if you think about it, wasn't there another mission where you started out by crossing a tennis court? I'm not saying that the roof of Blackwater, and Blackwater as a whole, was once an attempt to set up a parallel with the intro mission...except I think that's exactly what I am saying. At some point it got changed into a fog-focused stealth setting, then into the last area of the Blackwater mission, then into its own mission, then finally into this weird garbage countdown forced stealth thing. This game is like an Aztec ruin of design decisions.

By now I've realized that I could probably go back over earlier missions and information posts and figure out all sorts of things about the earlier designs of Absolution...but I want to end this. I'm not going to do that, except for all the information posts where I've already done that, and all the other ones where I'm going to do that.

The Countdown
Protip: When you enter the mission, sneak forward and choke, then snap the neck of, the first guard immediately on your left. The sound makes the guard on the immediate right go "huh?" and stop his call to Dexter. Because Dexter doesn't receive any word that the bombs are set, this prevents the countdown from starting. The countdown will not restart until a guard somewhere becomes suspicious.

For the life of me I can't tell if this is intentional or not. Based on other cues throughout the mission, the bombs are not just on a timer. Instead, they reflect the amount of time before Dexter loses it and blows the roof. But I can't tell if you're supposed to be able to circumvent it in this way. If they were trying to make the countdown a hard time limit, there would be many easier, cleaner ways to implement it- but this is Absolution, so who the hell knows.

Alternate Routes
While this level may seem incredibly linear (and it mostly is), there are a bunch of dead ends and alternate routes you didn't explore in your run. Once you're up on the tennis court, there are three paths forward. On the left wall is a keycard door containing the level's intel and several melee weapons. The end of this hallway is blocked off; it's a dead end. In the center is the mine path you took. On the right, though, is the real prize: past two stationary guards, a door leads to a short utility tunnel. This tunnel contains the keycard needed for the door mentioned earlier, but it also has a padlocked door at the end. Like the padlock in Skurky's Law, it can be shot open, or knocked off with a convenient sledgehammer that's immediately nearby. Past the door is a ladder that leads up directly behind Dexter. But the utility route has another surprise- an easily missed vent that just leads to a spot past the first set of mines.

Both the extra routes and the bizzare dead end with the keycard strongly suggest to me that this level was originally larger, and was a conventional stealth affair, fog or no.

Axe me a question
Part 3 of Take em Down requires 10 kills while remaining unseen, and "Axed" requires nabbing an axe from the keycard hallway and killing 5 enemies with it (meaning you have to go get the keycard first). Without stopping the timer, the window for doing either of these is pretty darn tight. The reality is that since the level is pretty short and there's a nice checkpoint on the abandoned tennis court, these challenges aren't too bad.

Lost and Found: the Agony and the Ecstasy
Despite being so short, this map has some especially infuriating lost and found items. First, a plunger is hidden inside a completely static, partially open locker in the keycard corridor. It's really hard to see, let alone finagle the game into letting you pick it up. What's really infuriating, though, is that there are a couple melee items that are hidden in the minefield. And not just off to the side of your route, oh no. You have to shoot the mines to clear a path- taking you to a spot that you'd otherwise have no reason to go to. There's not a single other situation where you shoot these mines in the game- hell, they only appear in one other level! To add insult to injury, when you shoot a mine, Dexter has a special behavior that makes him move and check out the minefield from the helipad- unique lines and everything. Avoiding getting seen by him appears to be impossible if you're actually on the field- you have to basically retreat all the way to the stairs. The crowbar that is your reward for going through this is the last truly obnoxious Lost and Found item in the game. Good riddance.

Except not quite, because it turns out there's a completely unknown, hidden interaction on the rooftop that no one else has written about. There are some lights suspended from cables on the roof- shooting the cables will make the lights fall, destroying a bunch of mines and clearing most of a route through the mines (though some additional mineshoot is still necessary to walk up the stairs to the helipad). I can find no reference to this action anywhere online. I alone know about this. I alone found it. And I only found it because I played through the level again to get more information about Dexter's behavior. Do you understand what this game is doing to me?!? I started a fight about Slavoj Zizek in the philosophy thread to put off doing this!

Cut Dynamite
The cut, patched out, unobtainable Lost and Found items are sometimes revelatory. At one point, there was a dynamite inventory item on the map (just like the ones the guards are setting up all over the place).

Dexter
Remember how I said Blackwater was once meant to parallel Diana's mansion? Here's a sobering thought- Lenny was meant to parallel and contrast with Victoria in that setup. Yeesh.

In the level, as 47 approaches, Dexter complains to Victoria that this whole mess was nothing like 47- that he'd never chosen to "go all guardian angel" before. When the player gets closer, Dexter is scripted to get a call from the guards informing him that Layla is dead, halting the timer. This prompts Dexys Midnight Runners to start directly addressing 47. Dexter laments the loss of Layla and his son, then calls 47 out as good at killing, but terrible at protecting people. He begins threatening to kill Victoria, but will not actually do so. When he finishes talking, Dexter will start a simple back and forth patrol of the helipad.

In combat, Dexter has way more torso health than almost any other enemy in the game- but he takes headshots like a chump. His scripted animations dragging Victoria around and yelling into his phone make him only a little harder to garrote than any typical NPC. He wields a unique Ultramax, the Big Bad Beltfed gun of the game. The extra pause after killing him is to give you a chance to grab it.We've seen a lot of Dexter as a character in Absolution, more than just about anyone else, other than that smug useless gently caress Birdie. Dexter seems to represent the excesses of a number of different stereotypically American villains (the arms dealer, the bigot, the cowboy, the businessman) but he was also, during the tangled development of Absolution, set up as a contrast to Diana and/or Travis, and is nebulously the primary or secondary antagonist. He's a multibillionaire arms dealer and former ICA client who somehow is desperate for ten million dollars- a price much cheaper than the cost of even a fraction of the equipment he's shown owning in any of his levels. Depending on the cutscene, he's either callously indifferent to, or cares deeply for, his son and sexretary. He's either presented as being sincerely Western, or a city slicker Chicagoan. The only thing he doesn't really seem is especially competent, which is what makes the promo material calling him the "most calculating and ruthless antagonist in the series so far" such a joke. In better hands, in a cleaner script where he was a main focus, Dexter would maybe be a captivating antagonist. That's not what we got, but the potential still lingers. It's hard to tell exactly what Dexter was supposed to be, or what story the developers wanted to tell with him. But I know what fictional property his character is ripped from, and it's not the Dukes of Hazzard. In conclusion, Blake Dexter is a land of contrasts, and as a bloated, bigoted mess of bullshit contradictions, a great metaphor for the game as a whole.

Outro
whoops, there isn't one!

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Jul 8, 2018

# ¿ Jun 23, 2018 04:01

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Part 19: Angel of Death Notes

"I can't wait to be free of this"
You're telling me.

"I hope Discendo Vox corrects me"
I have no freaking idea why they did this. My only guess is they didn't want to make it so people entering the Absolution level would get thrust into the giant spoilersphere that is the Absolution intro right off the bat. I'd completely forgotten it did this, and need to move my notes from Countdown over to this post.

Countdown Outro
Victoria's hair sure is snazzy, isn't it? In many of her cutscenes, when Victoria first appears, her hair briefly appears in a default position, ignoring gravity, before being effected by whatever physics variables are involved in the scene. In other scenes, "chunks" of her hair doesn't seem to be effected by gravity at all. I think this is the same issue that caused the Elevator Sushi Ninja's buggy stomach- a sort of model physics equivalent of the asset-loading T-Pose. Like the T-Pose issue, it's a completely amateur mistake to make. Not all cutscenes have this problem; I think the ones made late in development just skipped that level of scrutiny. Yet at the same time they have that SYMBOLISM shot of the sky clearing, which would not have been easy to make, so I have no idea.

I just want to pause to reiterate that Dexter does this, mostly because I love the linked site.

what a tweest
So in case it wasn't obvious, Travis's people made Victoria. I know, it's been obvious for freaking ever. Here's why. This cutscene consists entirely of material that was originally in the intro level, followed by in-engine footage of the Absolution map with some filters put over it. The whole "twist" wasn't going to be a twist until late in development-it was just going to be a main plot hook. This is also why I think the scene of Victoria fighting was originally from much earlier in the game-it was going to be used to establish the stakes. The remixed twist reveal with the envelope is also apparently where the motif with 47 staring at a coin was going to come from. Shame they cut it, eh?

A Note on Layout
Absolution is a relatively well-made level with a fair number of details and structural touches missing from the other corridor-setpiece-corridor frankenstein missions in Absolution. If you look ahead into the horizon from your starting position, you can actually see the crematorium building in the distance, past the depressed also visible middle area:

Similarly, at the crematorium, you can turn around and get a good look at the route you took to get here, including the mausoleum you start at.

This is a pretty basic layout trick for a game to use, but for a game like Absolution to actually make use of it, even at the end, makes a nice change. Hm, starting in a mausoleum and going back to a crematorium. At the end of a game all about 47's symbolic destruction and rebirth. SYMBOLISM

Open graves and High Ground Challenges
The starting area is laid out for the sniper rifle in more ways than one; the open graves you mention are actually all aligned with idle position for enemy NPC patrols, with line of sight to the starting position. You can shoot guards into the graves from there, which is part of the last part of the higher ground challenge; it requires chaining completely unnoticed sniper kills. It's not too bad.

"why are we here?"
It's 6 months after Dexter died, and Travis has gotten paranoid that Diana is actually still alive. He's come to the Burnwood family gravesite in England and cordoned the place off so he can dig up her body and have it tested.

"was that a rocket launcher on the right wall over there?"
It's a shotgun and a bunch of shell boxes.

A note on the exit
I've gone without mentioning it the whole run, but many levels have a big colored light highlight over the exit to try to make it stand out. It's especially visible in this initial graveyard, because it's red and comes from nowhere (see 4:55). My guess is it was added because testers were unable to find the exit under all the grime and extraneous detail.

Burnwood Crypt
The Burnwood Crypt is really a fine level- it's very small, with relatively little going on, but that's because there's only one target with a couple intended kill methods. If I didn't know any better, I'd say Absolution's levels were finished and polished relatively early, given their much simpler scale. That's a shot in the dark, though.

"Is Diana of nobility or something?"
Yes, basically. This garbage promo video should have you covered. It's sort of a Lara Croft thing- minor nobility, superwealthy, father dies mysteriously at young age. The writers decided she also had a brother that has gone missing. Be warned that if you pause that video enough and connect the dots, you'll probably spoil the upcoming HITMAN sequel; unless the devs decide to retcon things, it indirectly reveals where the games are headed.

"why do we have to be here?"
Travis is terrified of Diana because she had information on the creation of Victoria. The whole cloning project was unapproved; he was hiding it from ICA leadership.

"That scientist guy I killed is the only guy with that outfit"
You, uh, literally say this while staring at a free copy of the technician outfit. The technician's outfit has the freaking ICA logo on the back, and the front, and on an ID card necklace. If you're wearing the outfit and walk within eyeshot of Jade, she'll tell you to walk back to the grave with her. If you do so, she will conveniently stand under the lifted scarcophogus lid for a while (with the big red button on the crane, etc) before giving you a brief "we need to finish this job" spiel. Think of it as a prototype for all the other social stealth opportunities in HITMAN 2016. The only other intended kill method is that several little tunnels in the map are collapsible (you kill her in one at 7:40), although the hit detection on them is garbage and you need to basically use the explosives pointlessly littered around to make them work.

"maybe I didn't shoot it enough times"
Haha, I tried to shoot it in the exact same place, to the same outcome. I didn't go back and check, but it might work if you shoot the chain just above the scarcophogus lid.

"who even is Jade?"
I'd love to say there was more to Jade, but there's nothing there past an Asian stereotype. NPC conversations say that she's ambitious and is looking to seize power from Travis, but as you mention there's zero direct indication of this via her actions at any point in the game.

"Discendo Vox lied"
My bad, I have no idea how the backup works at this point. I do think it eventually ends, but the details are totally opaque. In my defense, the game's not exactly well-documented (aside from my beautiful artisan posts).

"we killed Jack Aeges"
"Igis?"
"enh, it'd probably be Aeges"
ˈējis.

The Praetorians
As you illustrate, the Praetorians are mostly clowns in stealth- while their patrol routes overlap and there are trip mines in the area, the game's mechanics just make them a joke of a final "boss" encounter. They do not have any random pattern, which would indeed be...well, something interesting at least.

The Praetorians do have a couple special tricks- their detection range for sound appears to be wider, and they move around at a faster rate than most enemies when patrolling. Also, if you kill one Praetorian within a certain range of another, regardless of method or position, the other two instantly go hostile, with knowledge of your exact location. This...doesn't come up because you don't generally kill them in this sort of proximity. Similarly, the investigation behavior isn't changed, leaving them just as open as any other semi-alert enemy- and their greater range makes it easier to lure them away. I could write a whole long design theory post about the challenges presented by a "Stealth Boss", especially in the hitman series, but...god, I'm just so tired. Let it be over.

In combat, the Praetorians behave like normal enemies- they even have generic voices. Their only special trait is having frankly absurd amounts of health, even against headshots.

The symbolism of the Praetorians is probably pretty obvious: they were the dudes that guarded the Roman Emperor. You know, the dude who orders the death of Christ. Yep. They go there (well, tried- the Roman history's more complicated than that).

"Carey Scut'em is our target"
ˈskuːtəm.

There's something hinky going on with the Praetorians, though, and I think I (and some other obsessives) know what it is. Although NPCs ingame say they're mercenaries, "the best of the best", that wasn't their original role. Here are three clues:
1. All of the Praetorians come equipped with a set of digital displays on their arms and waist, similar to below:

2. All of the Praetorians also the following patch on their arm:

This is highly reminiscent of the ICA logo(warning, huge):

3. Finally, all of the Praetorians have white hair and red eyes (try to ignore the luscious lips of mr. aegis here):

"I want to hazard a guess that these are the names of people who won a contest"
Haha, you wish it was that smart. They're names for three different kinds of Grecon-Roman shield.

Why am I showing you all this? Cast your mind back to Hitman Blood Money. In that game, the big bad rival assassin company, "The Franchise", were dabbling in human cloning, an activity that drove the plot of the game. A pair of targets in that game were successive iterations of their imperfect clone assassin program; albinos who aged incredibly fast, dying in only a couple years, but who had skills that rivaled 47's.

It appears likely that the Praetorians were originally going to be the ICA's successful efforts at continuing the Franchise's clone assassin program. The targets are all albino, and carry digital gear that appears to (in addition to serving military roles), monitor their vital signs. Regarding the patch, "Praesidium" seems to be a rank; the historical use would be "senior executive", roughly. The roman numeral VI probably refers to their origins; the earlier Franchise assassins each had a roman numeral at the end of their name referencing what generation of imperfect clone they were, with the final enemy being Mark III. The laurel wreath is pretty intuitive. I have no clue what the drops represent, and frankly I don't care anymore.

Or maybe they just slapped some assets from unused ICA guards together, who knows.

Double Rainbow Easter Egg
Because the internet is a thing, there's an easter egg in the last area. If you look left from the start, there's a rainbow there, formed in response to the sunlit drizzle that covers the level. Destroying every statue in the area causes a second rainbow to form, all the way.

"That explosion apparently ripped the middle and top of the door, and nothing else"
It actually reflects a bit of care in modeling the explosion: the parts that are still intact are the areas where there are big metal crossbands holding the wood together.

Benjamin Travis

Travis' big motivation throughout the game was that he was secretly trying to replicate 47, producing Victoria, who was supposedly easier to control due to the incredibly stupid isotope Macguffin. Travis is only mildly more characterized than Jade, and I've described/linked that material before. Here's his ICA file trailer. Note the scene at the end where he's shot through the hand- this is left over from when 47 was going to more overtly betray Travis after "killing" Diana in the intro. It's also where his cyberhand comes from. The video has many blink-and-you'll-miss-it shots of psych reports on Travis (again, fully written, exhaustively so, to great waste) that basically imply that stress makes him increasingly sociopathic and he has an innate impulse toward abusive manipulation of others, referring to them as "buttons and levers" when pressed.

Ingame, it appears very likely that there was some sort of fight, or conventional assassination, or at least a quicktime shooting bit like Wade, planned for Travis. The dynamite used to enter the crematorium is visibly a reused asset from countdown, and the effects associated with it are very slapdash. The interior of the crematorium is also fully rendered, and is partially visible from outside. Travis does have an in-engine model, but it appears visibly incomplete in the only visible instance of its appearance. More on that, and the crematorium, further down.

Ben also has a unique pistol that you can't pick up; it's another million dollars in Contracts mode.

RIP Contracts
Speaking of which, Contracts mode is now online, possibly forever; IOI sent out a message on their site that they didn't have time to make it GDPR compliant before the 2018 Eurpoean privacy law went into effect. So long, only popular part of Hitman Absolution!

A note on getting murdered
There's a fancy little thing when you're in a mission where you kill a Big Target- Sanchez, Wade, Skurky, etc. If you die, a brief cutscene plays showing the player looking up from the ground at the target, who has a one-sentence, entirely unrandom, boring taunt. It's basically a garbage version of the killscreens in the Arkham games.

I mention this only because it reveals a couple things about Travis. First, Travis does in fact have an ingame model that appears in this scene, but his cybernetic hand is completely unmoving in the brief animation, which may be tied to why they weren't able to do an ingame assassination. Second, the killscreen perspective appears inside the crematorium, with particle effects that are probably meant to signify 47 is going to go into the oven. This supports my theory that the crematorium interior was at one point going to be navigable. Third, Travis's taunt is "You cross the agency and you get hosed!" (I know, great, isn't it). The line doesn't match his motivation, which is to kill 47 and cover up his own crimes against the agency. No clue what's going on there.

Ending
This ends with Victoria considering giving up her isotope necklace, permanently rendering herself a medical invalid. You cover the details of the obvious/nonsensical Diana reveal. Victoria does not appear and is not mentioned in the follow-up, our beloved HITMAN 2016. I like to think she found a better game to star in.

"I'm sure that the corporate heads from [square enix] did it very poorly"
In my last posts, I hope to convince you that the fault for Absolution rests almost entirely with the core devs.

"What happened to Birdie/Cosmo Faulkner?"
hehehahahahaha :getin:

But wait, there's more!
I still have two more posts in me:
1. An extras and sources post with:
a) A set of links to some information sources I used to compile these posts.
b) The virtually unheard-of social media promo material for Cosmo Faulkner, preserved for all time before Google Plus shuts down.
3. My fanfiction on how I'd have reworked Hitman Absolution to be moderately tolerable.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Jan 15, 2020

# ¿ Jun 27, 2018 06:03

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

You say in the video that you have to take out the technician, but you say it...as you are standing in front of a technician outfit.

For the record finishing this out is going to take a bit longer than I wanted, my RSI is really acting up and another goon project I'm on is about to launch.

Mantis42 posted:

I can't remember if this was brought up, but why does the judge wear a wig? The game is set in South Dakota, not Britain.

You're going to hate me for this.

He recently found out one of his ancestors was a British judge, so he's started wearing British judge poo poo.

I'm sorry.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 06:36 on Jun 28, 2018

# ¿ Jun 28, 2018 06:18

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Mantis42 posted:

Hahaha, sounds like they probably reverse engineered it after coming up with what is admittedly a pretty cool disguise. They should revisit the courtroom idea in one of the new, better games.

Based on reading the tea leaves, there was a Big List o' Costume Ideas brainstorming session during the runup to Blood Money, and they went back to that list and just kept trying to force them in after they ran out of development time for BM.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2018 06:43

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 03:06

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I'm sorry, I need to correct my earlier statement. The judge didn't find out that his ancestor was a British judge, then decide to dress as a british judge, adopt british mannerisms and collect british legal paraphernalia.

He found out his ancestor was British, then decided to dress as a british judge, adopt british mannerisms and collect british legal paraphernalia.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2018 18:12

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Drowning, with options - Let's Play HITMAN 2016

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