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This has made me wonder if IOI have bitten off more than they can chew.
Whatever It Ends Up Being, I Just Hope That It Doesn't End Up Being A "Poopy" Rushed Bug-Filled "Poop" Ala "Cyberpunk 2077".
So your saying cyberpunk 2077 is fantastic ;)
Is Cyberpunk still bad? I thought it had largely been fixed. Though it has the worst release I can remember. Even Assassin's Creed: Unity, which was a mess at launch, wasn't as bad as Cyberpunk.
There are times when Ubisoft gets some idiotic, it pulls to the surface my inner John McCririck, causing me to bellow "BEHAVE YOURSELF, YOU FOOL!!"
The fact that Ubisoft have canned the Ghost Recon battle royale game, which absolutely NO ONE wanted*, plus Assassin's Creed going back to basics, have given me some hope. Furthermore, I never want to see Gear Scores in another video game. Or at least if they must put them in, allow us to turn them off. This is why I am not looking forward to going back to Assassin's Creed: Origins. They forced them on us in Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, until fans pushed back, and they then made them optional. Why couldn't that have been done with AC: Origins too?
*Because that's what fans of a tactical shooter wanted, a Fortnite cash-in. :-<
It seems like they've created a really cool "endgame" experience to their trilogy of games, where you role play as 47 like never before and grow your resources and reputation in the world of freelance assassination. You'll have a safe house you can customize, an armory to collect weapons and use them for missions, a shooting range and the ability to customize loadouts before you head out on a mission.
The contracts seem to have a campaign styled escalation to them, where taking out a target leads to more information that allows you to uncover the head honcho of the organization you're going after. The difficulty and intensity seems to ratchet up as time goes on and you complete more missions, and eliminating threats give you more experience and resources to grow as an assassin.
This all looks incredible, and makes me want to jump into the Hitman games again as I didn't play 2 or 3 yet. I just love the role playing nature of this, and the freedom of how the contracts will work, to truly make you feel like 47 as never before.
I wanted to share this here, because I was curious if you guys think IO doing this kind of update/mode with Hitman is their way of test running how their Bond game could work? Because we've talked before about how cool it would be to have a Bond game where you truly feel like 007, where you set up your kit before a mission, decide how Bond will look, how he'll take on his missions and more. This mode with Hitman seems like a great test run for what I'd want to see in a Bond game, where you can hanker down in a safe house, MI6 or Bond's flat before he heads out onto a mission and can plan your next move as you try to whittle away at a threat to reveal a greater enemy behind it all.
What do you gents think?
I wouldn't be surprised if they are using certain aspects of Hitman as test for Bond. It's still early days for Project 007. I am curious about how IOI are going to handle vehicular missions, as they have no experience of this. Are we even going to have them?
I just really liked the idea of it, and never thought it would be implemented in a Hitman game like that. It's also cool that they are using all the different maps they've made since 2016, making the world feel a lot larger than it otherwise would be. The mode will always have some repetitive elements to it, but they've done their damnedest to reduce that feeling as much as I think they could.
Sadly, as much as I love the series, this new trilogy was so up and down for me. I absolutely loved the first one but the second one being entirely plagued by bugs and rather uninteresting missions killed a lot of my interest. Hitman 3 definitely got things back on track but didn't implement enough variety to stand out and still contained some bugs that have existed throughout this entire new trilogy. I played it way more than 2 but it doesn't sound like enough new content is contained here to get me to return. I LOVE the idea of a safehouse but it's not terribly inviting to me now that I've unlocked virtually everything and played the levels countless times already.
It's only a shame it took them this long to get around to implementing something like this, because the original trilogy all had proper weapon rooms (when the games actually had weapon variety) and Blood Money even had a really nice safehouse.
I think for me, they were ones that either took me out of the experience or ruined elements of the way I preferred to play after a while.
Once I inevitably got all the trophies and completed virtually all the differing playstyles, I favored a firearms-only style, trying to take down everyone in the mission with them stealthily before turning to firefights whenever I was caught. The combat and gunplay, though, is pretty rough at times (bad recoil, weird positioning bugs that essentially let you shoot through walls), so seeing the same wonky glitches and whatnot was tiring after a while.
Of course, there were also some lingering bugs, like being spotted by enemies that were nowhere near me (sometimes several floors up or in entirely different buildings), which is clearly game-breaking for the canonical way to play and ruined a lot of runs for me. Most of the worst offenders were eventually patched and I found H3 to be in a pretty solid state, but I think my distaste for H2 after a while sort of soiled the series for me. I know these new ones were meant to be a cohesive trilogy but there are so few differences between the three that it all got a bit stale after a while.
I think if they had made some of the levels a bit smaller and tighter but way more detailed while bringing back previous, stellar elements of the series earlier on in the trilogy (a safehouse/weapons room, the ability to earn money for your hits and playstyle while using the funds to properly upgrade weapons, the post-mission newspaper feature, NPCs and targets fighting back with more consistency, and most preferred, a larger variety in weapons), I would've been much happier.
See, that's when the game started to show some real unique promise but...
I'm not sure exactly. It's not like Hitman 2016 was the most polished game in the world or anything but it was in a way better state from launch onward (when they were really learning how to gear and change things going forward) than H2 was. H2 was a bit more polished, added a couple of cool guns and interesting ideas, but was marred by the shorter length and level design.
I thought some of the levels were simply too big for their own good, leading to lots of bloated areas not worth exploring, whereas their shortcutting in other realms (the awfully cheap cutscenes, that first mission that's little more than a snappy prologue one can complete in 10 minutes) was annoyingly noticeable.
It made me realize that I prefer the more detailed maps that don't require giant, moving crowds. I don't like when they implement those hollow NPCs that don't show up on the map and will die if you shoot them once anywhere on their body. That's not to say all of these levels are terrible (I thought The Showstopper in Paris was brilliant and one of my favorites to revisit) but give me something like Hokkaido instead any day of the week.
@ByRoyalDecree, I hope so too. I will just assume that they made 47 so stiff because he's a superhuman sort of killing machine and isn't intended to have humanity.
Bond needs to glide through a room, though, and walk with presence.
The boundless optimist in me thinks they are indeed using this as a stealthy way to try-out some stuff for P007, while they are still kind of figuring out the top-level direction of that game (have they finally filled all of the positions they were advertising for that?). The pessimist in me thinks they used so many ressources for this, there can't be any real development for P007, yet.
It seems interesting.
Square Enix dropped IO Interactive prior to the release of Hitman 2 but while it was already in development, so they were on a much tighter budget. I don't recall the finer details of the situation but basically IOI ended up performing a management buyout and while they gained total independence it meant they had a much leaner budget to work with.
The Hitman 2016 cutscenes, for example, had been done by an outside party which is why the renders were quite good. Lacking the budget to do so again, they did those still frame cutscenes for the bulk of Hitman 2. It's also why they only released six locations at the time of release and spared the other two for the "Gold" edition (the Bank and Haven Island - two of the best locations in the series in my view).
I think their subsequent deal with Warner was for distribution only, and their future as a company effectively relied on the continued success of Hitman 2016 Game of the Year Edition sales (now distributed by Warner) and Hitman 2 as a whole. Fortunately, it ended up working out for them - but that's why Hitman 2 was rougher around the edges. It's totally fine now though, especially when played within Hitman 3.
Hitman 3 was an unprecedented success for them thanks to the growing popularity of the first two games plus continued interest when they are offered as free or discounted titles on the PS and Xbox stores. Hitman 3 servers crashed the day of release and problems continued on the Playstation servers for another week. While annoying at the time, in retrospect it was nice to see such "Day 1" interest in what is a relatively niche franchise.
IOI doesn't really tend to update all that frequently on game development until there is something worth announcing. They've even been late on dropping their monthly Hitman roadmaps on occasion.
Indeed. I’d rather he catwalk like Connery instead of statesmanly like Moore. He walks like Lazenby, and seems to flail his arms a bit like Craig, which fits Craig but would less so a traditional looking avatar.
It’s the switches between animations games should work on rather than graphics according to me. If you can somehow retain responsive control without ruining fluid transitions every game would instantly become much more realistic.
My biggest worry with this game is the animations and overall gameplay design, because I definitely don't want the action/combat to be as stiff and unpolished as it so often feels in the Hitman games. Bond's movements should be fluid and energetic, not stiff and closed in like 47's are, and I hope they account for just how different the pair are. Bond is not an emotionless robot, and shouldn't move as such.
No matter how long ago they came out, for my money the later EA Bond games that were in 3rd person really nailed how moving as Bond should feel. Everything or Nothing and From Russia had really zippy, free feeling combat that pulled the camera out and made Bond feel so fluid and deadly with his guns, which is exactly how I feel he should play. The game doesn't have to make it so that Bond instantly locks onto an enemy and kills them, I want a challenge, but that same freedom of movement and boldness in Bond's animations and combat style is something I'd love to see adapted into a modern Bond game. He shouldn't be a guy that ducks and covers to take infrequent shots at enemies. He should be daring and deadly, always on the move and advancing his position.
I have both doubts and hopes.