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I've been spotted through several walls by some rando NPC when dragging a body down the basement stairwell, I fixed DX12's stuttering by switching Render Target Reuse from Auto to Enabled, but now a whooole lot of textures are tinted blue, and melee (or really, anything that's not the garrotte, including the syringe) from behind is super inconsistent with how detectable it is. The launch jank is palpable, even dismissing server issues. Some of my fears of script triggers came true, some didn't. NPCs largely don't seem tied down until you walk into their vicinity, but there's still the issue of loving up your timing because you triggered dialogue by proximity, so it takes longer for them to go to the next spot on their route. Contracts have the issue that I knew they'd have, in that most active NPCs basically just stand in the same place forever or have very basic patrol routes, so it's usually just "cheese coins/throwables to move them here and then murder". If I had it my way, the release schedule would end with a level editor proper, but with the amount of detailed dialogue and visuals they're pushing (and AAA business being what it is) there's no way in hell that's happening. It would totally extend the lifetime of the game tenfold, but try telling Squeenix's higher ups why that'd be a good thing that would not actually cut into future sales. Despite all of this, I'm still really enjoying this. It's not really "Blood Money 2", it's kinda its own HM game, with its own advantages and caveats while still sticking to a general design ethos that makes it feel focused.
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Mar 13, 2016 04:29
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Jintor posted:well i just got booted off the server crashing my twenty seconds of exploratory looking around which is pretty annoying. hey IO/squeenix no-one actually cares about leaderboards especially since everybody has 210,000 points atm, nobody needs to be online to do challenges, thanks So, the 210,000 points thing is a bug, right? I thought that maybe it was just a contracts thing and the timer would just kick in if you messed up one of the bonuses or something, didn't realize even the main leaderboards were that borked. It really sucks that there's so many technical issues holding the game back for so many people. I was willing to give the online stuff the benefit of the doubt, because contracts and elusive targets seem neat, but this server poo poo is ridiculous and unnecessary. There's not even a lovely DRM reason for it, Square Enix mandates Denuvo on all their modern PC releases, and pirates can't even be bothered to crack that at this point unless it's in a super high-profile release. The only way to pirate JC3 to this day is cheesing Steam refunds and family sharing, and have fun doing that without getting in trouble. jfc squeenix.
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Mar 13, 2016 18:44
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StabMasterArson posted:E: Contracts mode seems a little weird right now, the creator can't choose where the player spawns or what equipment they take and all the disguise / weapon restrictions are optional. Also there just doesn't seem to be anyone playing it The lack of restrictions seem to be an attempt at allowing more freedom by default, so you don't get the kind of gently caress-you contracts (some of which I totally made) from Absolution that are completable with one very specific course of actions and nothing else. If you kill a person without either of the disguise or weapon restrictions, it basically doesn't count as an objective complete on the end screen. You also, AFAIK, get to use weapons you haven't unlocked if the contract asks for it. On the one hand, I dig it, on the other hand, creators should be allowed to clamp down stuff like starting areas or certain planning items. There's probably nobody playing it because the game just came out and the servers are a hot mess making everyone (justifiably) salty. I did play a contract named "These people need to die, I guess" with a description of "These people did very bad things somewhere so this person told us to tell you to kill them, make it look like security guards are shootin up the place, like crazy town" and had two targets that had the exact same face, which I kind of loved, even if I later learned you can just check the map to see their names so it's no big deal. Puella posted:They're like three minutes at most. That's a lot of minutes for any game released after the Playstation era!
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Mar 13, 2016 19:02
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I kind of love how the security guards' dialogue is very deliberately made to be as insufferably lovely as possible when you're in certain disguises, mainly the waiter and the dresser. "Smile for that extra tip!" "Keep those glasses full!" "Can't have you prancing around upstairs, you pussies need to get a real job!". Makes for some real cathartic contract fodder though I'm sure plenty of ~gamers~, especially hitman forums users, will hear that last comment and think "yeah!!!!"Ciaphas posted:Having never played a Hitman game, what are people thinking about this latest incarnation so far, compared to Blood Money? I'm still debating dipping my toe in this (the newer, presumably more refined game, even if it's technically not done yet) versus the much older but proven entry in the series. Opportunities can be turned off entirely (including the submenu that lists them), as can Instinct and the minimap. The only thing in that regard that you can't bring back from BM is a live map, since the game pauses when you look at the map screen. Accordion Man posted:If all the missions are at the very least of similar quality as these first three, I think new Hitman will definitely be better than Blood Money. Any problems new Hitman has can be patched. The only thing previous (proper) HM games have over this one IMO is consistency of AI routing and more natural, less SHARE THIS SWEET KILL ON YOUTUBE type "opportunity" design (also difficulty select and post-mission papers seriously come ON IOI). Otherwise, yeah, I have a fair bit of confidence in this now. The jank is a real bummer but unlike certain modern releases the division there seems to be a genuinely well-designed game underneath the woes of modern game publishing. I also feel like IOI has grown up a bit while still retaining a sense of humour that's not "aren't minorities just so gross and weird???", though some shots in the trailers (most recent gameplay one included) suggest it might go down that route, and like everything else, it's best to reserve judgement 'till we've played more.
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Mar 14, 2016 00:38
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Boosted_C5 posted:Why does Steam allow morons to spam reviews for a game complaining about problems on their end like garbage GPU or bad internet? It's a valid complaint, if your internet so much as hiccups for a few seconds (which most ISPs do), it's not a big deal with a download, but it's a huge deal with a game that will immediately boot you out of whatever you're doing, leaving you at the mercy of a fickle autosave. The servers have also gone down several times in the past couple of days and the leaderboards are seemingly broken, so they haven't been handling the online part of their always-online game too well on their end either. And hey, some peeps just don't have internet for a while, it happens, and singleplayer games are usually a way to play games without needing internet, not to mention the long-term idea that most of the games' content could be wiped out without a trace should the publisher desire. There's no need to defend major companies doing dumb crap like this, even if armchair developer r/games-types will find a way to be as insufferably smug as possible about it regardless of context. Also don't read Steam reviews, seriously. There's a reason creepy anime porn made by actual unambiguous real-life scumbags has been making it into the top releases and front page a lot recently, and it's not because the Steam community's most vocal/least financially burdened members are decent standup folks.
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Mar 14, 2016 01:14
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Oh DX12, how you tease me with your 60 fps, yet taketh away with purple-blue textures and random crashes and even more buggy sound seriously why is the sound engine so borked in this will anyone ever actually finish a full sentence goddamn. Learning to do Silent Assassin and similarly stealthy challenges has led me to remembering that I am real bad at new Hitman levels, and only really git gud after tons and tons of replays. I'm also very happy that this Hitman game lets me be bad at Hitman-ing. You thought Viktor was going to drink from that glass and vom into a toilet you can drown him in? Nope, and you probs just poisoned a random NPC for no reason. Feels real good, because it's not just PLAYER HAS DONE THING SO AM SCRIPT NOW. It's chill if you don't dig the game but "only one hour of 'novelty'" is a real silly thing to say for a lot of reasons, unless you really despise replaying things in which case it's silly for one less reason and also why would you buy later episodes of a game where that's almost explicitly the point???
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Mar 14, 2016 08:25
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Steve2911 posted:This is a very not true statement. it's literally impossible to acknowledge a major flaw in a video game without hating it thoroughly so you must be one of those filthy casuals ruining my perfect franchise you're not even REAL gamers like me your fun is false i know what's up. I will say that I like getting hosed in general so I wouldn't equate the level count to that, it's more like having a satisfying poo poo but you feel like there's more in there so it's like "man I'm both satisfied and unsatisfied and also can't bottom for a while so that's a bummer", y'know?
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Mar 14, 2016 21:15
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I'll only be shittin' on the business model well and truly if they pull a season pass out of their rear end at the last moment or charge more for the ~full experience~ (i.e, bump it up to the much more gross level of FF VII Remake's garbage), neither of which I would put past Squeenix's lovely management. As it stands, though, you pay five whole extra dollars if you buy the levels individually and IOI is forced to make big intricate levels that stand on their own and not pull any of their bullshit ideas about "cinematic storytelling" or just plain poo poo levels like half of SA or all of CN47. Level count's a bit of a bummer, but if they're all immensely dense with potential shenanigans, then I guess I'll have to be a casual shill sheeple and shell out to The Man. Steve2911 posted:Yeah but it's still just one level. With one set of routines to explore, one set of targets to kill. One sense of wonder to enjoy. I mean, there's several modes dedicated to giving you different sets of targets to kill and encouraging you explore the map in different ways, there's enough different ways you can get through a mission that there's usually more to discover even after a few playthroughs, and the whole thing has been pretty clear about how it wants you to play the levels a lot and know them inside and out. If that's not your jam and doesn't let you "enjoy a sense of wonder" past the first run, s'all good, but this is pretty plainly designed for grognards like me to play over and over and over and Honestly, my complaint here is that there's not enough reward for doing any of the contracts, since it's just pure score at the end and the time stat seems either broken or just poorly designed so everybody's just gettin' 210,000 score every time. And yeah, this game needs some MGSV-style patrols that have schedules and shifts or something, because a lot of potential contracts targets are just peeps standing in the exact same spot forever.
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Mar 14, 2016 22:02
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voltcatfish posted:were coins always this OP? Even more so in Blood Money than here, actually, since 47 had an endless supply of featureless gold coins in his infinitely deep pockets. Here, there's at least a risk of losing them all if you're not careful (or if the game bugs out and doesn't let you pick them back up, because that seems to happen quite a bit with interactable physics objects). I really, really wish they brought back a difficulty select, that's maybe my biggest disappointment with the game so far. The default difficulty isn't anywhere close to Absolution-easy, but some new restrictions, more perceptive and less forgiving AI and maybe evidence cleanup would be nice to have. Also a BM-like notoriety system that would adapt to previous runs ala TPP would be a nice bit of variation, even if it wouldn't make much sense here.
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Mar 15, 2016 03:07
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There's a lot of poo poo that Square Enix wants to pull that people are rightly dubious about, but yeah the sheer checklist numbers game of "less content why???" is unbelievably trite and overused critique. It's especially hilarious, because a lot of wannabe game critics will then turn around and use the old "wide as an ocean deep as a puddle!!!" thing with Ubisoft-type games, when the dollars-to-hours, quantity-over-quality checklist ideal is reinforced specifically by them. There's still a shitload to criticize in this game, especially on the technical side, and even I'm a bit sad that we're only getting 7-odd levels total, but I understand that this is pretty much the only way to pitch modern prettied-up Hitman game while retaining what people (who aren't creeps) revere in the series. It's not really anti-consumer on its own (though Squeenix's ambitions to standardizing episodic releases are, as evidenced by FF VII) and makes for a kinda clever focus on replay value in a niche stealth game. It's worth noting that I also like that there are intuitive UI helpers for casual players that don't give away all of the level, so they can still get creative, so basically I support casual gamers hijacking our precious no-cooties-allowed hardcore gamer identities and have no concern for ethics in video game development.
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Mar 15, 2016 05:40
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Game development is cheap and easy, and developers are just lazy and not giving us hardcore gamers what we're entitled to, I've heard.
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Mar 15, 2016 06:21
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Mr Scumbag posted:Nah, you're just one of those bandwagon whiners who hate everything about gaming while indulging in it anyway. You aren't fooling anyone. You earnestly think that because people enjoy something that you don't that they're "brainwashed" or don't know any better. There's also the possibility that they enjoy games the way they are, y'know? What you don't realise is that the industry has moved on and you're a loving idiot who can't move with it and has to blame everyone else for not conforming to your idea of fun. Okay, dude, as much as I'm all about taking the piss out of armchair developer self-identified ~gamer~ jagoffs that have taken the red pill or whatever, you seem to be taking the argument of a person who literally said "game for sheep" in good faith. Don't do that, there is no happy ending to that. On-topic, I had actually forgotten about the Contracts progression system from Absolution. I feel like they could have their cake and eat it too here if they brought back weapon customization, so you could maybe unlock weapons with challenges and unlock custom parts with contracts or something. Just in general, as much as I like the idea that it focuses on the pure core gameplay, there needs to be a light smattering of an unlock loop to keep people going. And again, unborking the leaderboards might help a bit, but nobody really cares about leaderboards unless the game is Devil Daggers so meh.
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Mar 15, 2016 21:22
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Heliosicle posted:I think I might wait until the full game is out to play it now though. Half the fun of blood money for me was getting to play through it loving everything up a couple of times before you found the good routes, with only 1 level so far it gets stale quickly This is a good way to go if you're not one for replaying the same specific level, Square's stated that the full disc version is coming out in January of 2017, so that's basically the release date for the whole "season". and yeah this new patch is hella borked, DX12 has gone from fickle to non-functional now. Crashing after like half a minute of gameplay if i'm lucky.
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Mar 15, 2016 22:00
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Kontradaz posted:Go play an ARPG if you want grindy mechanics, stop making GBS threads up the Hitman games with this crap. This type of thinking is why we have developers focusing on not creating content but rather gating content behind time intensive activities, artificially increasing game length with no actual benefits. It tickles that addictive part of your brain and doesn't give you much more. Jesus Christ I say "add a bit of a carrot on a stick so more people engage with the actual core of the game" and you go all r/games on me. Cool your gears, man, sorry I'm the cancer killing video games or whatever.
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Mar 15, 2016 23:12
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I don't know about you, but I rabidly froth at the mouth with seething indignation when a game dares to have an overarching meta progression, how dare they slowly feed me new tools over time, I should be the only tool here. Except for when I conveniently forget that that whole system was a major part of an old game that i have a creepy, undying and uncritical loyalty to, because that was made in the good old days and kids today, they don't know, they missed out.
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Mar 15, 2016 23:29
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Kontradaz posted:That rewards skill and not repetition (sometimes some skill needs to be built, but once that is done it is done). QED. And Contracts already have a rating system that rewards skill and, if tied to a light progression mechanic, would be rewarding skill with slightly more than a place on a leaderboard nobody looks at. christ now i'm taking this bullshit in good faith the hell am i doing
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Mar 15, 2016 23:44
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The most heartbreaking thing about Contract creation so far is that toilets don't count as any kind of weapon, so it just defaults to "Any Weapon", and I only learned this after spending like two hours setting up one of the dudes on the Level 3 balcony to get drowned while wearing the default suit, after lots of brainfarts and bugs ruining entire runs of it, too. Honestly. nearly every specific weapon or method should, well, be a specific weapon or method, instead of umbrella categories. "Lethal Melee" is the worst offender, how can I make a contract about screwing security guards in public now???
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Mar 16, 2016 23:20
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Extreme0 posted:Death to Spies is better. From what I've seen, read and played, Alekhine's Gun is borderline Death To Spies: Absolution. Which is especially hilarious, considering the types of ~gamers~ it's surfing on the goodwill of. s0m3 guy posted:now everyone is either american or british, no more potential for accidental racism!! I mean, considering that most of the ridiculous cultural insensitivity was delivered by cheap Danish actors giving Breakfast At Tiffany's a run for its money, they could have easily been just as bad here. My guess is IOI realized they can't help themselves when they start doing that poo poo, so they just stuck with the same handful of people talking in a broad American or British accent (except the FSB agent, who is Russian until you bump into him and make him break character).
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Mar 18, 2016 06:37
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Odobenidae posted:~11 hours here with lovely canadian internet and haven't had any problems. The only thing I can think of is a little red icon in the bottom right, I think it's saying that it can't reach the servers to save but by the end of the mission it's all gravy. I'm also in Canadia land and only had server downtime once since launch. I'm guessing it's a regional thing, as these things usually go, though it really shouldn't be having issues anywhere nearly two weeks after launch, and some folks are still reporting constant disconnects and downtimes. One-seventh of a singleplayer-only game with fairly static online components really should not be having more server issues than a rushed, buggy Ubisoft pseudo-MMO. Livin' in the future.
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Mar 19, 2016 08:05
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Unlucky7 posted:1. I am on PC, and I am not a fan of having a billion separate buttons that do separate things despite most of them being contextual. Honestly, once you get used to it, it's way better than a controller. The controller binds too many things to singular buttons, and that can make a big difference between a perfect run and a botched run, especially since contextual items tend to be bunched together a whole lot. Keyboard ain't perfect either, but at least you can rebind stuff. Also the gunplay and precision aiming feels way, way better with a mouse.
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Mar 19, 2016 22:42
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Profanity posted:I think the biggest improvement to KB/M would be introducing some kind of incremental movement for 47 like the controllers have. Following a target and having to stop for a second or two because you walk faster than them ruins the flow a little. Every game in the series has had this problem. I fully agree, and like 90% of games where you follow a person have this problem, even if it's scripted, let alone expected. I'll still be eternally baffled by how nobody, especially stealth games, ever took notes from Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, in which the scroll wheel would incrementally-but-smoothly change your movement speed, regardless of stance. It would solve so many problems with the lack of analogue movement with a mouse and keyboard in these games. Even that game only thought to implement it because of how the sound detection system worked
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Mar 20, 2016 00:08
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SolidSnakesBandana posted:Absolutely, the mouse wheel was the absolute perfect solution! It made you feel like you had a lot of control. Plus is was cool how his animation would dynamically change as you slowed down Yeah the visual feedback was real good, every increment of movement reflected how much sound you were likely to make with the animations alone. Considering that that was like, the only game that had ever attempted that (unless the previous games did idk), it was a really good implementation. Goddammit Chaos Theory was so good. Extreme0 posted:
Wouldn't be a Square-published stealth game without loads of potential for AI and ragdoll shenanigans. I still have a photo on my steam profile from the leaked DXHR demo of a shitload of unconscious cops forming a mountain in the police station lobby.
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Mar 20, 2016 01:33
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Unlucky7 posted:Speaking of unconscious people, do they wake up by themselves after a certain amount of time? Not as far as I've seen. Civilians also have no idea what a pulse actually is so they'll just scream in horror that THEY HAVE NO PULSE I FOUND A DEAD BODY DEAR GOD and the guards have to go over and wake them up. The worst part of this mechanic is that they actually made the AI go fetch clothes from (empty) lockers if they're naked when they wake up, so you can't undress all the men, have them all woken up and then just have them walking around the map in their skivvies. This will eternally bum me out.
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Mar 20, 2016 02:08
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nickmeister posted:Is there a way to look at a large map in game? Only using the minimap is a pain. Hit the F1 key (Select/Back button on controllers?), there's a map tab that also lets you flip through the different height levels of the map, as well as hover over target icons to identify who's who.
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Mar 21, 2016 19:40
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Hitman seems a lot more CPU intensive than GPU. Most performance issues caused with modern cards are evidently dipping when panning the camera/running towards LOD/Shadow heavy areas, primarily crowds. There's probably also some issues from the (actually pretty ambitious) reflections going on, since they're not just simple cubemaps/screenspace things and are actually lower-res rerenders of the scene, seemingly with most lighting and shadows intact. This would also explain why my AMD FX-fitted PC gets way better performance on DX12 than DX11 (ignoring crashes and buggy stuttering), but peeps like Digital Foundry get like 1-2 FPS boost at most on a more single-core capable Intel CPU.
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Mar 25, 2016 15:00
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If every level from now on has the scope and complexity of Sapienza (or greater), then yeah I'm actually really into what the episodic thing does for both the developers and consumers. It pushes the devs to design each individual level extremely intricately in a way that's replayable in a plethora of ways, and also means they can't focus too much on story outside of self-contained vignettes, all of which makes for the kind of Hitman people have been clamouring for since BM. It puts just enough restraint on the devs to make them creatively work around their limitations, without being so restrained that they can't do rad grandiose stuff. Granted, we all know by now that Square Enix's larger plans for sneaking in episodic models into everything is far more insidious, so I don't want to sing its praises too much, but Hitman in particular is working with it in a way that's surprisingly really fitting despite the initial weirdness in concept. the always-online server poo poo (((in a game with uncracked denuvo to begin with!!!))) is still super lame and bad tho. The design of this seems to be pretty tight and getting tighter as time goes on, but the technical side is a goddamn mess. PC especially.
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Apr 27, 2016 18:04
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