And while Deus Ex May have fallen prey to the insane expectations of Squares sales team (see: Tomb Raider reboot) it seems to have sold well by all accounts.
There is capacity for big budget stealth, but only one or two a year.
Bad example, given both games didn’t sell a lot. It’s doubtful their next game is going to be anything like them :(
I enjoy Styx. I am not playing RDR 2 at the moment.
The character, the environment, the marketing I saw… none of that appeals to me, and really, I don’t get the impression the publisher really ever cared to market that game beyond a certain niche crowd even with the marketing they did.
I have to admit, until this thread, I never considered the Hitman franchise a stealth game franchise. I have tried to get into a couple of the Hitman games, but it didn’t seem to be the same genre to me as Thief. I always thought it seemed like a cross between an adventure game/puzzle game and a first/third person shooter.
It’s a cross between adventure game/puzzle game and stealth game. It has some parts here and there where you have to use normal stealth, waiting until someone looks at the other side, and all that, and it has challenges where you can’t switch your clothes playing entirely as a stealth game.
Isn’t Dishonored a stealth game and didn’t it sell well?
That’s actually one of my favorite things about especially the modern incarnation of Hitman. You do need to deal with things like line of sight etc from time to time but for a lot of it you just need to find an unaccompanied disguise or pick off someone by themselves and you have access to big chunks of the level without much fuss. But of course you don’t necessarily know exactly who can go where, and there are just so many possible approaches, some much more elegant than others.
The first one sold well, the second one not so much.
Attention span, or more precisely, the eroding of it could have something to do with it.
Stealth games all put you into the same mode, regardless of who they are made by, and there’s only so much of that feeling to go around. I personally find the genre very tiring to play, as it rarely if ever has a good balance of tension and release, it’s just all tension. That can be fun for a while, or once in a while, but if I’ve played any stealth based game, I don’t really feel like playing another one for a pretty good period of time.
That’s surprising, the first was so well received.
I don’t buy the idea that modern gamers don’t have the patience for stealth. Look at PUBG! That’s like the most hard core stealth game ever made, where the canonical experience is skulking around the map for 25 minutes while skulking around, jumping at shadows or the slightest noise, but not actually seeing nobody. (And then being sniped). And it sold tens of millions of copies.
A single PUBG run takes about the same amount of time as a Hitman run, but has higher stakes since a) you can’t reload, b) the opponents are real humans rather than just this elaborate clockwork machinery.
Dishonored 2 probably sold something like 3-4 million copies. It was by no means a flop.
Dishonored 2 would have sold even more,if it didn’t run like crap on lower end systems. But yeah it wasn’t a flop at all.
Death of the Outsider sold around half a million physical units according to VGchartz. Probably another half to a million digital sales (guess).
I love stealth. Increasingly however I find it in different games. Like open world shooter games like FarCry or even Ghost Recon Wildlands or RPG’s like Pillars of Eternity or wargames with FOW or simulators (like flight sims or naval sims) I play stealth but the games are not defined by it as the core mechanic.
I have far less interest these days in scripted content or story based stealth. Its too often a case of “Oh spotted again, time to reload and get through this stupid level then watch some dumb cutscene”.
Which maybe why I like my stealth in a more open less binary context. If that makes any sense at all.
People forget, but the Assassins Creed series are stealth games too. :)
And they sell like hotcakes. Origins and Odyssey being the least stealthy, but still are viable stealth games if you choose to play them as such.
And that is on my list once I get through some of my current games. Hitman is not.
It makes perfect sense. And that’s exactly what Hitman does. Unless you’re going for single very specific challenge, being spotted is not a fail state. Having to salvage things after something goes wrong is pretty much the source of the best Hitman moments.
Dishonored 2 underperformed until Bethesda dropped the price.
It’s very sad to see that Hitman 2 isn’t getting the sales it deserves. I hope it’ll have a long life, and that I.O. will have the resources to support it because they make the greatest stealth sandboxes around. Quality-wise, the series has never been better, and while you can tell they had to cut corners on some of the presentation (instead of slick cutscenes the story is now lightly animated slides), the new gameplay additions, like the ability to hide in bushes and crowds, compliment their already awesome 2016 base game nicely. I hope the live services elements will keep enough people engaged over time and more people discover it.
There’s this recent meme in armchair games analysis where people suddenly seemed obsessed with extrapolating UK retail sales figures as being representative of a game’s overall success. Maybe it’s because those retail UK sales figures are the only concrete figures given out in a short timeframe, but still.
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2012 is positively ancient in the gaming world. Comparing retail sales from 2012 to retail sales today is effectively meaningless. 2012 was before the Xbox One and PS4 launched. It was before buying digital games on consoles was an everyday thing that the majority of customers even considered. There is no way to assume anything by comparing physical retail sales today with those in 2012.
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I/O is a much smaller company today because they had to lay people off when going independent after Hitman 2016. No one but them knows how much they need to stay afloat
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Hitman 2018’s costs are a lot lower than 2016 - not just because it’s a smaller studio, but because they released it in a much shorter timeframe, already had the engine up and running, and didn’t bother wasting resources on FMV CG cutscenes and other stuff the 2016 game had
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It’s already sold 100,000-200,000 copies on Steam according to SteamSpy’s current algorithm. I don’t know how much the 2016 game sold - especially how it broke down between Episode 1 to Episode 5 and the full season - but that doesn’t seem catastrophic for the first week, and of course doesn’t include console sales figures
None of this is to say that the game is a success of course, but we also don’t have any strong evidence which suggests that Hitman 2018 is a failure.
You make a good point, in that IO now it’s smaller dev (after layoffs…) and Hitman 2 should have costed less: the tutorials are reused, the dropped the CG cutscenes, the engine is reused too…