They killed it. Hitman chapter 1.

First off… the royal we have given up on regular updates. Too much going on right now with trying to find a new job and some other side projects. Mondays will remain the day for updates. We will keep you updated…. Now on to the topic of the week.

As someone who tend to lean on the side of click bait…. This was perhaps the most click baited title I have done so far.

But I feel it is ok, especially as I more or less predicted doom and gloom for the Hitman series with them going episodic. Seems like I will have to eat crow. The first episode is really solid and a nice nod back to the classic hitman formula of sandbox playground. An open level and you are left to your own devices as to how you like to solve the mission. A fantastic tangle of AI interactions and triggers that if left to their own might seem predictable but once you start poking around your actions causes a ripple effect that in turn change the playing field.

Now this is just the first episode. The one that one can assume have been in development for the longest time but it also set a good bar for the following maps to hit. Should they reach said bar the game will most likely land on many GoTY lists as an example of how to do episodic content the right way outside of a TellTale game. Should they not… At least the starter pack will be worth the 15 bucks it cost and you can keep on replaying that trying to find the most creative ways of breaking the game.

So the game… It is for all intents and purposes a Hitman game, you are bald, people need to be stuffed in to boxes, carrying a gun in the open is bad and so on. New or at least new-ish is the soft version of your super-assassin sense. The game has a mode you can use that track information you see and hear and paint you guideline to follow. This can ofc be turned off if you like to go in old school. This way the game remains open to veterans and newcomers alike.

But that is all there is right now. I will return and make a more in-depth review of the game once all the parts are out and we can see how it meshed together. But for now I can absolutely recommend the starter edition as it stands on its own very well. 

Splitting reality.

So in the recent history of video-gaming there has been some serious talks about nipping and tucking content. It started with Day1 DLC and similar. Something that most people feel miffed about (but most often to me seemed to be a bored art and asset team putting in a few extra hours.) and while we did not really see the nightmare scenarios materialize. But it is not open to debate that we today have a culture of micro expansions and other forms of DLC in pretty much every game. Enter Telltale Games. The by today crowned masters of episodic content re-wrote much of how games would be released. They proved that a good idea did not need a complete game. Rather they took a cue from TV and told their story in small bite sized chunks.

With this came a new dawn. One we are just seeing the effect of. More and more companies try their hand at carving their games up and selling them ala carte. The biggest names right now being the FF7 reboot and the upcoming Hitman game. Now I have no real problem with this approach as long as the design from the start is to produce the game episodically. Since you really need to have the pacing down to a pat. Each episode having its own narrative structure. To see if Sqeenix can do that with the FF7 game will be interesting, because that game will need all the help it can get. If nothing else it will be a horrid train wreck and we all go back to playing the original.

Now as for hitman you would think the design of the game would make it perfect for episodic content. Make each contract an episode. Fill it out with the overarching story and let the player do them at their own pace. If well designed Hitman contracts have several solutions and paths to said solutions. But here is the thing… The game in question have changed model about twice a day. So to now carve up a game that was not designed for episodic content to begin with can lead to some very awkward storytelling and really poor pacing. It also tells of a really poor confidence in the product. Now going forward this could turn in to a really annoying trend, because companies love to lower the barrier of entry and being able to do so without the stigma of F2P must sound really tempting. But it is also a very different way of making games and I doubt that many companies have the agility and flexibility to pull it off.

But what I look forward the most is when the asset flipping early access trash that populate the dark side of Steam figure out this… Not only will they sell you shit games, but they will sell you shit game chopped up like a game tartar. 

That will be glorious.