Hitman: Blood Money (or why Steve Gaynor is nuts)

[twmac]

The thing is, the game already gives countless ways to complete the level.

I just started playing Vampire Rain and it made me hark back to Hitman: Blood Money(depite IO Interactive being amongst the rudest developers I've ever dealt with) because in Vampire Rain you are fucked if you make one bad call.

Certainly alarms go off if you fuck up in Hitman, but at that point I usually cracked out the big guns and went on a rampage and would re-attempt the level at a later date using different tactics.

I'm not saying that developers shouldn't be striving for even more diverse games but they need to take into account challenge. If the game can simply be solved any old random way then the challenge of replay just wouldn't be there.

Incidentally IOI were very resistant to too open ended a game when Hitman was in full flow which will proabably explain why they made Kane and Lynch afterwards.

[eljay]

It's a totally different type of gun, so no.

So you should disallow all player actions that won't result in success?

It would not be difficult at all to implement a generic item switching action and the AI could have a response for replacing it with a similar gun and a response for something else.

I agree that extending features indefinitely is absurd, and if there are no other times where you have the opportunity to switch items for dupes then a whole system for that is unnecessary, but if that's the case then they aren't really designing to their own constraints (see also the lighting issue mentioned before).

I know some people who never finished the game because they were intent on getting Silent Assassin on each mission before moving onto the next. Those people are lame.

I find having to resort to blazing in / out with guns utterly dull, so in order to enjoy the game at all I have to find one of the elegant puzzle solutions (which I think are ace). I only got to the Opera level too incidentally, hehe.

[DanJW]

I find having to resort to blazing in / out with guns utterly dull, so in order to enjoy the game at all I have to find one of the elegant puzzle solutions (which I think are ace). I only got to the Opera level too incidentally, hehe.

Did I say you should go in guns blazing? No. Don't put words in my mouth . Even using the puzzle solutions you can get spotted or make a mess or have to take out one extraneous person, which loses you the Silent Assassin rating. Likewise it is sometimes possible to make your own 'accidents' (my favourite method), or to kill the target using a single shot and still get Silent Assassin.

As for the gun switching... yeah I can't think of any other similar situations, and what would be the purpose of adding in a bunch of assets for a pointless exercise? The exchange works perfectly if you listen to the briefing and actually pick up the replica weapon right at the start. And if for some reason you didn't then you can put the gun back and find another route.

edit: In fact I think you can drop your own weapons wherever you want. Doing so in this case would create a perfectly believable scenario, where the actor finds the non-matching replacement gun, and either takes it to a guard or fetches a guard to have a look at it. So after all that the game allows you to do exactly what Bistro was claiming it wouldn't.

Yeah, shame about the lights though.

Edited April 16, 2009 by DanJW

[eljay]

Apologies, I misunderstood what the Silent Assassin rating was

[Salka]

Stop getting so worked up Dan, it's not becoming of a lady.

[Thrik]

I'd forgotten about this until seeing this thread, but Blood Money's CV review has to be one of the best.

-wEwgwXrJ_0