Hitman (2016) - Baldy killing evil people. Hopefully no sexy nuns

Hitman 2, maybe revealed this week?

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/06/05/hitman-2-revealed-by-logo-on-warner-bros-website/

Waddayamean “2”? Did they drop the whole season idea?

I really really really hope this will be full game with no episodic nonsense. And more storydriven than first season (while keeping the open levels).

If it’s really true that they aren’t doing a pure expansion season 2, and are instead doing a standalone sequel, then it’s a shame their plan didn’t work out. It’s understandable though. I imagine the sales numbers for a second expansion season this far from the initial launch would be a fraction of the full sequel’s.

I suspect it has more to do with residual rights to the previous game. By making this a sequel they are likely contractually free from any payments to their previous masters.

Marrakesh free to play until the end of July at the moment for anyone interested. Guess IO found a new way to do their season packs since they previously gave away the Paris and Sapienza levels for free indefinitely, for a limited time. Understandable in a way since one could have ended up getting at least half of the first season for free if they kept up with all the promotions, and two weeks is a decent amount of time to check out the game and hopefully be lured into buying it.

Though, personally, it feels like IO could maximise the lure by syncing up the Summer Pack with the Steam Summer Sale or offering a discount during the Summer Pack period instead; but maybe their data shows that there is plenty of uptake for the complete game at full price so no discount is necessary. Plus with Hitman 2 on the way, certainly no harm in getting people potentially interested for the sequel even if they don’t buy into the Hitman (2016).

I’ve been enjoying this free portion for the last couple days, and probably would have bought the full set (on sale) eventually. BUT! The always online requirement is a real drag. My reality is that while I have fast internet, sometimes it drops briefly. In those situations I end up having to pause, or exit to menu, while in the middle of a level. Given this is single player game this functionality ends up being a deal breaker for me.

Why do studios do this? Or, why was this requirement included for this game specifically?

Because people think “games-as-a-service” online functionality needs to be crammed into every game. It was dumb.

They wanted to have real-time “heat maps” of where people go, what route they use, weapons, etc, so they could create contracts that use of the less popular areas of the map. I doubt it’s the only reason (there’s anti-piracy and leaderboard cheating) and whether it’s worth the hassle, but it’s an interesting idea.

I’m 99% sure that it was for discouraging piracy.

Things like heatmaps or other statistics would work just as well even if limited to the people who happened to be online when playing. The other obvious excuse is preventing cheating. But there it would have been super easy to e.g. allow unlocks offline, since there’s no real advantage to be gained there. To prevent cheating they would have just needed to not have offline runs count for the leaderboard.

Thanks for explaining.

Anyhow, it’s a deal breaker - I hate studios that require online for offline play, given it means so many random pauses for me. Especially given its never a technical requirement.

Started this up as I am trying to not buy the sequels to games I haven’t touched yet.

Finished up the two tutorial missions , this is the hitman I remember and not that POS game that was Absolution.

Did you send the guy flying on the jet seat? That was a good death!

If you like that mission, you will have an aneurysm when you play Paris :)

I fixed the ejector seat but couldn’t get him to leave. So he accidentally drowned in the toilet.

I just played the Patient Zero mission (in other words, the last mission of the Patient Zero dlc) and man, what a disappointment. I heard it was the only mission with an interesting twist on it, so I though it would be the highlight of the DLC, but actually it’s worse than any normal mission, imo. There is a virus spreading around, that basically don’t allow you to play it exploring the location with calm.

Basically, it is bad as railroads you in three options:
-Doing a speedrun of the mission, before the infection spreads. It can’t be done until you learn from memory some things, so it isn’t really an option at first. Nor I like doing speedruns on Hitman.
-Doing a " kill’em all " resolution to the mission. Again, not the thing I play Hitman for.
-Stopping the infection from spreading. This could have been a good point, having a extra objective or two that are randon in each run, and having to kill them against a time limit. The problem is that they aren’t random, it’s always the same nurse in the same point of the map on the same specific moment, and the infection is instantaneous so you can’t plan the kill, you aren’t left time for that, if you don’t kill her in a moment the infection spreads to 30 targets in a pair of inutes. You basically are left without options except the predetermined ones.
So the solution is to be in that specific location, in that specific time, to kill a specific target, or you have to use any of the other two first methods.

OK. I’ve only started dipping my toes into this - played the prologue in both the old and new engine, then switched back to the old engine since I only have the free Sapienza. Convinced me to grab the Hitman GOTY and wow - got the super-spy chills from Paris. I get that maybe hitpersons are edgier and more antihero, but I’ve been looking for good spy sims and does this mean that I should have been looking at the Hitman series all this time? Just did a run of Paris and … wait, is this entire level not basically a big Zoolander gag? But yeah, there’s like NOC lists and secret agents and the best part is I can follow the story but also completely go off the rails and it’s both completely A-OK. I hope there’s more of this Agent double-oh 47 vibe!

It was from 2016 where the spy-vibes increased. I personally love it.

Same here, and I wouldn’t mind if they took it even further. The gist of the excellent Super Bunnyhop review is basically that this is the James Bond stealth game that never was.

@warrenac If you are just starting out, you might get an even more engaging experience by heeding his advice and turning off the instinct and opportunities modes.

Actually, part of what sold me on the game was having some fun opportunities and some instinct x-ray vision which handily takes away most of my inclination/need to save/restore or looking stuff up online. I love that a lot of the unlocks are kind of like shortcuts to things like “start with this outfit in this location” - I’m actually surprised this was tied to leveling/XP and not tied to actually finding a location/wearing an outfit/picking up a weapon. I’d almost go further and would have preferred to have indicators of “obvious” alarming actions - I guess I’m slowly learning about approximate hearing ranges and vision but this is always the most annoying thing in games like this. And I’m sure at some point I’d prefer to have things I discover be marked on the map permantly - I’m already getting lost in the first couple mansions, just like in real life.

So I got this for free from PS+ a while ago. Last week I decided to give it a go and discovered that I could access via the Hitman 3 engine, and BONUS, I apparently also have Hitman 2!

After playing the tutorials I’m hooked, and because of significant savings on the PlayStation winter sale, I go ahead and buy what I think are everything from the Extended Murder Trilogy. This game has been repackaged so many times, I’m not actually sure I have everything, but it’s still probably far more than I’ll ever play.

Tried the Paris mission, and following the story prompts, I’m able to complete the mission. Tried it a few more times, since that appears to be what you’re supposed to do.

Turns out I’m really bad at Hitman. I get the basic mechanics, I think, but I keep getting caught and having to reload. And I can’t figure out how to get to the Sheik’s room to follow that story. For some reason it keeps timing out.

Any tips?