Hitman (2016) - Episode 43 - The Poison-Her

Let us finish what we started, with puns.



In a typical Hitman level, most of your time is spent figuring out what approach would be best to take out your target. What weapon will you use, when's the best time to strike, how will 47 get out after the kill is completed, and remove all evidence of the crime?

Players are likely to screw up several times before they successfully complete the mission, one way or the other. What makes this mission different is that one of those questions is already answered for the player. What weapon will they use on the targets: The Viral Syringe (which is functionally identical to the Modern Lethal Syringe).

This would normally be fine, but this one question also answers several others. When and where is the best time to strike? The answer to that is basically any place and time where no one is looking at the target. How will 47 hide the evidence? He doesn't need to. A Poison Kill is treated like an accident, so it doesn't matter if the body is discovered.

Because of the particulars of how this weapon works, the tricky part is merely in finding where all three moving cogs (the viral syringe and the 2 targets) are. Since players can still restart until the first objective is complete, the most dangerous part of this mission is completely safe. You'll notice that once I found where both targets were, I was able to quickly kill both of them, delete the evidence tape, and escape.

I think it's good to experiment with new ways to add challenge to the Elusive Targets, but I think this experiment failed. This was just far too easy.

Hitman (2016) - Episode 42 - Pro Surgeon

We talk about the addition of the Professional difficulty while completely another Elusive Target.



The addition of a Professional difficulty hammers home the need to allow players to more easily customize their own difficulty settings to form the ideal experience for them. There are a ton of ideas in the Pro difficulty that I would love to have added to my Hitman experience. I want to play around with how the game plays if players need to make clean kills to take disguises, or if cameras can detect suspicious/illegal activities and summon guards.

But other parts of that difficulty mode, like the limit of 1 manual and no auto-saves, and the rearrangement of objects in the mission to make them harder to get to, are things I'd rather not have when playing Hitman. I'd love to be able to turn some of these options on and leave others disabled.

After playing Dishonored 2 on my own custom difficulty with enemies who are easy to sneak around, but deadly and tenacious once alerted, it's hard to not see how other games, especially these kinds of "immersive sims", could benefit from this kind of customization. In one of the recent updates to Dishonored 2, players can change everything from enemy detection rates, how much damage they inflict and how often they attack, to even how much potions heal for. It takes the innate replayability of the game and severly ampli