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HITMAN |OT| Blood Monthly

I want to see a university just to see 47 disguise himself as a young student (he'll just be a professor or mature age student won't he..)

Yo what if 47 has to blend in by teaching a lecture and he fuckin nails it and it's some obscure course or hard-core math.
 
motivational speaker or one of those televangelist Christian preacher, he kills a dude by hitting him while yelling and singing in front of like a hundred people
 

Jintor

Member
Improv stand up comedy

Just have Bateson read this:

"Heard a joke once. A secret agency has a test for its agents. It's about orders. The agents are given a gun, and have to walk into a room and kill their lovers.

The first agent says no right away. They send him home.

The second agent picks up the gun, and goes into the room, but after a minute she comes back out again. She tells them she can't do it. She, too, is sent home.

The third agent goes in. Shot after shot rings out, then thumps and screaming. He emerges.

'The gun was loaded with blanks,' he says, 'so I had to beat him to death with the chair'."
 
I hope they are willing to reuse level concepts from Absolution so we can see stuff like a court room and a prison in a good hitman game. I don't think those levels in Absolution even had targets. I would love a proper court room level.
 

GonzoCR

Member
Okay, I went searching for stuff that should be a Hitman level and... I found a new standard for "ultimate prison level." http://www.archdaily.com/379246/hydroelectric-waterfall-prison-proposal-margot-krasojevic

Working_waterfall_prison.jpg


It's an architectural concept for a prison tower in the middle of the ocean that doubles as a hydroelectric power plant by generating a massive waterfall cascading down from the top.

Somebody get this in front of the developers.



They're showing season 2 stuff to the panel already?

I'm glad there is potential!

I need that prison level.

Shit, all these ideas are so cool, I'm already getting hyped over what is basically fanfiction lol.
 

Reven

Member
Echoing everyone else with all their level ideas but I also think an offshore drilling rig would be pretty cool. Just the accident opportunities would be staggering. Someone earlier mentioned a circus but I would also add a county fair to that. Splinter Cell Conviction had a county fair level and it was pretty awesome.
 

Trouble

Banned
A Circus, Theme Park or even a Casino are currently the things that I'd like to see.

I'm sure they will come up with some good level designs either way. Enjoyed all of them.

Colorado would be the perfect setting for a traveling carnival. Just sayin'.

I want, no I need, to garrote a clown in front of some funhouse mirrors.
 

Plesiades

Member
I want a female hitman game mode, doesn't even really have to be part of the actual storyline, just the option of playing and finishing a level using female disguises. Not having opportunities and unique kills would be kind of lame but whatever.

You could probably still do an SA (not suit only SA, obviously) on all the season 1 targets, with the exception of Colorado, and maybe the General in Marakesh.

Season 2 Final Episode: 47 gets captured and you play as Diana, trying to break him out.
 

justjim89

Member
My first failed Elusive. Ugh, what a sloppily-designed contract. "Hey, let's add a brand new tier of guard to a level that's already a bit hard to get around in some spots, plus an additional objective!" Ugh. Between that and how shitty professional mode ended up being, I think I'm just done until season two. IO has ran out of steam.
 
I kind of agree with that Vice article about how Agent 47 was only killing bad guys this season and maybe they should change that. I don't know if they're actually afraid of blowback if they get him to kill good/innocent people. The best they could manage this season was making Silvio Caruso a tragic villain but a villain nonetheless.

Imagine a mission in an airport terminal where you have to assassinate the estranged sibling of a dictator because the dictator is paranoid that he might lose power. Is anyone seeing any sort of controversy in this story?
 
I kind of agree with that Vice article about how Agent 47 was only killing bad guys this season and maybe they should change that. I don't know if they're actually afraid of blowback if they get him to kill good/innocent people. The best they could manage this season was making Silvio Caruso a tragic villain but a villain nonetheless.

Imagine a mission in an airport terminal where you have to assassinate the estranged sibling of a dictator because the dictator is paranoid that he might lose power. Is anyone seeing any sort of controversy in this story?

I think people are overestimating the "neutrality" of ICA and Agent 47. They are neutral in the sense that they don't work for any government ("technically"), but they are far from neutral when it comes to picking their targets. There is no reason whatsoever for ICA to have Agent 47 go after an innocent target. I mean the last level of Blood Money has you saving the president from assassination.

And yes, there is probably some fear of blow-back on some of this, the crowd in Marrakesh is the clearest example of this. At some point there had to have been a way to use that crowd or at least an idea was pitched, but considering that rioters taking embassies actually happens in real life, multiple times and would actually very often turn very ugly, they probably decided to scrap it.

There is a fine line between being dark and goofy like Hitman and Mortal Kombat and something like Manhunt. And considering that even Rockstar washed their hands of Manhunt, no dev probably thinks it is worth it to even get near that line.
 
The ICA is a criminal organization. They are contract killers. Agent 47 is a murderer. He's not a good guy, unless you find moral shades of grey in cold blooded murder. We are not roleplaying a heroic character here. It is absolutely okay in the game's fiction for him to be hired to kill someone who isn't a cartoon villain.
 

justjim89

Member
The ICA is a criminal organization. They are contract killers. Agent 47 is a murderer. He's not a good guy, unless you find moral shades of grey in cold blooded murder. We are not roleplaying a heroic character here. It is absolutely okay in the game's fiction for him to be hired to kill someone who isn't a cartoon villain.

Right. So often, the targets seem like they have evil shoehorned onto their characters. On the surface they seem mostly innocent of any wrongdoing and then the briefing always throws in "They're also suspected of murder." "The target also abuses his wife." "The target is suspected of fucking kids." Like, if they're gonna maintain that every target deserves to be killed, the quality of the writing needs to go up significantly.
 

CloudWolf

Member
I think people are overestimating the "neutrality" of ICA and Agent 47. They are neutral in the sense that they don't work for any government ("technically"), but they are far from neutral when it comes to picking their targets. There is no reason whatsoever for ICA to have Agent 47 go after an innocent target. I mean the last level of Blood Money has you saving the president from assassination.

Yes, there is. ICA runs on nothing else than money, there isn't some greater moral thing going on, someone pays ICA a lot of money, ICA sends someone to kill them. Sure, in previous games this was often some sort of bad dude because the guy had to have done something bad enough that somebody was willing to pay a lot of money to have them killed.

This game is far more political correct, for the lack of a better word, than the other Hitman games (not counting Absolution). Every hit was someone who actually is a villain, with Diana even going out of her way to explain in the intro's why exactly your target had to die. In previous games the targets were often morally ambiguous and you learned why they had to die through the context of the level, not because it was spelled out for you in the mission briefin. For instance, Blood Money had the opening level (The King wasn't necessarily a bad dude, he was just a guy who caused a bad thing in the past and one of the victims paid the ICA for revenge) and A New Life and Flatline, which featured targets who you were clearly killing for the organized mafia. Or how about those two levels in Mississippi, where in the end it turns out that the sole reason you were paid to kill those was so that the daughter could get the inheritance money, escape her marriage and party it up in Vegas.

As for your example of the final mission in Blood Money, that wasn't an ICA job and that 47 only said 'yes' because Agent Smith offered him a lot of money to do it. 47 is an anti-hero/anti-villain, he's not a James Bond-like hero.
 
The ICA is a criminal organization. They are contract killers. Agent 47 is a murderer. He's not a good guy, unless you find moral shades of grey in cold blooded murder. We are not roleplaying a heroic character here. It is absolutely okay in the game's fiction for him to be hired to kill someone who isn't a cartoon villain.

The ICA is a crime organization in the same way Vin Diesel's crew in F&F are criminals. And 47 is a cold blooded murderer in the same way Vin Diesel's a cold blooded murderer in those movies.

The only person Agent 47 kills in actual cold blood that is even remotely possibly innocent is a courier in a cutscene in Blood Money, and that is after receiving a message to trust no one.

Hitman has always been a pulpy series.

This game is far more political correct, for the lack of a better word, than the other Hitman games (not counting Absolution). Every hit was someone who actually is a villain, while previous games often had more morally ambiguous hits. For instance, Blood Money had the opening level (The King wasn't necessarily a bad dude, he was just a guy who caused a bad thing in the past and one of the victims paid the ICA for revenge) and A New Life and Flatline, which featured targets who you were clearly killing for the organized mafia. As for your example of the final mission in Blood Money, that wasn't an ICA job and that 47 only said 'yes' because Agent Smith offered him a lot of money to do it. 47 is an anti-hero/anti-villain, he's not a James Bond-like hero.

The King was a dude who was so greedy that he didn't want to pay maintenance in his park and due to his shady dealings a bunch of kids died and then he used all of his money to get out of prison, he is far more of a villain than Caruso is. Caruso at least had a reason for being fucked up. In that mission you're not a Hitman, you're the damn Punisher.

The people who organize the hit can be bad guys and have been bad guys but you are still always going after bad guys. That guy in the New Life and Flatline was still a big time mobster.

In season 2 you will probably be doing some work for Providence, who are bad guys, but you will still probably go after Shadow Broker (?, forgot how they refer to him), so you will still kill bad guys just different bad guys.
 
The briefing for Landslide actually had Diana say something like "we are the only ones who can stop this man," which starts to sound less like you're an assassin and more like you're a superhero.

Although I get why they do this, I think. Giant Bomb called the game "revenge porn" more than once, which really gets at the motivation for writing the targets this way. Most people who play a game about killing want to villify the people they're killing.

If you write a target as a good person... most people don't operate at that level. They assume the target is always the bad guy. What you want to do is challenge the player to rationalize killing a good person; what most players will do is just go ahead and rationalize the target as a bad person.

In fact I would bet that some of the games writers who bring up this "why are all the targets evil" issue would fail to notice a non-evil target if presented with one.

(And Hitman is not exactly clear with its storytelling, anyway. I still haven't figured out whether Dalia and Viktor were supposed to be a married couple or not.)
 

Stoze

Member
The ICA is a criminal organization. They are contract killers. Agent 47 is a murderer. He's not a good guy, unless you find moral shades of grey in cold blooded murder. We are not roleplaying a heroic character here. It is absolutely okay in the game's fiction for him to be hired to kill someone who isn't a cartoon villain.

It is okay, and its already been done. Silivo Caruso, Penelope Graves, and Matthieu Mendola are not cartoon villains (albeit many of the kill methods are definitely cartoony). Dino Bosco wasn't even a bad person necessarily. And despite Caruso still being a villain, he's one that's meant to make you feel a little bad for killing him or at least bring up that line of thought, which is what the article is really asking for.
 

CloudWolf

Member
The King was a dude who was so greedy that he didn't want to pay maintenance in his park and due to his shady dealings a bunch of kids died and then he used all of his money to get out of prison, he is far more of a villain than Caruso is. Caruso at least had a reason for being fucked up. In that mission you're not a Hitman, you're the damn Punisher.

Actually, no he isn't. Joseph Clarence is the only true neutral target in Hitman (though you could make a case for Dino Bosco). The accident that killed the kids and caused the park to close down/go bankrupt was a construction failure, not a result of poor maintenance nor shady dealings. In fact, the shady dealings with the drug gang only started after the accident, because it was the only way Clarence could keep his dream of owning a theme park alive. The fact that it was a construction failure is why Clarence doesn't get into prison, he's put on trial but exhonorated because he legitimately had nothing to do with the accident. One parent gets upset about that, calls ICA and hires 47 to kill Clarence.

Caruso is far worse than Clarence. He willingly murdered his mother and is willingly working on an extremely deadly virus. Joseph Clarence is in many ways a victim of circumstance.
 
Yeah I can't even play this anymore, says something about my copy not being valid or issues with my account.

Makes me sad because I love it so.

Contacted support with Square and they had no idea what was going on, basically told me to try again in two weeks.
 
Actually, no he isn't. Joseph Clarence is the only true neutral target in Hitman (though you could make a case for Dino Bosco). The accident that killed the kids and caused the park to close down/go bankrupt was a construction failure, not a result of poor maintenance nor shady dealings. In fact, the shady dealings with the drug gang only started after the accident, because it was the only way Clarence could keep his dream of owning a theme park alive. The fact that it was a construction failure is why Clarence doesn't get into prison, he's put on trial but exhonorated because he legitimately had nothing to do with the accident. One parent gets upset about that, calls ICA and hires 47 to kill Clarence.

Caruso is far worse than Clarence. He willingly murdered his mother and is willingly working on an extremely deadly virus. Joseph Clarence is in many ways a victim of circumstance.

Nah, the intro video mentions that he hired a team of best lawyers to get him out and the last newspaper clip shows an article that says, safety inspection report mysteriously disappears. King is a scumbag

 

Moff

Member
I kind of agree with that Vice article about how Agent 47 was only killing bad guys this season and maybe they should change that. I don't know if they're actually afraid of blowback if they get him to kill good/innocent people. The best they could manage this season was making Silvio Caruso a tragic villain but a villain nonetheless.

Imagine a mission in an airport terminal where you have to assassinate the estranged sibling of a dictator because the dictator is paranoid that he might lose power. Is anyone seeing any sort of controversy in this story?

I haven't read the vice article, but Hitman targets have always been supervillains or at least terrible people, so I don't know why you would say "this season" (though I have to admit, and I already wrote that here when "The Icon" was released, the target of that bonus mission was kind of a prick, but not a bad person that needed to die like all other targets in the hitman franchise).

Hitman has always been a game with strong morals. That certainly makes 47 no hero, he is a hired killer, but at the same time he is not a fleshed out character, we don't idenfity with him or the agency, we identify much more with the goals and parameters the gameplay mechanics the game rewards and punishes us. In earlier hitman games, if you killed too many non tarets or even civilians or police, you wold not just get a money penaty, you would go game over. In Blood Money you would get more notorious and be recognized faster. Today it's jut score and ratings, in an online community game where the score is your biggest reward.

What I am trying to say is, Hitman punishes you for killing anything that is not the main target, always has, and the main targets have been terrible people most of the time. Crime Bosses, child molesters, Druglords, that kind of thing. In that way the Hitman franchise has a moral highground, more than 99% of the action games out there, heck even more than Super Mario. And I think that's something worth mentioning and worth to keep in the franchise. It's also fun because it's ironic since it's a game about an icecold Assassin.
 
Dino Bosco was just an asshole, I know he was costing the company money on his shitty movie but I think he was the one that least deserved to die.

Yea, Bosco is a GTA NPC pedestrian tier evil, i.e. an asshole.

Aren't the prologue and the six main missions the only thing that are effectively canon in the game?

The intro video shows kills from all the previous games (well maybe not Hitman 1), so technically they should all be canon, though it gets a bit tricky with Absolution, but not insurmountable.
 

CloudWolf

Member
The intro video shows kills from all the previous games (well maybe not Hitman 1), so technically they should all be canon, though it gets a bit tricky with Absolution, but not insurmountable.

The previous games (except Absolution it seems) are definitely canon. Just look at the newspaper headlines in the Colorado safe room at the end. I think he was talking about what is canon within the game and I think that the bonus missions are part of the official canon. The Sapienza briefing mentions Caruso was a former client and in the last bonus mission you are hired by Caruso.
 
The previous games (except Absolution it seems) are definitely canon. Just look at the newspaper headlines in the Colorado safe room at the end. I think he was talking about what is canon within the game and I think that the bonus missions are part of the official canon. The Sapienza briefing mentions Caruso was a former client and in the last bonus mission you are hired by Caruso.

Oh yeah, I forgot about the wall, I'm not sure about the bonus missions, I know that they mentioned that the elusive targets aren't canon. It gets kind of hard to tell considering that there is no clear timeline in Hitman, especially with Absolution kind of being in limbo still.
 
The previous games (except Absolution it seems) are definitely canon. Just look at the newspaper headlines in the Colorado safe room at the end. I think he was talking about what is canon within the game and I think that the bonus missions are part of the official canon. The Sapienza briefing mentions Caruso was a former client and in the last bonus mission you are hired by Caruso.

They even added NPC dialog to World of Tomorrow talking about Abiatti's (the Landslide target) murder prior to the present time.
 
They even added NPC dialog to World of Tomorrow talking about Abiatti's (the Landslide target) murder prior to the present time.

I think that was even in the game when Sapienza came out - it just wasn't obvious at the time.

The Sapienza timeline is intended to be The Icon > Landslide > World of Tomorrow, not that you'd deduce this except by looking at information outside the game.
 
In Colorado, Penelope Graves is innocent. Her greenhouse conversation shows she is a double agent. You still kill her.

We still don't know who she was a double agent for, do we? It's not Interpol. She really did cut all ties with them - the ICA checked and her own reaction to the test confirms it.

She was profiling Rose for an unknown party and expecting a message transmitted via the communications relay. I seriously don't think this has been resolved.
 
In Colorado, Penelope Graves is innocent. Her greenhouse conversation shows she is a double agent. You still kill her.

In the slurry pit conversation you tell her that her past 'transgressions' will be forgiven if she becomes an informant. So, she still has a history of doing something bad.

Look I'm not saying that the game needs to pick nice people as targets but surely the writers could come up situations where it's not black and white. Dino Bosco is actually a good example because he was just a movie guy who was trying his best to make a good movie and his financiers got him bumped off anyway. So while playing the mission you ask yourself at least once whether he deserves to die for going over budget on a comeback movie.
 
In the slurry pit conversation you tell her that her past 'transgressions' will be forgiven if she becomes an informant. So, she still has a history of doing something bad.

Look I'm not saying that the game needs to pick nice people as targets but surely the writers could come up situations where it's not black and white. Dino Bosco is actually a good example because he was just a movie guy who was trying his best to make a good movie and his financiers got him bumped off anyway. So while playing the mission you ask yourself at least once whether he deserves to die for going over budget on a comeback movie.

I think the "transgressions" was just referring to her defection from Interpol.

Bosco's private conversations in the trailer showed that he knew he wasn't just filming a movie in good faith - he got called out over the phone for just stalling the movie by doing the same take over and over again.

Of course, he was also trying to talk himself into doing the right thing and finishing the movie. So there's some grey there.
 

Joeku

Member
In the slurry pit conversation you tell her that her past 'transgressions' will be forgiven if she becomes an informant. So, she still has a history of doing something bad.

Look I'm not saying that the game needs to pick nice people as targets but surely the writers could come up situations where it's not black and white. Dino Bosco is actually a good example because he was just a movie guy who was trying his best to make a good movie and his financiers got him bumped off anyway. So while playing the mission you ask yourself at least once whether he deserves to die for going over budget on a comeback movie.

This is where I have to side with the writers. More than the other games, this Hitman is about score. And score isn't determined by "did this person deserve to die?" but rather "how efficiently did they die?" Some moral absolutism needs to be present to not sully that.
 
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