IO Interactive's Tore Blystad has said that the Hitman: Absolution team "won't be dictated to by the fans", despite some of the backlash the game has received within the community.
When Hitman 3 recently changed its name to Hitman World of Assassination, fans had no idea how meaningful the moment was. On the outside it looked like a simple thing: Hitman 3 would now be known by this name and include levels from Hitman 2 and 3 - the trilogy would all be in one place. But on the inside, at IO Interactive, much more was going on.
You mean destroyed it with this tethered single-player campaign BS... And only the first few levels of the third modern game were on the disc! I'll never support this crap at any price-point! They've lost me as a customer.
The last 10 years of Hitman have been full of highs and lows. And David Bateson and Jane Perry have been there with the series through this eventful decade.
Hitman is, and has been, a remarkable series developed by some of the best. Some are better than others, but every Hitman is challenging and fun.
Sure, there have been some stumbles and fumbles, but always in pursuit of the perfect Hitman game. The most recent trilogy is a masterclass in level design.
Hitman: Absolution: 72H for FREE. There's no gimmick here, just CLAIM IT and it's yours forever
I'm really unsure how I feel how about this. On the one hand, the fans make the game. Without them it's nothing. On the other hand, it isn't us that actually psyhically make the game. I mean, if I was making a game, I'd want to put my ideas in there, because it's mine :D
Sometimes us fans can be completely over-bearing and that results in developers mentally suffocating, compromising their creative abilities that made the original games great in the first place.
This is exactly what the Deus Ex developers did and the results speak for themselves.
They've made enough classic style hitman games to be able to do something new and not offend fans, anything more of the same would just be prettier graphics and now new gameplay.
I would be fine with them ignoring fanboys if the alternatives they are introducing sound like improvements. The "Instinct mode" sounds like the Detective vision from Arkham Asylum(whose devs have even said was too much.)
Then there's the linear approach that worries me, a massive part of Hitman's replay value was the variability of mission completion. There were a dozen different ways to kill everyone, little easter eggs and a number of different ways to get in and out of a situation.
Reduce those and what do we get? Something that seems less like the unique Hitman franchise, and a lot more like everything else.
Gaming is not a democracy and when it is treated that way, games tend to backfire. Look at black ops for example. For the most part, Treyarach followed every critique that fans gave about MW2. They removed nukes, commando, quickscoping, and balanced the game to a greater extent than MW did and the game pretty much ended up being worse than MW2. The point is fans dont know what the hell they want. For years, they demanded photo realistic experiences on every level but when GTA IV brought that, they switch gears and decided realism sucked. You can never please a fan. They dont know what makes a game great and they should just leave it to the devs who actually do know what makes a game great. Hitman has been very sucessful on its own merit and I expect nothing less from Absolution.
Also, any BS about Hitman being the next Splinter Cell Conviction is just that. Hitman Absolution will still maintain the same non linear stealth gameplay taht made it great in the first place. The run and gun you see is just the result of playing the game that way (ie wrong). Every hitman game allows you to go guns blazing but you get less credit for it.