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blackguy32 posted:People always say this while ignoring that the first two Hitman games had plenty of levels where the goal wasn't to actually kill anyone. Maybe they aren't similar to Blood Money in that way, but they still fit the Hitman mold. What really got me about Absolution is the plot and the tone of the game in general, its just so dumb and in the most obnoxious in your face kind of way. I won't pretend that the series has ever been high art, but I think one of the reasons that I ended up liking Blood Money so much was that they had the intelligence to shove the main story into the background and instead focus on mostly unrelated missions that wildly varied in setting and character. You get a bit of a briefing as to why your killing a sheikh in Vegas or whatever and away you go, if you're observant you might notice little quirks like the fact that in till death do us part its clearly the bride who has organised the assassination of her own husband and father on her wedding day as well as the targets in the previous level. In Absolution on the other hand you've got a shitload of garish, ugly cutscenes filled with garish, ugly characters in a garish, ugly game that you can't ignore since it contextualizes all the stupid poo poo your doing. Instead of a day in the life of 47 on the job you've got this nonsense about him trying to rescue a teenage schoolgirl he's inexplicably grown attached to from the good ol' boys while you wander around the most boring parts of middle America. Also Kane and Lynch show up to rub salt on the wound. I'm ambivalent about the episodic nature but the new game looks like a return to what the series is good at, more globetrotting, glamorous missions taking down high profile targets in big, complex, heavily populated, open ended environments without getting too hung up on lovely grind-house level plots.
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Feb 11, 2016 20:06
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Snuffman posted:"Streets of Hope" is not a good stage for size comparison. Sure, it was a "big" stage in Hitman Absolution, but it was small compared to a lot of the stages of Blood Money. The level size looks at least as large as Blood Money and I'm happy with that. Besides, massive levels aren't really intrinsically a good thing, one of the best levels in BM, A New Life, is one of the smallest ones.
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Feb 11, 2016 20:28
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Sleeveless posted:
Blood Money (and contracts) had a story that was background fluff you can immediately kick away to get to the meat, it existed purely to string along varied setpiece missions, as it should be. Absolution has the kind of story that dumb people will defend by calling it camp, although, unlike good camp, it takes itself bafflingly seriously, and it also hijacks the direction of the game so that you spend most of it killing rednecks in boring as gently caress small town America. It seriously baffles me how little fun it felt despite trying so hard, none of the characters were enjoyable or charismatic, it had this real ugliness in the character design and tone, and don't get me started on the way women get portrayed in it. The one thing I kind of liked was the way that 47 clearly didn't fit in at all with the ~W a c k Y~ nonsense going on around him and just went through the whole thing with an expression that said 'what the gently caress am I even doing here?' Its like he's stoically going through the crap the script requires of him so he can get it over with and be in a good hitman game again. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 07:40 on Feb 12, 2016 |
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Feb 12, 2016 07:34
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Moartoast posted:To be fair, IOI has always had some real bad issues with these things. Blood Money's maybe the closest they ever came to being decent about that and it still had some extremely, uh, questionable parts, and that was before they regressed completely in K&L2, where you are at one point forced to listen to a lady being raped during a loading screen (seriously) so the male leads would have more motivational framing to shoot more people. True, it seemed in BM that there was only one model they had for most women below fifty, and that model had the most ridiculous tits. Absolution just felt like they were going backwards on that front at a point when most games were finally getting the idea that maybe this sort of carry on was really dumb. I will say that the trailers are really selling me on the new game though, I think the trailer that involved 47 jogging interspersed with clips of various assassinations is one of my favorite game trailers I've seen in years, it just perfectly gets the kind of tone I want in a hitman game, that combination of glamour and danger that really makes it feel like your trying to rub out some seriously powerful people in the most elegant way possible.
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Feb 12, 2016 08:48
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Mr. Fortitude posted:
I sometimes wonder if Absolution's structure would have been tolerable if the story was at least good, but its not so 
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Feb 22, 2016 04:00
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Moartoast posted:It's still hilarious to me that Square Enix published Absolution and Thi4f within like two years of each other, and they make so many of the same mistakes in such similar ways, and wasted potential in similar ways, too. I even remember that they used the same VA for their "101" trailers that give bullet point rundowns of mechanics/story/whatever. Those games dovetailed so nicely as hot messes of confused adaptations of classic freeform games. Shamus Young had a really good lets play of Absolution, and they noticed that about Square Enix too. Their theory, which I think is plausible, is that at some point Square Enix sunk a poo poo ton of money in state of the art motion capture tech and the resulting sunk cost fallacy demanded that they spend massive amounts of resources on lengthy cut-scenes and over-intrusive plots in games that really didn't need them to get their moneys worth. It would also help explain the way the most recent Tomb Raider and Deus Ex games also feel like Hollywood movies at many points, but at least it works better there since they remembered to hire actual writers. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Feb 22, 2016 |
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Feb 22, 2016 04:27
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Mr Scumbag posted:Seriously? When I play other games from the same year, I think the vast majority look worse than BM. The worst thing you could say about the graphics from a modern perspective is that they're kind of low-poly, but the art style has seen it age exceptionally well, in my opinion. Yeah I don't get that either, as a late era PS2 game it looks like it was at the very limit of what you could reasonably expect to do with that system.
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Mar 1, 2016 08:34
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The Cheshire Cat posted:Absolution had some nice refinements on the existing systems (the shooting/cover was good, contracts mode was a great idea) but the level design was way too constraining. Even the more "open" levels were really tiny, and the various ways to kill your target all felt really forced - Blood Money and earlier games certain had "scripted" options for kills (like say, rigging the pyrotechnic display in the heaven & hell mission in BM), but the way Absolution did it just felt like ticking off boxes for achievements rather than being rewarded for exploring the level and watching the target's routines. Whenever I see people praise Absolution as underrated or whatever I always feel a bit baffled. I know I harp on about the plot too much but another thing that irked me was the level design, at times it just completely failed to be anything but total nonsense. I remember there was a bar level I just found so bizarre, it had all the problems you state, compact, constrained etc. But what really annoyed me was the very concept of the level itself, you're not assassinating anybody(  ), you're just sneaking around (I can't even remember why)... except its a public bar so you should be able to walk around most of it without anybody hassling you, but you can't. I couldn't figure out why, there was no explanation as to why half the people would go ballistic and start shooting you if they looked at you too long, were they all goons of the main bad guy and able to recognize you on sight? Did the police put out information to the public to try to get you arrested (tempting explanation, but it would make other missions like the gun shop and hotel make no sense)? No clue! Its also packed with guards so you can barely walk anywhere without suspicion going through the roof, I ended up exploiting a quirk in the AI that reduces a guards suspicion to zero if they can't see your face so I just spun around in circles to keep breaking eye contact, pretty funny I must admit.So I sneak around and I find a lever and I pull the lever, and somehow, I still cannot figure out how these two events were connected, pulling this lever starts a cutscene that causes a barfight to break out, which makes finishing the mission a fair bit easier (Edit: looked it up on youtube, I think it might have turned off the music?). The whole thing was so loving weird and non-intuitive, I was seeing the mechanics, contextualization and level design collapse into this nonsensical mess. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Mar 1, 2016 |
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Mar 1, 2016 22:28
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Dandywalken posted:Killing Diana was unacceptable. Good news!
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Mar 4, 2016 08:09
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MinibarMatchman posted:funniest comments on Season 2 announcement are tied between the usual "online only still, gently caress YOU" and "please get better voices, I would even take heavily accented racial caricatures" which is some real wtf level idiot poo poo. Seriously though get rid of online only and maybe don't hire people from California to voice Moroccans.
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Nov 4, 2016 14:19
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Mr. Fortitude posted:Always online seems to be a big sticking point though. Superbunnyhop recently reviewed Season 1 and said it was one of the best stealth games he ever played but if you're crazy enough to look at the comments, everyone says they will never buy it because it's always online. I wonder how many additional sales they'd get if IO told the Square-Enix suits to gently caress off with the always online mandate. SBH himself really didn't like the always online thing and felt that certain elements of the design, primarily the Elusive targets, mostly existed to penalize players who hadn't bought it as soon as possible. Its a real shame that there's so much dodgy stuff going on around the game when fundamentally its so drat good. The always online is not helping the consumer at all, there isn't a real multiplayer component to the game. Its clunky DRM and ought to be called out as such. Bad Seafood posted:
Don't appreciate it, it shouldn't be there at all. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 03:23 on Nov 6, 2016 |
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Nov 6, 2016 03:17
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Bad Seafood posted:I appreciate it in the sense that I've had conversations like this before, though not about this particular title, where defenders of the game were quick to justify how it "Wasn't as bad as how those other guys do it." As a feature, as a thing some devs and publishers do, I hate it and won't carry water for it, but I'll at least save everyone some time hashing out where everyone stands. Fair Enough. Anyway, they seem to have basically confirmed season 2 at this point. I have good faith in IO, but I was a bit worried reading some of the stuff they're saying that they don't end up recycling the old maps. I guess it might be alright if they radically modify them, but I'd really like to see entirely new places and I've spent an awful lot of time in Paris and Sapienza at this point.
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Nov 6, 2016 03:38
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Jack Trades posted:Are you talking about the Requiem "mission"? Because nobody shits on the Requiem. I think he meant the white house mission, which is a bit too rigid imo.
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Nov 7, 2016 03:29
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Sinteres posted:Is Absolution worth getting for $5 just to have more Hitman, even if it's not as good as Blood Money or the new one? Buy Absolution, play it, then get the new one and it will seem even better by pure contrast.
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Nov 23, 2016 23:59
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Sinteres posted:I just got the new game a few days ago, and I'm already mourning in advance a time when I won't have fresh maps to play, so I was hoping Absolution would be worth a shot. I've only played the first two maps so far, because exploring the different variations is fun, but they've been so good that I want way more than what I have left (especially since it looks like the rest of the maps aren't considered as good as the first two). At least there's a second season coming. So you know, Absolution is much more linear and the maps are generally much smaller and less interesting than either Hitman 2016 or Blood Money. Half them aren't assassinations and don't offer much by way of creative free-form approaches to the problems presented since all you have to do is get to a level exit or shoot a bunch of nuns.
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Nov 24, 2016 00:07
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WindyMan posted:Christ dudes, for $5 Absolution is worth it. It's a terrible Hitman game, but it's still a good game for what it tried (though failed) to do. Still a fairly significant time investment and I wouldn't really recommend it all round. I found that game so dang unpleasant to experience, especially with the way the story was presented.
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Nov 24, 2016 00:42
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MinibarMatchman posted:Wow, an offline mode for Hitman? They're really getting serious about scooping up the rest of the playerbase that didn't like the online requirements, huge update. Also good on them for realizing that depending on serverside saves of your progress forever was a dumb idea. Oh baby!
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Nov 28, 2016 15:14
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SubponticatePoster posted:IIRC somebody tweeted or emailed him and he said "y'know, they haven't even asked me to do it I remember reading a post-mortem for absolution, I want say it was in pcgamer? not sure, that specifically blamed Bateson for most of the problems in Absolution and spent the article bitching about his performance. I thought it was really stupid and unfair, especially since Bateson's buttoned-up, professional delivery contrasted so ridiculously with everything that was going on in the game it was actually really entertaining, probably the best part of the game. I just loved the implied 'uggh, I can't believe I'm stuck in this nonsense' that 47 seemed to betray whenever he talked, it seemed fittingly in-character.
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Dec 13, 2016 05:53
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" Cue a lot of hollering from fans (rightfully) and whomever was responsible realizing it would be a huge loving mistake and secretly getting him onboard and then releasing the bathroom trailer.
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Mr. Fortitude posted:The game has been good since the first level. It only received bad reviews due to a mixture of gaming journalists being completely out of touch with what is good as well as people getting mad over the DRM, which is slowly being phased out anyway and the most vocal complainers probably planned on pirating the game anyway. It didn't receive bad reviews from what I saw.
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Dec 14, 2016 02:50
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WindyMan posted:User reviews were pretty brutal early on. If you look at the Steam store page, a lot of the first reviews were negative due to the always-online requirement. Even a lot of the positive reviews mentioned it as an issue, because for the first few weeks it really was one as IO was still getting the game up on the server side. Steam reviews are a whole different kettle of fish, talking about journalists the first episode mostly sat in the 7 or 8 out of 10 territory, which is fair enough imo.
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Dec 14, 2016 03:03
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Discendo Vox posted:Absolutely not. Yeah, Absolution is a loving terrible game that just makes me embarrassed for whoever thought it was cool, do not play it. Its seriously one of my biggest purchasing regrets in videogames and the defenses here boil down to 'its not that bad if somehow ignore the horribly bad stuff the game shoves in your face every ten seconds, it even reaches the dizzying heights of total mediocrity for a stealth game that waters down most of the stuff that makes Hitman interesting if you manage to ignore the awful, awful plot and aesthetics!' khwarezm fucked around with this message at 15:03 on May 26, 2017 |
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May 26, 2017 14:57
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shut up blegum posted:Counterpoint: it's literally 5$. Play it, if you don't like it, stop playing it. Life can be very easy. Counter-counterpoint, its literally not worth your time, get a better game like one of the old Thief games, one of the other Hitman games or MGSV.
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May 26, 2017 15:06
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Holy gently caress the tension. C'mon season two, you can do it.
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May 29, 2017 01:01
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I guess we have... Styx?
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May 29, 2017 03:45
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Discendo Vox posted:Superbunnyhop has a fascinatingly, aggressively incorrect and audience-pandering video out about why Hitman "failed". No, he doesn't, given the information available he has a very good examination of what might have damaged the game and caused Squeenix to abandon ship. Whether or not you think the game was great gameplay terms or the episodic or always online stuff was fine is irrelevant, events conspired to make the game under-perform, and likely significantly below how Absolution did. Given the costs involved this has put IO and the whole franchise in jeopardy, its essential to examine why. Zaphod42 posted:
Don't give me that, people were right to be wary not to put up 60 dollars up front without having the whole package available for review or feedback, heck, with episodic games you don't even know if they'll actually be finished. The original two episode deal would have been much more approachable. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 22:03 on Jun 6, 2017 |
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Jun 6, 2017 21:59
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gently caress I hate gamers sometimes. They really don't know poo poo about what makes a good game.
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Zaphod42 posted:Who abandoned ship? This game has gotten updates for far longer than I expected it to. Really man? They aren't supporting the franchise anymore even though it seems that IO was halfway through season 2 and are trying to sell it and the company off elsewhere. If it met their (likely completely ridiculous) sales expectations this likely would not have happened.
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Jun 6, 2017 22:05
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Like, if you look at the steam reviews right now the consensus is way below what the game deserves, back while it was being released it was even worse (I believe it was mixed before the completion of the season). People were very skeptical of the episodic stuff beforehand (I had hope since I thought Hitman's singular massive open levels lended themselves to the format better than most games) and while it was being released the always online stuff was a huge bugbear (and a criticism I frankly agree with). The game had a really tough uphill battle, a lot of people (myself included) were turned off by Absolution going in to this, the episodic stuff sent off a lot of alarms, deserved or not, the always online requirement was needlessly antagonistic to a lot of people, the first episode wasn't the strongest, and its probably a bit too niche overall for a AAA game. A lot of similar games like Dishonored 2 and Mankind Divided struggled without any of this additional baggage so Hitman really got the worst of it.
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Jun 6, 2017 22:31
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Discendo Vox posted:He speculates at random with a videogames journo from Germany, provides no actual figures, makes specious comparisons between games, and doesn't define any of his terms. He makes no bones about speculating because that's all he and anyone else can do, everything is presented as a possibility and nothing more. He tried to get in contact with IO and other sources but nobody bit and as a result he's in a bind, and yet there's little hints like steamcharts, the oddities and changes over the episodic structure, Square Enix's previous demands of similar properties oh and the fact that the publisher is trying to unload the franchise and developer like a ten ton brick for some reason that point to everything not having gone well. The German fella confirmed some rumors before any official announcements and seems to be very knowledgeable about the game so he might have some connections, may as well talk to him if nobody else (and he clearly doesn't treat all he has to say as gospel). What you're saying saying here doesn't really line up with your previous post, 'fascinatingly, aggressively incorrect'? How do you know? Nobody, except the employees of Square Enix and IO have any idea what really went down, that's the problem. Do you take umbrage with the fact that he described Hitman as failed? Because, and its poo poo to say this, the fallout looks an awful lot like what happens when a publisher considers a game a failure.
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Jun 6, 2017 23:31
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WindyMan posted:The fallout doesn't square with the leadup, though. If Square Enix saw that the game was going to be a failure, it would have never greenlit season 2. That it was is the biggest point against any speculative claims that the Hitman 2016 concept as a platform was a failure. Failures don't get renewed for a new season. But as far as SE sees it that's still a failure. If it undersold Absolution that could be pretty bad. By the sounds of it season 2 is fairly well into development but the last episode was only released in October and the complete package in January, with tons of Elusive targets still being released. I suspect that development on season 2 started well before season 1 was fully released and that SE gave them several periods to see how well sales were before ultimately deciding they weren't going to meet their sales demands and canning the thing, likely when the full season was finally finished and got a boxed release. I'd love it if another company picks up the game but for all we know nothing may come of it, maybe they perceive that SE abandoned the property for good reason. Maybe this is where the Hitman saga ends, that would be miserable, but we all know hope is a lie anyway.
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Jun 6, 2017 23:55
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Episodic games were the next big thing ten years ago. Since then basically only telltale style neo-adventure games have found major success, they would have broken out of their ghetto by now if they were ever going to work in the AAA market. Of course Square Enix seems like it was the biggest recent backer of episodic gaming (Hitman, FFVII remake, Life is Strange), but none of the other major studios seem to be particularly interested and SE has an increasing reputation of being batshit insane behind the scenes rather than indicating the wave of the future.
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Jun 7, 2017 03:02
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:The three best Hitman levels I heard proposed were a) a mall during a hostage-taking incident (so you start outside in the crowd and have to work your way past the cops and into the mall and avoid the tangos to take out your target) b) a pro-wrestling rehearsal (like Curtains Down but at a professional wrestling promo rehearsal) and c) Comic Con-style convention 47 disguised as an anime waifu or putting on tremendous amounts of weight and growing a horribly grotty beard to fit in. What kind of target would be at Comic-con? Maybe some angry nerds hire 47 to take down a Zack Snyder style directer so he won't make movies in their favorite franchise anymore.
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Jun 8, 2017 19:06
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The Kins posted:Of note: Dammit, wish I could buy the game again now. I just hope they have a stable enough source of capital that they can get season 2 out without any drop in quality. Even if it means cutting back on the number of episodes. Hopefully they can get picked up by another publisher if the situation worsens.
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Jun 16, 2017 19:36
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HelixFox posted:I really hope they introduce some way to revisit past elusive targets for people who bought the game after its initial release. They should have them on a yearly rotation.
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Jun 17, 2017 12:06
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I still think they should put the elusive targets on a yearly rotation.
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Oct 25, 2017 05:28
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I think that goons in particular give too many games a free pass on pricing and things like cutting out pieces of content to sell as DLC or poorly done season passes or the current insipid 'lootbox' trend. A lot of people just want to get a game at a set price without feeling like they're missing out. Having said that I don't really mind what's going on with Hitman. I guarantee that if IO said that season 1 was completely finished with no more content and that really held true nobody would bat an eye since there's such a shitload of content already and it really did seem complete, all this extra stuff is icing on the cake. Contextually I think it's safe to assume that the company is desperately in need of money after everything that's happened in the last few months and that their current strategy is to fast track some additional paid content that they can produce quickly for their main product to get a return sooner rather than later, I'm fine looking at this as the IO life support fund if that's what it's really about since I doubt anyone else in this situation would be acting differently.
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Oct 26, 2017 20:57
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Tumble posted:The rating system is one of Hitman 2016's biggest flaws in my opinion. For a game that prides itself on being a sandbox, it's rating system is basically pass/fail. Didn't get Silent Assassin? Then you failed. I don't really mind, its like the way the old Thief made not killing anyone a big part of higher difficulties. In both cases you can just ignore it, but the games are stating clearly what's considered skillful play.
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Oct 27, 2017 06:57
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HORMELCHILI posted:The concept of a sleazy low budget revenge movie themed Hitman game is incredible, its a shame that the execution wasnt so good. Ugh, you know I genuinely really hate the way that some videogames try to cultivate the whole grungy B-movie thing with all of the dreadful undertones and lousy shock value, but none of the genuine connection to the world of low budget movies and the quaint quirks of production and creativity you'd often see as the people making them were trying to make their crazy ideas work onscreen with no money. Games like Absolution are pretty lovely and unsatisfying simulacrums of those sorts of movies in my experience. I didn't like the Kane and Lynch or Manhunt games for the same reason.
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Jun 14, 2018 01:32
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Didn't Kane and Lynch 2 by the same devs go for that grindhouse aesthetic and everyone hated it? Yes, it was a difficult game to simply watch being played with the handheld camera gimmick and nauseatingly overused lens flare and other effects.
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Jun 14, 2018 02:23
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A Buttery Pastry posted:The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that Hitman is probably one of the rare series where having both a male and female character is sort of required to fully explore the basic concept of the games. Like, it's a game about social stealth, leaving out the female side of social interactions is just leaving you with less things to work with. It'd also be an "easy" way to make a mission feel fresh for longer, if the two characters don't have the same opportunities for infiltration - and obviously that would also dovetail nicely with a co-op system. That would honestly be really fascinating seeing how the social stealth mechanics would result in totally different playthroughs based on which gender you chose since the disguises and opportunities would be completely different. You could have the choice of gender have subtle but meaningful gameplay ramifications that are perfectly easy to justify in a way that has absolutely no intrinsic reason to come across as misogynistic. Holy poo poo, now I really want this to happen, I know its uncharacteristic for me to say bring back something from Absolution, but they could just use that Victoria character as 47's counterpart.
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Jun 14, 2018 14:50
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Kane and Lynch loving sucked and both games were dime-a-dozen third person shooters plastered with Absolution style edginess.
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Jun 15, 2018 02:13
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