Hitman: Absolution: the deadly imagination of Agent 47

**Teajunkie** · 26th July 2012

Hitman is a series with a strong identity and an ardent fanbase, but it's not easy to get across what the game is in a trailer.

Take the Uzi Nuns trailer for Hitman: Absolution. Six nuns walk towards a motel, strip off their habits to reveal leather basques, produce machine guns and bazookas from god knows where, and explode the entire building, with Agent 47 inside.
You could be forgiven for thinking that this is a high-octane sexy thriller starring half a dozen Angelina Jolies.

Far from it.
Hitman is a series where chaos is possible, but the most coveted rank has always been the super-tidy Silent Assassin.
"We've always had these larger than life trailers," says producer Luke Valentine, responding to our suggestion that IO might be getting people in under false and sexy pretences.
"It wouldn't make a very good trailer if you just saw a man waiting in a box." Hitman is a game of stealth, of observation and planning.
It's a game of professionalism, where the only people who need to die are the people you're being paid to kill.
But most of all, it's a game of options, where maps bristle with potential killing implements. It's like a Final Destination movie - where you get to play Death's invisible hand.

Hitman makes you think in a maliciously creative way. For example, in the last game, Blood Money, when you saw a shark in a tank, your first thought wasn't "oh cool, a shark". It was "how do I get him to eat my victim?"

Pure, not simple
The word "purist" was designed to go into the same sentence as "outcry".
Sure enough, Hitman purists have been voicing their concerns about what's been shown so far.
They're most suspicious of Agent 47's 'intuition', which comes in the form of on-screen context hints. Getting spoon-fed is anathema to a game where you're supposed to learn and exploit the patterns, and spot the opportunities.

Hitman has five difficulty levels, but the real difference is between the two broader categories.
Intuition comes as part of the two 'Enhanced' modes, Easy and Normal.
Enhanced refers to the augmented reality of this layer of hints. If you want to strip out the UI completely, the toughest of the three 'Professional' difficulties is a homage to your uncompromising dedication. It's called 'Purist'.

"With the Purist mode, we are removing all helper systems and GUI elements so that you're more or less left on your own," game director Tore Blystad explains. "This is a severely harsh difficulty, and we are looking forward to seeing the response we get to it in the final game. We know that there are a lot of gamers out there waiting for a real challenge and this should be it."
In other words: stop saying that this isn't a proper Hitman game.

Absolution marks a new era in Agent 47's career.
Duped into thinking that his long-time handler, Diana Burnwood, has betrayed him, 47 accepts the hit on his trusted companion.
But this is no simple hit - Diana has been the voice in your ears since the very first game.

She gives you your mission in the pre-order bonus, Sniper Challenge, and there's a genuine warmth to her.
This is why, in the second act, we're no longer working for the ICA.
This also ties in to that Bazooka Nuns trailer - when the Saints whipped off their habits for an unexpectedly sexy showdown, their ICA tattoos were plainly visible.
Agent 47's relationship with his former employer has broken down to the point where they're sending blasphemous hit squads to kill him.

The second act is King of Chinatown.
It's a small, tightly-packed level that's designed to show you the density of options available to you.
And it's not just murder methods that are packed in - the crowds are incredible. This is the first outing for IO's home-brewed Glacier 2 engine, and the 500 people packed into the Chinese market is something that Valentine describes as a "fraction of the engine's capabilities".

It makes Assassin's Creed's crowd dynamics, with clots of four or five courtesans patrolling around, feel old-fashioned. When you push your way through this crowd, you're brushing up against individuals - it's not even easy to spot duplicates.

Walk into the market square and you'll see your mark -- the self-styled King of Chinatown - standing in the central plaza.
In terms of frustrating temptation, it's like floating a dessert trolley past an astronaut.
It's possible for you to pull out your silenced gun and complete the hit right now, but you'd cause panic, and the crowd is dotted with his corrupt police officers. Create chaos, and SWAT teams will be summoned, making your escape even tougher. So take your time. Follow him around.

He nips into an alleyway and takes a leak under a palette suspended by a couple of narrow, weak ropes. He picks up a coffee and some lunch. He walks past an open hatch. He chats to his drug dealer who has two different drug stashes on the map. And what kind of man parks his car next to some unmanned explosive devices?

If at first
Our experience with the Hitman levels is a slow process of learning and improvement.
Does anyone ever complete a level well on their first try? "It depends on your definition of well," laughs Blystad.
"Yes, there are players that finish pretty decently on some levels.
We conduct a lot of play testing and we watch the live streams of players working their way through the levels.
It's a very humbling experience, seeing a player struggling with a level where we obviously haven't done our job properly.
It shows how differently design can be perceived." It also shows that gamers have been taught not to expect what Hitman offers.

And one of the things it offers is a dark, deadpan humour.
Like Batman, Agent 47 will never mug to camera or break a smile, but that's what makes his disguises work so well.
How you dress affects the way people around you react, but apart from your suit and tie, every outfit has to be peeled off another character. Whether you're stunning a delivery boy and stealing his clothes to infiltrate a compound, or stealing a clown's outfit from a party entertainer to get invited into a mafia birthday, what you look like is key to not arousing suspicion.
It's also makes Agent 47 a more likeable character - nothing's more adorable than a grumpy man in a red clown nose.

Springs eternal
We're shown a playthrough of the ninth act in the game, which takes place in a town called Hope.
The benefactor is a man called Blake Dexter, and propaganda for him litters the streets. But the headlines are stark - the city is bankrupt. Hope is a place of survival and hardship. It's also a much larger level with a peculiar 1950s vibe - it's full of pink Cadillacs, jukeboxes and romance-blinded young girls.

We're not time-travelling. This was inspired by contemporary American towns. "From an art direction point of view we wanted a sort of timeless feeling in Absolution," says Blystad. "It's a central part of the style that everything in the environment should have some kind of history, some story to tell. So it's a contemporary game, but many locations have sort of been lost in time."

"Hope was inspired by a research trip around South Dakota. It's an amazingly diverse state, where the landscape can change within an hour of driving.
All locations in Absolution are designed to be a micro-universe, with their own feeling and atmosphere." It's a fair comment - Chinatown and Hope couldn't be more different in terms of population and size. But one thing unites the two - they're both full of potentially lethal objects.

What makes Hitman feel like a masterful psychologist is that it leaves the tools in your path, and trusts you to find them. That's why there was an outcry about Easy modes - playing on Easy would tear out that satisfaction of decoding and defeating the world.
As Blystad himself says, "It is impossible to discover everything in one single playthrough. The most devious details should take months to find."
That's why the new Challenges system makes the tension between purism and accessibility even more explicit. In the pause menu is a list of challenges which explicitly reward you for every kind of possible death.

It seems like a curious misfire.
We put this to Blystad - that this might be robbing the pleasure for the purists who like to feel like they've found their own path.
"That's a very valuable observation for us. It only goes to show how important play testing is for a game as diverse as Hitman.
The game experiences for a trained player and for an inexperienced player are extremely different, and the way information needs to be pushed varies for each person. Our goal is that anyone picking up Absolution will find a way to play that feels natural for their skill set."

The Hitman legacy is a tough one to live up to, but no-one's a bigger fan of the series than Blystad himself.
What's his favourite mission from the old games? "An early favourite is the 'Meat King Party' from Contracts.
It's a predecessor to the Heaven and Hell party in Blood Money.
And the New Orleans level for the awesome crowd tech and the feeling of openness.
And the wacky bird costumes.
We often think about the old game and the legacy that we have to live up to. It's pretty daunting to try and surpass a game like Blood Money.

It was so jam-packed with ideas." Well, it's looking alright so far, bazooka nuns and all.

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