NYCC 2015: Hitman aims to please all fans with experimental release

Prior to seeing it in person, the new Hitman game sounded like some weird scheme to pre-sell/Kickstart a retail product. After seeing it, I’m still concerned about their pricing model, but I’m starting to see the appeal of what they have planned from a gameplay standpoint. If Hitman: Absolution was a product of an era where cool set-pieces were more important than gameplay depth, than the new Hitman is a product of the game industry’s latest push for open-world freedom. Needless to say, it’s a much better fit.

Hitman’s new locations are large and complex, with multiple buildings and space for up to 300 AI characters. The mission I was shown at a Square Enix preview event during New York Comic-Con showcased their Paris locale, and a target using a fashion show as a front for more sinister plans. I saw multiple points of entry and an almost infinite number of options available through Agent 47’s selection of weapons and disguises. Perhaps most telling, I saw an opportunity — within minutes of starting the mission — to assassinate the target in plain sight.

“We actually dictate only three things in the game,” explained Sven Liebold of Io-Interactive. “Get to your targets, take them out, and get out of there. So if we shoot him in the face right here it makes the third part really hard.”

The ability to put a bullet in your target right then and there is a bit boring, it lacks creativity, but I applaud Io-Interactive for putting it there. It shows trust in the player to be creative, explore, and truly play the role of Agent 47. Moving beyond that part, we saw Agent 47 disguise himself as a staff member in the fashion show, get frisked by guards, hide bodies, and craft an elaborate booby-trap for his target. In the end, 47 can even escape via the same helicopter the target would have left in.

On March 11th, 2016, Hitman will launch with three locations available to the player. From there, the game will be refreshed every week with missions like limited-time contracts. Then, in April, May, and June, the plan is to introduce brand new locales. If you’re like me, you’re probably wondering what the point of this release schedule is. When asked, Liebold told me that the reasoning is two-fold. Firstly, they want an opportunity to respond to fan feedback, developing content in tandem with the audience actually playing the game. Secondly, they want to capture the true essence of a hitman, giving you some downtime between contracts.

I’m not sure I buy into the second part, but as a fan of constantly-evolving live games like Destiny, I can see the appeal of this model. Having new incentives to return to Hitman’s stealth sandboxes every week could get players invested in this new game in a way they might not have in the past. Of course, this will all depend on how dynamic these locales truly are, but Liebold explained that the Paris map, with its museum-turned-fashion-show premise, could be modified to simply be a museum setting. On top of that, any of the 300 characters in the area can be a potential contract.

What I saw suggested a game that would retain the best parts of Absolution while returning to the more free-form scenarios of previous entries, coalescing into something that will hopefully surpass all of them. “Everything we’ve learned over the course of 15 years now went into this game,” Liebold said. “We looked at every single Hitman game and cherry-picked what made them special and what we liked about them, and put it all on the table. That was our starting point. Different people like different Hitman games for different reasons, and we really wanted to get everyone into one group.”

And that all sounds great, but I still found Hitman’s pricing suspicious. Here’s how it works: players can either pay $60 upfront and get everything as it comes out, or pay $35 for the base game and $30 for the rest. That $5 premium might not seem like much, but it’s a bit of a sticking point in a market that rarely rewards early adopters.

I cited Batman: Arkham Knight’s disappointing season pass as a particular offender and Liebold was quick to agree. “Tell me about it! It was very disappointing for me as well,” he said. “I fell for it, and now we’re stuck with shitty DLC. And that’s why it’s so hard for us as well, because people instantly think we want to rip them off.”

In a sense, it’s a matter of perspective, and Liebold explained the angle they’re coming at the pricing model with: “We wanted to reward the players that are going to come with us on this journey…we wanted to try something new, and it’s not episodic, it’s not DLC, it’s definitely not early access…in the end we want to deliver a game as soon as it’s ready, otherwise, everyone will have to wait until Fall when everything is done.”

We’ll have to see how this experiment works out next year, but from a gameplay standpoint it’s looking like we may have a potentially great Hitman game on our hands.