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Nakar
Sep 2, 2002

Ultima Ratio Regum

StashAugustine posted:

One of the little things I really like about the game is how the various staffers on all the levels bitch about how the guys running the place treat them like poo poo. Doing the opportunity where Ken Morgan bitches you out about his room not being spotless up until you drown him in the toilet is cathartic enough to almost redeem Bangkok
I like that this is also reflected in how disguises work. The more menial and lovely the job, the fewer VIPs and important people recognize it, absent some exceptions (like the hotel manager in Bangkok being able to recognize her entire staff apparently). You can be trespassing in many parts of Paris in your suit and Viktor has no loving clue who you are and seemingly doesn't care. Outfits for waiters or chefs are often far more valuable than elite guard disguises because those CICADA dickwads all know each other from their PMC days but nobody can be bothered to remember if there was a bald waiter working today. The lovely outfit may have less access, but you're almost completely safe from being noticed in it.

EDIT: Now that I think on it, Hitman '16 says a lot about class and wealth and how people in that group can afford to murder each other with an impassive superclone contract killer they don't even see coming because he just waltzed into their heavily-guarded event as a janitor. The way this is reflected in gameplay terms says a great deal about who the wealthy consider to be invisible, and how important those people are to the success of what the elite do; there's no shortage of handymen at the GAMA facility, after all.

Every level involves killing someone super wealthy or well-connected... except Colorado, where you're arguably not even really supposed to be killing the targets. Though the Colorado targets are all kind of dicks, several of them come from poorer backgrounds and abuse (or had second thoughts about what they were doing, like Ezra Berg) and are made more sympathetic by that, culminating in the Shadow Client reflecting on his and (presumably) 47's childhood in the cutscene afterward.

I wonder how much of Colorado's odd feeling comes from the map design and how much of it comes from thematic dissonance: Rather than sneaking into some hoity-toity facility to liquidate an rear end in a top hat rich person, you're wandering around some mudhole apricot farm that's been hastily reconfigured to serve as a militia camp for people resisting the global elite to murder a bunch of people who are bad, but maybe bad for the right reason. It feels bad to freak Penelope Graves out by pretending to be an Interpol agent and listen to her paranoid rambling as she contemplates whether someone knows about her defection in a way it doesn't to find out Silvio Caruso murdered his mother. Both are in kind of lovely situations, but the "yeah but" of the latter isn't enough to outweigh all the absolutely awful things they've done and will continue to do.

EDIT EDIT: Also the audio barks from random NPCs when you're in a menial job outfit are really degrading. They gently caress around with waiters by joking about bad service or place orders that they claim are a joke, guests in Bangkok ask if you're a male maid, etc. By contrast they're very respectful of security people and security tends to be much nicer about approaching a checkpoint when you're not in a lovely job disguise, whereupon they'll tell you to just gently caress off outright.

Nakar fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Jun 28, 2017

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champagne posting
Apr 5, 2006

YOU ARE A BRAIN
IN A BUNKER

Holy poo poo. In between the pantomime that is this game and that post I think Hitman may have been the most sociorealistic thing I've played since that war game where you're not a soldier.

StashAugustine
Mar 24, 2013

Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

I actually kinda like Colorado as a shakeup from the usual formula, but thematically it does have that going on- it's kinda funny that the terrorist training camp has the most sympathetic targets. (I missed Berg having doubts, odd given that he's the interrogator in the Michael Myers mask.) Additionally, apart from any political meaning, I just really like that you get little flashes of the lives of people in the mission- most dramatically Dalia's assistant who's spying on her and ends up running off with a guard who had a crush on her, but also just little fragments of dialogue like the siblings in Sapienza working for Caruso.

And apart from any thematic talk, the enforcer mechanic is a really nice way to differentiate disguises, although I wish it was signposted a little better and some locations (okay, Bangkok) could afford to tone it down a little

The Kins
Oct 2, 2004

Vahakyla posted:

Is ICA some sort of quasigovernmental organization, or fully private? Or what?
As I understand it, the ICA is fully privately owned and funded, but it enjoys the co-operation of various government agencies around the world (The Showstopper, for example, was contracted out by MI6.)

Nakar
Sep 2, 2002

Ultima Ratio Regum
It comes up in a few places that Berg quit Mossad out of self-doubt, among other reasons. He's also pretty respectful of his victim, to a degree; if you OD the guy Ezra blames himself for being careless with the dosage. The guards by the bridge exit talk about how he's a pretty nice guy as well.

Sean Rose is likewise no good guy but he was raised by an abusive cult or something and is battling severe OCD. Sending him into drug psychosis to drown him doesn't feel quite so poetic and drat near crosses a line of cruelty even for Hitman.

Also if you do the strike team training well when Rose is present he'll tell Parvati to lay off the yelling and defend the point man's flawless execution. :unsmith:

WindyMan
Mar 21, 2002

Respect the power of the wind

StashAugustine posted:

Additionally, apart from any political meaning, I just really like that you get little flashes of the lives of people in the mission- most dramatically Dalia's assistant who's spying on her and ends up running off with a guard who had a crush on her, but also just little fragments of dialogue like the siblings in Sapienza working for Caruso.

It really frustrated me during the run of Season 1 that people would complain about the game having a lack of story, that six story missions and a handful of cutscenes was not nearly enough to get someone immersed in the world the game is trying to sell you.

The people that actually played the game know how deep the rabbit hole of the story goes. I remember the first time I eavesdropped on Daila explaining to her bodyguard the situation with Viktor selling IAGO's secrets. I was surprisingly riveted at the conversation. Several weeks later, as I was finishing up the Paris challenges, I stumbled upon the conversation of one of Daila's model-spies handing in her resignation. (She's the one standing in front of the window in the hallway between Dalia's office and the auction room.) I was amazed that it took me that long to discover that.

The way IOI chose to disseminate story revelations and world-building dialog was brilliant. The briefings and cinematics gave you the raw details. The major NPC conversations, which the player was almost guaranteed to run into, provided more information and secondary details. Scripted NPC interactions, which are happened upon, gave the targets dimension and helped piece together how they fit into the location and the story on the whole. And then there was the off-the-cuff stuff (Rocco) which just made everything more relatable and believable.

DoctorStrangelove
Jun 7, 2012

IT WOULD NOT BE DIFFICULT MEIN FUHRER!

I like the story being very light and kept on the side-lines. This way the story does not interfere with the game as it did with Absolution.

champagne posting
Apr 5, 2006

YOU ARE A BRAIN
IN A BUNKER

Likewise. The story is dumb as hell and if it was just summed up as "you are a bald assassin this is your contract" then it wouldn't be any worse.

Nakar
Sep 2, 2002

Ultima Ratio Regum
This one goes out to all my Hitmen and Hitwomen and Hithomies in general.


The ABCs of Murder (Sapienza-PC): 1-03-1887300-02
Kill five targets around Sapienza any old way you want. Seriously. Any ol' way. No restrictions, no surprises, just targets as far as the eye can see.

That said, here's a run of it with most of the assorted restrictions I like to work under: Silent Assassin + Suit Only + Default Equipment + Fiber Wire Only + No Knockouts + No Evidence (All Bodies Hidden).

StashAugustine
Mar 24, 2013

Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

Nakar posted:

This one goes out to all my Hitmen and Hitwomen and Hithomies in general.


The ABCs of Murder (Sapienza-PC): 1-03-1887300-02
Kill five targets around Sapienza any old way you want. Seriously. Any ol' way. No restrictions, no surprises, just targets as far as the eye can see.

That said, here's a run of it with most of the assorted restrictions I like to work under: Silent Assassin + Suit Only + Default Equipment + Fiber Wire Only + No Knockouts + No Evidence (All Bodies Hidden).

I just wanna say I appreciate your Steam name

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.

Vahakyla posted:

The fun park boss in Blood Money made me feel so bad right away. There's nothing like that in this one where they are all worthy of post birth abortion.


Is ICA some sort of quasigovernmental organization, or fully private? Or what?

In the first game it was implied they are or were a spinoff of MI5. Since then they're an independent organization that focuses on being the absolute best at assassination for hire (usually favoring institutional clients like NATO because global instability is bad for business). The exception is Absolution, where they're basically SPECTRE.

Sneaks McDevious
Jul 29, 2010

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN
Hopefully they employed a few more voice actors for season 2

Vahakyla
May 3, 2013
Overall, Hitman 16 is one of the best games I've played and a really good game just overall.

Nakar
Sep 2, 2002

Ultima Ratio Regum

julian assflange posted:

Hopefully they employed a few more voice actors for season 2
It's almost endearing, in a way. Maybe 47's genetic conditioning and language skills mean just hears everybody with generic bad American voices everywhere on earth.

StashAugustine posted:

I just wanna say I appreciate your Steam name
At last, recognition! :zoid:

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Nakar posted:

It comes up in a few places that Berg quit Mossad out of self-doubt, among other reasons. He's also pretty respectful of his victim, to a degree; if you OD the guy Ezra blames himself for being careless with the dosage. The guards by the bridge exit talk about how he's a pretty nice guy as well.

Sean Rose is likewise no good guy but he was raised by an abusive cult or something and is battling severe OCD. Sending him into drug psychosis to drown him doesn't feel quite so poetic and drat near crosses a line of cruelty even for Hitman.

Also if you do the strike team training well when Rose is present he'll tell Parvati to lay off the yelling and defend the point man's flawless execution. :unsmith:
The Colorado Crew is a good guys outfit, employing a few questionable characters in the service of a greater good. Plus some not so questionable characters, like Graves, who seems morally perfectly in the clear.

DoctorStrangelove
Jun 7, 2012

IT WOULD NOT BE DIFFICULT MEIN FUHRER!

julian assflange posted:

Hopefully they employed a few more voice actors for season 2

Yuri Lowenthal is the only voice actor you really need.

Jolo
Jun 4, 2007

ive been playing with magnuts tying to change the wold as we know it

Mark Brown makes some pretty interesting videos about game design. A recent episode dealt with good AI in games and specifically about how important it is that the AI responds predictably to player interactions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bbhJi0NBkk

So, he doesn't really dig in to Hitman in this episode, but it did make me think of a very important piece of Hitman's design. When people in Hitman are about to turn around or change their current direction they always give some kind of visual indicator. If you sneak up behind someone after they've walked for a moment and stopped, you can see them adjust their stance from foot to foot before they turn around to walk the other direction. There are lots of these little tells in the game. Someone will put away a cell phone, or stop smoking a cigarette, or many other small moves to indicate that they're about to move. It's great stealth game design. I have definitely played other stealth games where you just have to memorize how long someone will stay in a spot before turning around because there isn't any indicator, the person just turns around. This was exacerbated in earlier Hitman games because of the incredibly slow sneak speed. In Hitman 2, You really had to get a feel for how far close you could get before starting the sneak and how long it would take to get to the person's back.

Mark's other videos are very good also. He did a three part video about the evolution (and downturn) in the Dead Space series.

Pigbuster
Sep 12, 2010

Fun Shoe
The best thing about Hitman AI is how they'll react when you throw something at their face before it actually hits them. That little detail might've honestly pushed me over the edge to buy this game.

KillHour
Oct 28, 2007


Nakar posted:

It's almost endearing, in a way. Maybe 47's genetic conditioning and language skills mean just hears everybody with generic bad AmericanBritish voices everywhere on earth.

At last, recognition! :zoid:

FTFY.

Midnight Voyager
Jul 2, 2008

Lipstick Apathy

Pigbuster posted:

The best thing about Hitman AI is how they'll react when you throw something at their face before it actually hits them. That little detail might've honestly pushed me over the edge to buy this game.

don't yOU THROW- *CLUNK*

Tumble
Jun 24, 2003
I'm not thinking of anything!
One of my favorite little guard things is when they're dragging a body away. They'll say "You'd be surprised but I really do this a lot."

Tumble fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Jun 29, 2017

shut up blegum
Dec 17, 2008


--->Plastic Lawn<---

Tumble posted:

One of my favorite little guard things is when they're dragging a body away. They'll say "You'd be surprised but I really do this a lot."

Or something along the lines of: 'well, of to the trash! Just kidding haha'

KillHour
Oct 28, 2007


Does anyone know where they actually take the bodies?

StashAugustine
Mar 24, 2013

Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

Security station I think?

What's the best SA/SO route for Colorado? I got it for Paris (lure Dalia into her bathroom, ambush Novikov on the way to the safe room which probably won't work on Pro) Sapienza (Caruso with cannonball, De Santis with virus grenade, laptop for virus) and Marrakesh (poison Zaydan, push Strandberg off second floor on the embassy) and got Ninja on Hokkaido (heart in morgue, Yamazaki in spa) but I don't have a good grasp of the safe SO routes in Bangkok or Colorado

Pigbuster
Sep 12, 2010

Fun Shoe

KillHour posted:

Does anyone know where they actually take the bodies?

I think every map has a designated corpse closet where they just dump everyone.

Tumble
Jun 24, 2003
I'm not thinking of anything!

StashAugustine posted:

Security station I think?

What's the best SA/SO route for Colorado? I got it for Paris (lure Dalia into her bathroom, ambush Novikov on the way to the safe room which probably won't work on Pro) Sapienza (Caruso with cannonball, De Santis with virus grenade, laptop for virus) and Marrakesh (poison Zaydan, push Strandberg off second floor on the embassy) and got Ninja on Hokkaido (heart in morgue, Yamazaki in spa) but I don't have a good grasp of the safe SO routes in Bangkok or Colorado

Wait, virus grenade?

qbert
Oct 23, 2003

It's both thrilling and terrifying.

StashAugustine posted:

Security station I think?

What's the best SA/SO route for Colorado? I got it for Paris (lure Dalia into her bathroom, ambush Novikov on the way to the safe room which probably won't work on Pro) Sapienza (Caruso with cannonball, De Santis with virus grenade, laptop for virus) and Marrakesh (poison Zaydan, push Strandberg off second floor on the embassy) and got Ninja on Hokkaido (heart in morgue, Yamazaki in spa) but I don't have a good grasp of the safe SO routes in Bangkok or Colorado

Bangkok is quite a bitch, probably the hardest SASO in my opinion. Generally, you want to poison the lawyer's food, then go out the walkway on the same floor as 47's suite, get to the crew floor, go into the back room of all the crew dudes (I blow up an extinguisher as a distraction to make it easy), knock out the guy there, climb the pipe, and make your way into the rock star's suite's bathroom. From there you can lure him in via coins and take him out with a corner subdue.

Colorado is a lot of sneaking around the inner and outer perimeter. The general order is the barn chick via hay bale, torturer in his shed, poison syringe the girl near the clock in the farmhouse, and lure Sean into the basement via audio distraction to use his face to open the exit.

Both are pretty tricky. Abuse saves.

SubponticatePoster
Aug 9, 2004

Every day takes figurin' out all over again how to fuckin' live.
Slippery Tilde

Pigbuster posted:

I think every map has a designated corpse closet where they just dump everyone.
In Bangkok it's in the basement by the laundry room. I was loving around seeing how many people I could kill before I got spotted, and the entire area was stacked with bodybags :stare:

StashAugustine
Mar 24, 2013

Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

Tumble posted:

Wait, virus grenade?

Caruso is (rightfully) paranoid about De Santis and keeps a strain of the virus tailored to her as an insurance policy. Break the model ship in the storage room adjacent to his room and it'll drop a virus sample that breaks when you throw it and will poison kill De Santis and only De Santis if you land it nearby

SubponticatePoster posted:

In Bangkok it's in the basement by the laundry room. I was loving around seeing how many people I could kill before I got spotted, and the entire area was stacked with bodybags :stare:

That would explain why they kept dragging people one room over when I was doing Himmapan Horror

WindyMan
Mar 21, 2002

Respect the power of the wind

Jolo posted:

Mark Brown makes some pretty interesting videos about game design. A recent episode dealt with good AI in games and specifically about how important it is that the AI responds predictably to player interactions.

Mark Brown's videos are really good, I recommend digging through them and picking out talks about games you like if you need something to watch. Very insightful and informative.

Jolo posted:

When people in Hitman are about to turn around or change their current direction they always give some kind of visual indicator. If you sneak up behind someone after they've walked for a moment and stopped, you can see them adjust their stance from foot to foot before they turn around to walk the other direction. There are lots of these little tells in the game. Someone will put away a cell phone, or stop smoking a cigarette, or many other small moves to indicate that they're about to move. It's great stealth game design.

Unless you're a speedrunner/gamebreaker. Kotti and his ilk complain about the headturning to the point where they feel it completely ruins the game. No, it ruins the game when you play it like they do. It's completely logical that someone will see something in the direction their head is turning, instead of a video-gamey static FOV coming out of their chest or something dumb and old-fashioned like that. It makes their movements more natural, and gives stealth that extra dimension you have to deal with.

The tells the NPCs give off are the balance to them having a wider/more random field of view, in that you can predict exactly when they'll be blind to you so you can act accordingly. That feels like the kind of stealth that 47 should be engaged in anyway.

SubponticatePoster
Aug 9, 2004

Every day takes figurin' out all over again how to fuckin' live.
Slippery Tilde

StashAugustine posted:

That would explain why they kept dragging people one room over when I was doing Himmapan Horror
Yeah, it's the hallway/alcove right by the laundry room. HH was a fun challenge, I'd axe someone right by the door, let another poor schmuck find the body to count, then axe them :v: Lather, rinse, repeat.

Goa Tse-tung
Feb 11, 2008

;3

Yams Fan

KillHour posted:

Does anyone know where they actually take the bodies?

the morgue in Hokkaido can become quite the center of attention

double nine
Aug 8, 2013

It becomes very entertaining when you go on a silent killing spree and the body storage starts overflowing

ChaosArgate
Oct 10, 2012

Why does everyone think I'm going to get in trouble?

qbert posted:

Bangkok is quite a bitch, probably the hardest SASO in my opinion. Generally, you want to poison the lawyer's food, then go out the walkway on the same floor as 47's suite, get to the crew floor, go into the back room of all the crew dudes (I blow up an extinguisher as a distraction to make it easy), knock out the guy there, climb the pipe, and make your way into the rock star's suite's bathroom. From there you can lure him in via coins and take him out with a corner subdue.

And if you wanna go for style points, do the Intervention opportunity where you confront him head on in his suite with the audio recording during your SASO.

Nakar
Sep 2, 2002

Ultima Ratio Regum

double nine posted:

It becomes very entertaining when you go on a silent killing spree and the body storage starts overflowing
The first floor laundry room in the Caruso manor is especially bad for this as it's a tiny room and seems to be the designated body bag dropoff for much of Sapienza.

WindyMan posted:

Unless you're a speedrunner/gamebreaker. Kotti and his ilk complain about the headturning to the point where they feel it completely ruins the game. No, it ruins the game when you play it like they do. It's completely logical that someone will see something in the direction their head is turning, instead of a video-gamey static FOV coming out of their chest or something dumb and old-fashioned like that. It makes their movements more natural, and gives stealth that extra dimension you have to deal with.
They might be whiny but they're 100% right, random headturning that causes identical actions to lead to wildly different outcomes is an indefensibly bad part of the game design. It punishes you for trying to eschew knockouts and makes formulating approaches to contracts annoying when the thing that worked the first 3 times you tried it suddenly doesn't anymore because an NPC you couldn't even really see halfway across a map has their head angled toward you 5% of the time you happen to be doing whatever it is you're doing. I just think it's not unreasonable to ask that doing the same thing leads to the same result.

Imagine how pissed off everybody would be if poison/emetic vials just randomly didn't work on the people who drank them. You can't plan for that, you can't play around that. And it affects the wrong approaches more: If I'm trying to break the game headturning is the least of my worries because I can make effectively every NPC do whatever I want with lures and coin tricks and thrown objects and dropped weapons. The game shouldn't be rewarding me for cheesing it and knocking everyone out over plotting a route that lets me avoid people and unnecessary violence, but that's precisely what the headturns in idle state are. If dropping a gun on the ground makes a guard less alert (doesn't turn, stops briefly multiple times, doesn't look left and right which can lead to 180 degree spots) than dropping a coin, something is hosed.

If the turning wasn't random and NPCs didn't have telescopic eyesight for crimes committed within the length of a football field from their view cone (EDIT: Also where their view cone was 3-5 seconds ago because lol x-ray vision) I'd be fine with it though. But since it is and they do, it has no place in the game.

Nakar fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Jun 29, 2017

WindyMan
Mar 21, 2002

Respect the power of the wind

Nakar posted:

They might be whiny but they're 100% right, random headturning that causes identical actions to lead to wildly different outcomes is an indefensibly bad part of the game design. It punishes you for trying to eschew knockouts and makes formulating approaches to contracts annoying when the thing that worked the first 3 times you tried it suddenly doesn't anymore because an NPC you couldn't even really see halfway across a map has their head angled toward you 5% of the time you happen to be doing whatever it is you're doing. I just think it's not unreasonable to ask that doing the same thing leads to the same result.

This is what I mean, though. The same thing does lead to the same result, it's just that speedrunners have a different definition of "the same thing" from normal players.

I know that if an NPC has his head turned and sees me, he'll react the same way every time. As a player, I have to read a guard's movements as I happen upon them and act according to the situation. The "randomness" of the headturning is consistent; I know a guard will naturally check to his left and right, as guards would realistically do the same way every time. It's just that I don't know which way that guard will turn to look at any given moment, and for the majority of players there's nothing wrong with that.

I say it was designed to be this way, to reinforce to the player that the only 100% foolproof way to get close to someone safely is to approach from completely behind them. This is evidenced by the obvious, consistent, and universal cue that this safety is about to be compromised and a guard is about to turn around—always turning in the same direction on top of that. I'd agree with your view if guards turned around 180° in a random direction or headturned/headturned back with random cadence, but they don't AFAIK.

It's critical to the game that the player knows that the 90° (or whatever) cone directly behind a guard is always safe, the 90° cone directly in front of one is always dangerous, and the rest of the space to the sides are risky unless reacting to a guard's change in head movement. Players can consistently react to (random) headturning because guard's heads stay looking in a direction for a consistent amount of time, every time.

Remember all the complaints about some opportunities and NPC movements being proximity triggered instead of on a universal timer? Speedrunners want that because it leads to predictability. But it would have been a horrible game design choice for the majority of people actually playing the game, since the levels are so massive that they'd never find everything or even know when/where to look. IMO the headturning thing isn't a bad design choice if you're playing the game normally, which means it isn't a bad game design choice, period. It's consistent where it matters, only being random enough to help with realism and to shepherd players into being stealthy based on what the guards are capable of seeing and doing, not to manipulate what guards are programmed to do.

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

WindyMan posted:

This is what I mean, though. The same thing does lead to the same result, it's just that speedrunners have a different definition of "the same thing" from normal players.

I know that if an NPC has his head turned and sees me, he'll react the same way every time.
But that's just it: as head-turning is implemented it does not yield the same result. Because you can't predict — or even tell — whether an NPC has turned his head in such a way that he sees you when you initiate an action.

It's not that the head turns and you only have yourself to blame for being spotted — it's that the game will randomly decide that, no, standing 180° behind an NPC will let them spot you because, no, the head was actually turned 90°+ this time with nothing to indicate that this even happened. It's actually worse than the old x-ray vision bugs, because those tended to be tied to specific parts of the map and were most likely due to slightly broken geometry. This, however, is just random. The game decides to gently caress you over, and if you're running on Pro, you're just plain old screwed.

It's even inconsistent in the opposite direction: NPCs can be looking right at you and see nothing, presumably for the exact same reason — the vision cone isn't actually pointing where the head is. Granted, that one happens more often if there's a difference in elevation, so it could just be that the vision cone is severely misshapen, but it is the same kind of unpredictable inconsistency only in the opposite direction, and that's just as bad.

quote:

I say it was designed to be this way, to reinforce to the player that the only 100% foolproof way to get close to someone safely is to approach from completely behind them. This is evidenced by the obvious, consistent, and universal cue that this safety is about to be compromised and a guard is about to turn around—always turning in the same direction on top of that. I'd agree with your view if guards turned around 180° in a random direction or headturned/headturned back with random cadence, but they don't AFAIK.
They do. You can attack a target completely from behind and be spotted, resulting in either the classic “let's get into a punching match rather than a choke hold” and “oh, I won't react, but you are now tagged as compromised because haaa-haaaa.”

Tippis fucked around with this message at 03:43 on Jun 30, 2017

Jerusalem
May 20, 2004

Would you be my new best friends?

One little bit I really dig about Ezra Berg is that he'll come out of the basement and stand around casually chatting with the guards, and after awhile they mention the mask and in this jolly voice he goes,"Oh! I forgot I was wearing it, haha :sweatdrop:"

His restraint when chatting to the enthusiastic guard in the garage is great too. "Look I appreciate your help but I've already done all this..."

StashAugustine posted:

Virus Grenade Caruso is (rightfully) paranoid about De Santis and keeps a strain of the virus tailored to her as an insurance policy. Break the model ship in the storage room adjacent to his room and it'll drop a virus sample that breaks when you throw it and will poison kill De Santis and only De Santis if you land it nearby

:aaa:

Nakar
Sep 2, 2002

Ultima Ratio Regum

WindyMan posted:

This is what I mean, though. The same thing does lead to the same result, it's just that speedrunners have a different definition of "the same thing" from normal players.

I know that if an NPC has his head turned and sees me, he'll react the same way every time. As a player, I have to read a guard's movements as I happen upon them and act according to the situation. The "randomness" of the headturning is consistent; I know a guard will naturally check to his left and right, as guards would realistically do the same way every time. It's just that I don't know which way that guard will turn to look at any given moment, and for the majority of players there's nothing wrong with that.
You don't understand NPC vision if you're saying this. First of all, you cannot possibly be watching every NPC on the map in places like Landslide's festival area or the public areas in Paris or whatever. It's too easy for a person two dozen yards away facing not-quite-entirely away from you to spot you doing something one time out of ten, and it's loving infuriating for it to happen that one time because it shouldn't happen at all, ever. Either a person can see what you are going to do or they can't, and if you take the same approach you should either always be spotted or never be spotted.

Also you're not addressing the point that normal guard behavior is actually more unpredictable and alert than when a guard sees a gun or a body. That doesn't make any loving sense. I can make a guard stupid by putting a gun on the floor but if he's just standing bored at his post he's Mr. loving Eagle Eyes. If somebody's going to sweep an area visually it should be after they're alerted and not before.

WindyMan posted:

I say it was designed to be this way, to reinforce to the player that the only 100% foolproof way to get close to someone safely is to approach from completely behind them. This is evidenced by the obvious, consistent, and universal cue that this safety is about to be compromised and a guard is about to turn around—always turning in the same direction on top of that. I'd agree with your view if guards turned around 180° in a random direction or headturned/headturned back with random cadence, but they don't AFAIK.
It wasn't designed to be this way. Before the Summer Bonus Episode patch there was no headturning; as the game was originally designed it was not an intended factor. The headturn thing is a hackjob nerf that doesn't function correctly and just screws you over. They did intend to add it to the game but that doesn't mean they designed the game with the feature in mind. Certain maps are badly hurt by it, like The Icon.

WindyMan posted:

It's critical to the game that the player knows that the 90° (or whatever) cone directly behind a guard is always safe, the 90° cone directly in front of one is always dangerous, and the rest of the space to the sides are risky unless reacting to a guard's change in head movement. Players can consistently react to (random) headturning because guard's heads stay looking in a direction for a consistent amount of time, every time.
Italicized part is not true. Guards do not stay looking in a direction for consistent amounts of time and can and will look away only to immediately look back a second later for no goddamn reason. Try picking the apartment door near the van on Landslide and enjoy trying to guess when the bodyguard by the sign will turn away long enough to not catch you breaking in. And since the camera has to be pointed at the door to get the prompt to pick it open, you're always taking a risk because the guard will no longer be visible on your screen.

Also the area behind a guard isn't safe. If a guard gets even the tiniest inkling of you out of their peripheral vision they can (but won't always) turn completely around immediately. And someone responding to a sound will look back and forth so wide that they can literally spot you from directly behind them. It's all super random and it rewards cheese strategies like knockout throws and legshots. I hate having to knock NPCs out. I'd rather distract them and sneak past. But distracting them and sneaking past is actually more risky than incapacitating them in a lot of cases, and that's stupid.

WindyMan posted:

Remember all the complaints about some opportunities and NPC movements being proximity triggered instead of on a universal timer? Speedrunners want that because it leads to predictability. But it would have been a horrible game design choice for the majority of people actually playing the game, since the levels are so massive that they'd never find everything or even know when/where to look. IMO the headturning thing isn't a bad design choice if you're playing the game normally, which means it isn't a bad game design choice, period. It's consistent where it matters, only being random enough to help with realism and to shepherd players into being stealthy based on what the guards are capable of seeing and doing, not to manipulate what guards are programmed to do.
You haven't actually provided a reason to explain what the behavior adds to the game for anyone playing it other than frustration. It can't be predicted so it can't be exploited or controlled. Your argument is basically "only speedrunners care and gently caress speedrunners heh :smug:" but this is a game where your score at the end of a map is literally based on your time spent completing it. By the rules of the game itself, speedrunning is what distinguishes who did the mission better presuming SA is preserved. If you're going to have time-based scoring, you shouldn't also have random uncontrollable elements that literally exist to say "gently caress you, you lose 5-10 seconds or have to restart." I'm perfectly okay with certain activities not working because they'll blow SA, but I am not down with them only happening some of the time because it means having a good route and good execution is only part of the factor that gets you a good time; the remaining factor is pure chance, meaning it ultimately rewards the people willing to run a route a hundred times for it to all work right once. I'd rather have a risky action just not work ever than only have it work sometimes.

For example, I'd be fine with a wider vision cone on NPCs if it weren't random. I'm not asking for the game not to be difficult, I'm asking for the difficulty to be consistent. I cannot see any valid argument for why this shouldn't be the case in a speed-based puzzle stealth game. Solving a puzzle isn't fun when some rear end in a top hat periodically comes in and sweeps all the loose pieces onto the floor.

Tippis posted:

It's not that the head turns and you only have yourself to blame for being spotted — it's that the game will randomly decide that, no, standing 180° behind an NPC will let them spot you because, no, the head was actually turned 90°+ this time with nothing to indicate that this even happened. It's actually worse than the old x-ray vision bugs, because those tended to be tied to specific parts of the map and were most likely due to slightly broken geometry. This, however, is just random. The game decides to gently caress you over, and if you're running on Pro, you're just plain old screwed.
This is correct but I'd just note that the x-ray thing totally still exists. What NPCs can see lags as much as 2-3 seconds behind what the player can see in-game. This is due to certain unavoidable or at least difficult-to-fix processing priority issues and it can be worked around with certain methods but it's bad in the sense that the player cannot trust what they see, which completely shoots down the "you should be more observant" argument. It's a lot of esoteric bullshit that the good players have basically worked around in exploitative ways and I don't really like that but will continue using the exploits if the game is going to keep cheating.

As much as Kotti whines, and he whines a lot where the rest of us have just learned to deal with it, Hitman definitely is at times a great game that I don't want to play because the bullshit just makes me angry.

Tippis posted:

It's even inconsistent in the opposite direction: NPCs can be looking right at you and see nothing, presumably for the exact same reason — the vision cone isn't actually pointing where the head is. Granted, that one happens more often if there's a difference in elevation, so it could just be that the vision cone is severely misshapen, but it is the same kind of unpredictable inconsistency only in the opposite direction, and that's just as bad.
Yeah like I discovered that from a Stylist start you can poison Sato's wine without needing a waiter disguise because despite there being 2 models looking at you and a female stylist standing right next to the wine glass at an angle, the only person who can ever catch you is loving Sato himself headturning you from 10 feet away, and that only happens like 5% of the time. If I trusted what I was seeing I would never attempt to poison that glass because obviously the model looking right at me will spot me. But she doesn't, and the stylist right next to me doesn't either because she's locked in an animation that doesn't have random headturning and can't see poo poo.

The only way I could discover any of this was by repeated trial and error. Observing the situation would've completely misled me. This is why some speedrun videos get comments like "That works?", because it doesn't look like it should work and only does because of some obscure gnostic game mechanic knowledge that a person either discovered (like my Napoleon pre-lure thing) or that someone else in "the community" shared with only those who care about that kind of thing. Like did you know that even though guards have the dot above their heads they won't spot you in high alert? But they will spot you in regular alert. What is the difference between regular and high alert? Did you even know there was a distinction between alert, high alert, and combat? And did you know regular NPCs won't spot you in any panic state? But only if you're trespassing; being armed or taking an illegal action causes them to still spot you. Why does any of this make sense? How was anybody supposed to know about it? I sure as hell didn't until a couple of top speedrunners explained it to me, and I'd had the game for like six loving months before I even knew about that bullshit.

Dropping and exploding a duck or emptying an unsuppressed handgun into a wall shouldn't allow you to just run through a trespassing area. It's idiotic and it shouldn't be rewarded. But it works, and it's often more reliable than trying to sneak past because civilian NPCs who would otherwise catch you are panicked and won't spot you even if you walk right up to them. That should not be more consistent than crouch-walking quietly behind two Tech Crew guys who are looking at their equipment and conversing with each other, but go ahead and try it on the second floor part of Paris and you'll find that firing a loud handgun out of their lines of sight makes it easier to get past them than trying to sneak. That shouldn't be how it works.

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where the red fern gropes
Aug 24, 2011


ChaosArgate posted:

And if you wanna go for style points, do the Intervention opportunity where you confront him head on in his suite with the audio recording during your SASO.

did this with my signature suit, disappointed there wasn't a specific challenge/achievement for doing it, but i regret nothing

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