Char-Nobyl said:
Just to throw this out there: those nuns are about as good at blending in with actual nuns as Altair was at blending in with actual monks in the first Assassin's Creed.
I had the same thought as well, though the school bus and the fact that they were heading to a seedy motel made it a bit more conspicuous. That and the fact that the school bus was parked on the road.
k-ossuburb said:
This is NOT what Hitman is about.-snip- if you have to use a gun AT ALL then you're clearly not smart enough to play the game as it's meant to be played.
I haven't played the first three, only Blood Money. So I'm not sure to what degree the others involved shoot-em-up, but I imagine shit hit the fan rather often, even for the best player. In regards to the second point there, it is absurd to view the most difficult or refined method as the "proper" way to play. Rather, my experience of Hitman (Blood Money) tells me that it's a series that encourages experimenting, rather than needing to find a guide online. The best comparison would be to a paint-by-numbers thing; "paint this part like this so that it ends up looking just like this."
k-ossuburb said:
Hitman is about patience and studying your target, it's about planning your actions and forming a strategy in order to take out the mark without anyone even knowing what happened or even think that it was because someone actually did it. Y'know, like a real professional killer and not some dime-a-dozen murderer.
Real professional killers vary wildly, from mob hitmen that give you cement shoes* to soldiers who use guns.** Is 47 an assassin who leaves no trace, or is he a brutal killer that kills a reporter with a shovel and leaves no survivors? The answer would seem to be that he exists in the middle, able to do both as the circumstances demand.
* - I cannot vouch for the veracity of this stereotype.
** - Soldiers often take part in numerous types of missions, and their weapons are ideally a deterrent and at worst a last resort.
k-ossuburb said:
Every mission in the series was set up so you can make every death look like an accident so nobody would even suspect that you were ever there. It is entirely possible (and advised) to go into every mission with nothing more than the syringes, the fiber wire and a couple of bombs, that's literally all you need.
I only got the Silent Assassin rank once, and that was on the first real level of Blood Money. I sniped the guy on the balcony (silenced, of course), but I had more trouble with his son. When he went to do cocaine in the basement, I tried to poison him and hide the body like an online guide said to. When that didn't work, I used the shotgun that the guards carry around (naturally I was in the disguise as well). All the guards came running in, and... Thought I was another guard. I stood around for a while as a bunch of other guards came in, then slipped out.
Until they find the body of the one guard and his discarded clothes, they'll be holding an internal investigation that will yield no fruit, since they didn't realize somebody infiltrated them.
k-ossuburb said:
Anyone who's played the previous games knows that it's about stealth first and that includes how you take out your targets, it's more a puzzle game than an action game because you're supposed to look at what's in the environment and then figure out how you can use it. Like when you swapped the fake gun for a real one to take out an overacting stage performer before detonating a bomb to drop a chandelier onto his lover's head as he rushes out to see what's wrong with his boyfriend. The whole thing will look like an accident.
Every game is a puzzle game, and sometimes bullets are the solution. And in every level, they're a part of the environment. Furthermore, when a prop gun gets replaced by a real gun, killing a renowned actor, and his illicit business partner (I'm pretty sure that was their relationship) gets crushed by a chandelier, somebody's going to call shenanigans.
k-ossuburb said:
They don't show you the newspapers for no reason, it's to show you if anyone is onto you and how long it'll be before they come to catch you, if you did everything correctly and made it look like an accident then you wouldn't even be mentioned in the papers, it would just be another "tragic accident". That's what a professional killer does, THAT'S WHY YOU GET PAID FOR THIS SHIT, because there's absolutely no way it's going to get linked back to your client if nobody suspects murder, is there?
If there's no hint that they were murdered, then there's no reason to pay the hitman unless he calls right before and says "You know that guy you want dead? Ten minutes."
In addition, the newspapers in Blood Money also foreshadow the (pen)ultimate level, and also have a number of silly articles.
k-ossuburb said:
Also this Batman vision bullshit, what is this? -snip-
47 is a trained assassin. He was genetically created to, and trained extensively to, kill people. The player was not. 47 could look around a room and see entrances, exits, cover, weapons, disguises, distractions, "accidents," etc. Can you? The vision systems in many recent stealth games (most notably Eagle Vision) help to bridge the experience gap between the player and the character. All it does is help newer players learn the ropes and older players reach their full potential. And, if I'm not mistaken, you have to press a button to use it.
k-ossuburb said:
Now what have we got? We've got a diluted version where we don't even have to make any effort to take someone out, which also means that it's actually ENCOURAGED that you take out innocent people with nothing to do with the intended target. In the old games you didn't do this because you wanted to, it was a last resort, if you could you'd avoid it as much as possible. In this version you're pretty much told to strangle any fucker just because they're there.
Char-Nobyl said:
Erm...why? Why is it more encouraged to kill people now? If anything, I imagine AIs will be better at finding out if people have gone missing (recognizing unfamiliar faces, checking in via radio, etc), so it's only the "dime-a-dozen murderer" types you've been railing on that would think "Oh, I'm better at killing now. I better make the most of it by killing as many people as possible and risking a SWAT team getting shoved up my ass."
Because I couldn't have said it better myself.
k-ossuburb said:
In the old games it's a bad thing to take out non-essential people because not only are they just the average working Joe Nobody who you've not been hired to take out, but more importantly: they're also a liability.
-snip- That not only makes you a bad Hitman and no better than a petty thug, it also means that your client will be under suspicion.
By making it seem like a random madman killed a bunch of people, it puts your client under suspicion? You don't know your client, and the only one you know (in-game in Blood Money; working off of limited experience here, I'm afraid) wants you to take out a rather high-profile target. I don't really think anybody's going to be pointing fingers in the right direction anytime soon. The Agency is good like that.
k-ossuburb said:
I don't care if everyone in the entire building is a Nazi, I'm not going to kill any one of them unless I seriously have to and if I do, I will have to restart the mission to try and get a perfect run.
Maybe it's because I played Super Mario Bros. as a small child, but video games aren't all about winning to me. Sure, I like winning and all, but playing a game solely to "win" seems like an odd idea to me. With more story-oriented games it seems natural, as the player becomes the "viewer" of the story. As such, I can certainly appreciate the desire to try an increase in difficulty, whether built into the game or artificial. As long as you've beaten the game once or twice without enforcing those kinds of limits, I see no problem with forcing yourself to do things perfectly. However, it is important to recognize that getting a perfect score is not the "proper" way to play, but rather an additional challenge.
k-ossuburb said:
It was exciting to sneak up behind someone and Garrote them, I agree, but it's also completely wrong and even though a "Game Over" screen isn't flashing up on the screen you can still be damn sure that the moment you've got to take out a non-essential target then you've failed the mission.
You've failed the mission when the game tells you you've failed the mission. If you're playing by your own particular sub-set of rules, then go ahead and consider yourself a failure for not doing things the way you wanted to do. Yet you must be able to separate your rules from the game's rules, and acknowledge that they are different.
k-ossuburb said:
I'm not getting paid to kill the underlings and by-standers, I'm being paid to kill the mark, everything else is murder, the mark's just business.
If you only hit the mark, you miss things like an exploding barbeque and a garbage truck with a trash compacter. The mark is just business, and Hitman is a game. Silly or odd things are also part of the series, and it's my opinion that you're missing a significant portion of it if you only focus on the dry base of the game.
k-ossuburb said:
So, yeah, this is a massive slap in the face for any fan of the original games. It's a complete betrayal of everything established beforehand and it's a massive dumbing down of what once was a very intelligent series of games.
Mario flying through space is less of a slap in the face for Mario fans. The game isn't out, only one or two levels have been showcased yet, including the Chinatown video from E3 in which 47 wanders around for a bit before poisoning the target and leaving quietly. This is a situation where we'll just have to wait and see.
