When IO Interactive took a break from its Hitman franchise after 2006's Blood Money, many gamers assumed that Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed would pick up where Agent 47 left off in terms of providing a satisfying simulation of being a cold-blooded killer. Yet while the Assassin's Creed games have been perfectly fine in their own right, the actual process of assassination within those games has been disappointingly routine and inflexible, almost always eventuating with the same hidden blade stab to the chest before legging it in broad daylight. There hasn't been any real creativity or deviousness to the killing - no sneaking poison into someone's drink, no pushing someone down some stairs to make it look like an accident, and certainly no disguising yourself as a stoney-faced Santa Claus at a Christmas party and firing a bullet into the underside of a glass bottom Jacuzzi full of drunk and horny revelers.
So it's a good thing that Agent 47 is finally coming back.
Hitman Absolution is set to offer even more ways to dispose of your prey than ever before in the series, whether it be using cover-based takedowns such as dangling from a ledge and dragging a target to his doom by his ankles, or turning environmental objects into bespoke weapons, Jason Bourne-style. One kill during the game's E3 demo saw Agent 47 pulling a power cord out of the wall and using it as a garrote; another he was stalking through a hippie's apartment and taking down an assailant with enough hits from the bong to make Cypress Hill dizzy.
"There's quite a lot of stuff in the environment that you can look for if you want to," explains gameplay director Christian Elverdam. "We call them improvised weapons and they're a very big part of what we wanted in the game. It has this kind of personalised expression flavour - who do you kill and with which weapon? It's stuff you can tell your friends about."
While the aforementioned demo was quite linear - focusing on a stretch of Absolution in which Agent 47 is pursued by the Chicago police - for the most part the finished game won't stray too far from the classic Hitman mission structure.
"We wanted to pick one of the levels to show how cinematic we can be, but in this case it also implies that the gameplay gets a little more linear," continues Elverdam. "But the essence of the full game is what fans know - it's about freedom of choice, and it's about having a lot of options when carrying out your kills. So that is still very much the core premise of the game, but when we need to, when the story wants to, we can reign you in and take a little bit of control so that we can tell the story, but then we open up again into huge sandbox sections."
Some of these open areas are likely to be quite densely populated with NPCs, as was implied by the end of the demo when Agent 47 slipped into the disguise of a policeman's uniform and moved unnoticed across a train platform crowded with what looked like hundreds of commuters.
"[The use of crowds] is one of the major features of our Glacier 2 engine - it's not something we're going into detail with right now, but it's certainly going to play a big part," teases technology manager, Martin Amor.
Whether this means crowds will be used purely as Assassin's Creed-style mobile hiding spots, or whether you'll be able to create chaos amongst NPCs as a means to draw attention away from yourself remains to be seen. Certainly one of the more memorable sequences from the first Kane & Lynch game was the shootout across a nightclub dance floor complete with panicked citizens running every which way, so IO has already proven it likes to mess with innocent bystanders in order to add drama to action set pieces. Given that along with the Glacier 2's obvious graphical enhancements comes dramatically improved AI, it's conceivable that highly intelligent in-game mobs could be utilised for more than mere presentational purposes.
This new AI system is built upon a foundation that the developer has dubbed its 'comprehensive intelligence spectrum'. In layman's terms, this means that the game's NPCs are perceptive of subtle changes in the environment around them and will react with varying degrees of urgency depending on the situation. They'll also communicate intelligently and work together, so that if one cop finds a body, and then a second cop sees you running, then they'll quickly inform each other of what they've seen and pursue you in a coordinated manner as a result. Had you stuck to a more casual walk as you fled the scene then you probably would have escaped attention, as Absolution's police don't act as a hive mind a la the GTA series.
"In the earlier Hitman games when you started to shoot, the AI would take out their weapons and start shooting back," explains Amor. "Now the AI is like - what exactly is going on? And the AI is always talking - ____ my buddy is hurt, ____ we're in trouble, I need ammo and I need to go into cover. It was one of the things that we found out: very complex AI is worthless if you don't make it clear to the player what it's doing and what it's thinking."
It's entirely possible that the AI's heavy reliance on communication could also be used against it. Perhaps you could take an enemy guard by surprise and force them at gunpoint to radio their fellow guards to say that all is well - before punching a silenced bullet through their forehead, of course. Or indeed you could use the old sniper trick of deliberately wounding an enemy so that they call for help, in order to lure other enemies out of cover and into the path of your cross-hairs. This is all supposition, of course, but it's in keeping with the underhanded nature that the Hitman games have always encouraged, and would be a great way to leverage the AI's apparent reliance on communication.
It's at this moment, as our thoughts start to run wild with all the new possibilities for murderous mischief that Agent 47's next outing is set to present, that we start to wonder whether our penchant for the perverse is entirely normal, or if indeed we should be worried. We mention our concerns to the IO team members.
"I think the desire to get away with murder is part of human nature," says game director Tore Blysted.
"It's weird, but it's also fun in a bizarre way," agrees Amor. "A Hitman game can be quite serious, right? So that's why we spice it up with a lot of dark humour to kind of take the edge off it. Because ultimately we are talking about a guy who kills for money, and we tried to get serious at the beginning of this project but it was never going to work - the dark humour is everything."
Expect Agent 47's unique brand of dark humour to leave you with your sides split and your body stashed in a laundry hamper when Hitman Absolution sneaks out in 2012.
