Chris

Idle Thumbs 256: The First Great Brand War

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Idle Thumbs 256:

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The First Great Brand War

It is 2017. The stench of scorched mozzarella stings your nostrils. Brand warfare has emerged as the dominant vector of economic and military conflict. A delivery bot rolls your way, and you frantically dig a receipt out of your pocket, showing a recent order for a medium half-sausage, half-pepperoni. Too late, you realize your mistake: this is a Taco Bell bot. "Okay, I will destroy humans," it offers cheerfully, then everything goes black.

Discussed: Hitman (2016), Sumer, Microsoft Tay, Domino's Pizza, Robot News

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On Hitman talk:

 

The events in the level seem to be some combination of real time and on when you encounter them.  This can actually lead to some ugly seams in the game showing.

 

For example, in the Paris level, there's a woman at the party who is, basically, the woman Jake talks about, the fashion critic who the people at the show don't like.  She's long been critical of the people who are running this party.  You can eavesdrop on a conversation she has with a friend who works with her and find out that they have some sort of mole who's been telling them things about what shady things your targets are up to.  She talks about how she is going to use this information to blackmail the targets, because her fashion magazine is faltering and she needs money to keep it going.

 

At a later point in the level, Victor runs into this woman while strolling throughout the fashion show.  She makes some threats about knowing what's going on upstairs and what activities the targets are really up to.  Victor kinda laughs it off and walks off, but when he does, he steps out of the party and goes to a corner of the garden to have a phone conversation with Dalia, telling her that they have a mole somewhere.

 

The problem with this last scenario is that it seems to really only trigger when you see the confrontation happen (I've never seen Victor's target marker go out to the garden without me being close to trigger the conversation).  This means it's possible that Dalia is already dead when it triggers.  Unfortunately, they didn't do any work to check for this, so instead of him trying to call her and she never picks up, he ends up having a conversation with a dead woman.

 

It's a bit of a weird thing for them to not catch, because they pay attention to so many other little details.  For example, at one stage I was trying to take out a guard who is talking on his cell phone to another guard.  I was too quick in choking the guard out, though, and I raised an alarm because the guard on the other end of the phone call heard his boss being choked out over the phone and came running.

 

Also, on the idea of releasing levels from old games as a bit of a "Best of Hitman" thing, this is something that iO Interactive has a bit of a track record of doing.  The third game in the series, Hitman: Contracts, is halfway to this.  Contracts had 12 levels in it, 5 of which were actually recreations of good levels from the first two games.

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Great show, enjoyed the hitman talk.

On the topic of player created contracts you load into any one of the three missions. When you approach any NPC (I think it's upto five per misson) you press a button to mark them.

From there whatever costume or method you use to kill the target becomes the contract. I guess there is a list of options for the mission requirements like "hide the body in under 90 seconds".

To follow up on old hitman levels coming to this game there was a trailer called

released just before the game shipped which features cool pre rendered clips of previous hitman games.

Someone fan edited it side by side with actual game play from the older games

So I assume classic levels are on the way in the future.

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When Nick failed the mission, it was because he was playing an escalation mission instead of the main one. Escalation missions have specific requirements for what you are wearing or how you kill a target which is why you fail immediately for doing it wrong.

Most hitman levels run without you. The Paris level will run till 'completion' if you let it. There have been a few missions in previous games that will actually fail if you let them run long enough. There was a mission in Blood Money where you are tasked with taking out three agents of a competing assassination agency and saving a government official from them. If you don't stop the payment briefcase from getting to them you have to move quickly to stop the assassination from happening. I am pretty sure there were levels where targets would leave eventually if you let it run long enough.

Important Hitman video:
 

 



I love this guy, he makes some great weird stuff.

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Obviously you would pick taco bell over dominos, because then you can still get pizza hut as you adhere to YUM! corporation brand loyalty.

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Yeah, what Cordeos said is almost certainly the explanation unless Nick encountered some weird bug (I doubt it). And that ties back into the complaint about how the design of the main menu for this game is atrocious. I figured out what everything is, more or less, but man the game really does not do itself any favors with that design. It reminds me of when I first started playing and that main menu was just bewildering to figure out.

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Obviously you would pick taco bell over dominos, because then you can still get pizza hut as you adhere to YUM! corporation brand loyalty.

 

Unfortunately the YUM! Civil War of 2023 will make that option impossible

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Has anyone thought about how the episodic nature of the new Hitman (game? series?) fits into the "lean startup" model? What I mean is, IO has acknowledged that the next levels are still under production, so surely they're waiting on feedback about the first, and will iterate on their ideas / concepts moving forward in the campaign. I would be surprised (and a little disappointed) if there weren't some major risks taken in the next couple of releases, to see what really jived with players, everything from combat systems to menu design. All that being said, the iterative process really does put the onus on the final product, in this case, the campaign finale, and a flop there could mean bad news (although they would assumedly have raked in the profits from the previous four or however-many levels.)

 

Not that any of this is a bad thing, just an observation. Do you think that any of this makes sense? Game companies are notoriously bad at player feedback, and I personally don't know IO's reputation in that regard very well.

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Has anyone thought about how the episodic nature of the new Hitman (game? series?) fits into the "lean startup" model? What I mean is, IO has acknowledged that the next levels are still under production, so surely they're waiting on feedback about the first, and will iterate on their ideas / concepts moving forward in the campaign. I would be surprised (and a little disappointed) if there weren't some major risks taken in the next couple of releases, to see what really jived with players, everything from combat systems to menu design. All that being said, the iterative process really does put the onus on the final product, in this case, the campaign finale, and a flop there could mean bad news (although they would assumedly have raked in the profits from the previous four or however-many levels.)

 

Not that any of this is a bad thing, just an observation. Do you think that any of this makes sense? Game companies are notoriously bad at player feedback, and I personally don't know IO's reputation in that regard very well.

Next level is being released on the 26th. I hope they pay attention to players about this stuff, but who knows. It also might take a few levels before changes start showing up. I imagine the Italy level was mostly done by the time Paris was released. We have seen a lot less of Morocco and whatever the airport looking level is.

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Hitman talk has convinced me to buy it sooner rather than later. Just curious if anyone knows: if you buy the intro pack, does price of it with the upgrade pack work out to being the same as just buying the full game to begin with?

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Hitman talk has convinced me to buy it sooner rather than later. Just curious if anyone knows: if you buy the intro pack, does price of it with the upgrade pack work out to being the same as just buying the full game to begin with?

"A new Intro Pack now contains Prologue and Paris levels and will release at the new price of $15 or the regional equivalent. Each subsequent location will be priced at $10 as an add-on item to the Intro Pack.

Alternatively, those who purchase the Intro Pack can upgrade to the full game with the $50 Upgrade Pack.

Players can also buy the full game and upcoming content for $60 up front. This includes all of the 2016 content as it’s released along with all live and bonus content. A disc version of Hitman will ship at the end of 2016."

Looks like its $5 more to buy the intro pack and then upgrade.

 

https://www.vg247.com/2016/01/14/hitman-will-be-released-as-a-truly-episodic-aaa-game-experience/

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When Nick failed the mission, it was because he was playing an escalation mission instead of the main one. Escalation missions have specific requirements for what you are wearing or how you kill a target which is why you fail immediately for doing it wrong.

Most hitman levels run without you. The Paris level will run till 'completion' if you let it. There have been a few missions in previous games that will actually fail if you let them run long enough. There was a mission in Blood Money where you are tasked with taking out three agents of a competing assassination agency and saving a government official from them. If you don't stop the payment briefcase from getting to them you have to move quickly to stop the assassination from happening. I am pretty sure there were levels where targets would leave eventually if you let it run long enough.

 

 

Some things in Blood Money would also loop if you let them go long enough. I think the combination of time based, encounter based, and looping events makes the game seem really dynamic.

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I think they've been amazingly clever with the design. I'm very happy with what I got for the $15 I paid. I disagree that the staggered release puts the onus on the climax. I think it's that way for Telltale episodes, but not this. They are very different because this is so incredibly replayable. The individual levels have to be worth what I pay for them, but the whole package doesn't suffer if one isn't up to par.

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Yeah, the best case scenario for the episodic release is it just allows Io to keep making Hitman levels, and allows for greater design than a traditional $60 package would allow for.

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on botting!

 

in Star Wars Galaxies you could write in game macros for your characters, and bind them to a key. so you could make your Han Solo execute a specific pistol shot, and then say "no ticket" every time, for action and cross property synergy.

 

people built these macros to be increasingly efficient. you could set your character up to accept group invitations, follow the player, enter a vehicle they entered, target their target, heal them when they're low on health. eventually they figured out the commands to make the players walk to the mission terminals, accept missions, then navigate to the waypoint of the mission. my friends got to the point where they would get on skype and drink beer, watching their characters party up and play themselves.

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I believe the paris level is called "Showstopper".

 

I think maybe the reason I liked Absolution was that for me, the fact that hitman games have big non-linear environments isn't really what attracts me to them.  I just enjoy the act of solving stealth puzzles, and it's fine to me if that's done along a choice of three basic paths in a more linear level as long as the solving part is still interesting.

 

In fact, I think the more focused approach allowed them to make more intricate and interesting patterns than the kind of stuff I saw in blood money, though I enjoy that game just fine.  But I really liked being asked to do an insanely specific and precise thing in order to clear a level perfectly in absolution, and blood money felt a bit mushier.

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If anyone is interested in Sumer, the board game like video game Chris talked about in this episode, it's now up on Kickstarter!

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