Games

[icycalm]

Next Hitman coming for PC and next-gen consoles.

http://hitman.com/open-letter-to-hitman-fans/

An open letter to all Hitman fans

Dear Hitman fans,

We wanted to share this open letter with all of you out there eagerly awaiting more news about what’s happening next in the franchise.

At Io-Interactive right now, we are building the next AAA Hitman game for PC and next-gen consoles. It has our total focus and we wanted to take a moment to tell you a few things about it.

In the next game you will experience a globetrotting Agent 47 at the prime of his career – the apex predator stalking his prey across the world, with the support of his long-term handler Diana Burnwood and the whole of the ICA.

The game concentrates on the core Hitman fantasy of using a wide range of tools to take out a diverse group of targets across expansive, exotic locations around the world. We are building this game on the backbone of the Glacier 2 engine, using the best parts and what we have learnt through Hitman: Absolution and drawing inspiration from past titles like Contracts and Blood Money to fulfil the core Hitman fantasy. That means we’re packing in an extreme level of detail on the largest levels we have ever built for a Hitman game. We’ve adopted an open, non-linear level design approach to the game, ensuring the game will play out across huge, checkpoint-free, sandbox levels. Our aim is to create living, breathing and believable levels which will allow gamers to play around with the AI to create those unique moments every fan of the Hitman franchise loves.

Contracts Mode is back – you will be able to create and build challenges by experimenting with the large levels and possibilities within them. And of course, you can share them with the world and challenge your friends or foes to complete your hits. Your rules, your Contracts.

You will also be glad to hear that we have removed 47’s magic pockets. We believe that’s all we need to say about that subject.

As we get further into 2014, we will reveal more and get into much closer contact with all of you. There are so many things we have planned and we are extremely excited for the future of Hitman.

Thank you all for your dedication. We will share much, much more in the coming months.

The Io-Interactive Team
@IOInteractive

[icycalm]

http://hitman.com/the-first-concept-fro ... tman-game/

The first concept from IOI’s next Hitman game

Since we posted our open letter back in January, we’ve had our heads down working on our next Hitman game. So you’ll have noticed that we have been pretty quiet, but we wanted to give you a short update about a few things.

First up, we’ve seen a lot of people talking about what we might be bringing to E3 this year. We know the worst thing is to hope for something that doesn’t turn up; so we wanted to let you know that our next Hitman is going to be under wraps for a bit longer. We’re focusing all of our time and efforts into creating the best possible Hitman game. That’s our number one priority and we don’t want to divert valuable resources to show something before it’s ready.

The good news is we’re making great progress with building exotic and expansive locations for the new game. To give you an idea of what we’re aiming for, here’s the first piece of concept art from the game. This location is set in Central Europe and you’ll be able to explore the entire building you see in the image, inside and out. For a sense of scale, the building on its own is larger than any location in Hitman Absolution.

As we move through the year, we’ll have some details to share with you and we’ll keep you posted right here on the blog. We will only lift the lid on the game once we feel we’re ready to. In the meantime, we’ll continue to answer as many of your questions as we can both in the forums and on Twitter.

On a separate note, we were happy to see so many of you enjoying Hitman GO from our friends at Square Enix Montréal. They’re pretty close to announcing new details about upcoming updates for GO as well as the first details about their second Hitman game for smartphones and tablets, we’ve been playing it here at the studio and it’s a lot of fun. Anyway, we’ll let them be the ones to tell you about it, so stay tuned for a blog post from them soon.

Thanks for your dedication, let’s stay in touch.

Io-Interactive

I would have imagined that that would be a screenshot from a current-gen game, and I am sure it can be done on PC or if the consoles are properly maxed-out, but it's still only a concept art... :(

[Sparkster]

Announcement Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yktoernWtw

Play footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA_Mx3-ZMGE

https://hitman.com/news/announcing-hitman

It’s Happening

The sense of satisfaction at being able to write this is almost indescribable:

“Io-Interactive announces its new game, HITMAN™, today”. The newest venture for us, Agent 47 and every single dedicated, wonderful fan of this franchise out there, is about to begin.

The new game is simply called “HITMAN”. We did this because in many ways this is the start of a new journey for Hitman. Don’t think of it as a reboot, though - think of it as a pure Hitman experience and the foundation for future HITMAN games. Agent 47 is the aspirational assassin, he’s at the absolute peak of his power this time around. This is our central promise: a pure assassin fantasy. So we liked the simplicity and the power of calling this game HITMAN. We want him to be powerful and embody the fantasy completely, and he will remain a constant throughout everything we do with the games going forward.

So what is this new game? Well first off HITMAN is still a creative stealth action game, featuring the greatest assassin out there, Agent 47. As an operative of the International Contract Agency, his job is to take out high-profile targets all over the world, supported by his long-time handler Diana Burnwood. Each location in the game is a living sandbox, a place where every NPC has a name and every room matters. We’ve focused on making sure you, the players, have complete freedom of approach over how, where and when you decide to take out your target. Creativity from players is fully expected, you have the power and intelligence of Agent 47 at your fingertips and it is your choice whether to use brute force or orchestrate a genuine masterpiece of assassination.

Locations are more detailed, more populated and much larger than ever before, full of things to experiment with and targets to kill without any checkpoint systems in there. Contracts mode, which we’ll talk more about later in the year, returns and really shines in these big sandboxes. We’ve brought back save games, so you can save your progress anywhere, and we have revamped pretty much every system in our Glacier engine to enable this HITMAN experience. We promised you these things a while back and we’re sticking to them because they are important – and because your feedback is important. In fact, it’s so important we’re taking things a step further.

A ‘LIVE’ Experience

One of the reasons why we’re calling this a new start for HITMAN is also the idea of releasing a digitally led product. That can mean a lot of different things depending on who you are, but for us it means we’re going to make HITMAN available first via direct download.

We’re embracing what digital can offer a blockbuster game series like HITMAN – it allows us to do things that are both bold and exciting and entirely new to the Hitman experience.

We are building an expanding and evolving world of assassination. The experience will begin on December 8th and we will release new locations, missions and hits over time at regular intervals through 2016, which means we’ll all be able to share in the excitement of a new content drop at the same time. Rather than unboxing a game, playing it and then that’s sort of it, we want to deliver a true community experience - creating an ongoing and evolving game which plays out with a finale that brings the story arc together. Our primary goal is to keep HITMAN players fully engaged, so between bigger drops we will be creating one-off live events and live targets to keep you immersed in the experience.

Imagine a target appearing for every player in the world, for a limited time only… let’s say 48 hours. Where your one shot counts. And when that target is gone, it is gone forever. A shared experience where we imagine the HITMAN community will come together every time a new mission or new location appears. For $60 you’ll get full access to all of this content – everything we release as part of this story.

Another big part of this new approach is that we will develop the game with you, the players, and adjust gameplay and create live content and events based on player activity and feedback - so the game will deepen and evolve as time progresses. The experience begins on December 8th on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC and will reach well into 2016.

Exclusives and beta

If you saw HITMAN revealed at the Sony E3 Press Conference, you heard the word “exclusive” a couple of times. We’d just quickly like to run through what that means. PlayStation 4 will be the only console where you can experience the beta and where you can play it first. A PC beta is planned to arrive a week later. The beta is available for pre-orders now. As for the PlayStation 4 exclusive contracts, they are only available to those people who own a PS4 copy of the game.

One more thing

The journey has just started for us all. We are incredibly excited to share a lot more with you as 2015 unfolds. Tomorrow, on June 16th, we’ll be showing the first gameplay trailer from HITMAN at the Square Enix Press Conference. You probably don’t want to miss that.

We’re very happy to invite you into this world of assassination. It’s a place full of challenges, contracts, hits, targets, opportunities, choices and freedom. We can’t wait to show you more!

See you in the trenches.
Io-Interactive

[shubn]

Leaked play footage: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2xqamg_videogames

[icycalm]

Insomnia review: http://culture.vg/reviews/in-depth/hitman-2016-pc.html

And another review that talks about all the positive stuff the Insomnia reviewer left out:

http://steamcommunity.com/id/BertieWoos ... ed/236870/

HITMAN is excellent, hands down. Just go buy the full experience right now and get playing.

If you want more of an explanation, then allow me to discuss essentially the three main aspects of it, the core game and level design, the "extra" modes, and the episodic experience as a whole.

The core game is simply pure Hitman Blood Money bliss, and I don't say that lightly. Each level we have gotten so far is massive, with multiple environments, crowds, hallways, multiple routes, many different killing methods, and stealth good enough that you can do them all silently with only the suit. There is nothing possibly bad you could say about the level design except that there are far fewer levels than Blood Money so far. But, every level is extremely good, where BM had a few stinkers spread about padding out the length. Here, each level has such a huge number of routes, kill methods, and opportunities, that it dwarfs even the best BM levels in variety on offer. The only serious trick added that BM did not have is that certain guards can see through certain disguises. Usually, these are important guards or important characters; i.e. the target will see through you in the uniform of his personal guard, or the guards running the checkpoint will see through you in the uniform of a guard, but not if you are dressed as a waiter. But then the chef might pick you out...

Beyond that, all I have to say is this is the heir to Blood Money, which was one of the finest games ever made. If you have had the pleasure of playing BM, that is all the endorsement you need.

But beyond even the variety of the main levels, Eidos has provided quite a bit of extra content. Contracts, the mode from Absolution where you create a custom challenge to kill an NPC in a level a certain way and can upload it for others to play, is back, though a few of the options are stripped from Absolution. Eidos also provides Escalations, which are much the same thing, but Eidos has scripting users do not, and with it they have made some clever challenges (Kill three people with a battle axe, but they are at opposite ends of the party, and there is only one axe, and if anyone at the party sees you with the axe... you will be in trouble. Stuff like that.). Elusive Targets are a similar deal, only there the levels are changed a bit. A new NPC and some guards are added, some new parameters are put in, and you only have one attempt (Technically, that attempt is only spent if you die. You can retry as much as you like provided you did not die.) and a limited amount of real world time to try the mission.

What makes these all alike is that they take place in the same massive, sandboxy levels as the story missions, but these are generally much tighter puzzles, you have less control, no scripted events to help... It boils the game down to the core mechanics. Distractions, disguises, poisons, stealth, peeling away guards to shadowy corners to knock them out and hide them to get at the target alone, exploiting the AI as best you can with precise distractions... These are not usually as fun. Tougher play of these tends to involve some trial and error as you are really battling the quirks of the stealth AI and systems rather than the elaborate scripting of the main story targets. These are not bad... it is just a different focus.

As far as the episodic experience goes, I think HITMAN is about the only episodic game I have seen that really justifies its price. With every content drop, Eidos improves the game with patches, updates, quality of life improvements. Each level in the game is meant to be replayed and savored, even more than Blood Money's levels. The immense variety of the story missions and the amount of bonus challenges in Escalations, the Elusive targets, and user-made Contracts... Eidos is providing a lot of support and the game really does work well with the wait between levels. If you are not marathonning the game, you have time between episodes to really play the level and associated challenges as much as they deserve.

So I do not think you should wait for the full release to get HITMAN. The content we have now is of exceptional quality, and by the time you finish that, more levels will be available. The game is worth your time and money, easily.

I should try to merge the two at some point.