A hitman hits men for a living, but Agent 47’s enemies hit women. IO’s most recent showing of their next Hitman game opens with a scene of masked men shooting an unarmed nun as she lies crawling, bleeding and screaming on the floor of an invaded orphanage. It’s a nasty introduction to a game that’s got meaner and darker since its previous outing. Blood Money had moments of bleak humour and silliness; Absolution has detailed slowmotion shots of Agent 47 slamming a fire axe into the side of someone’s knee.

As well as bleaker, it also seems narrower. The two missions that developers IO have shown so far from the game feature wide corridors strung together. Where Absolution’s predecessor dropped Agent 47 into a wide open space that necessitated backtracking and planning, the new game’s library and orphanage come in bite sized chunks, each made up of spacious strips to be overcome before moving on to the next area. “We want a very cinematic experience,” says game director Tore Blystad. But Blood Money’s joy was in freedom – the ability to go anywhere, and to inject a horrible poisonous mixture into any neck you chose.

That change is enough to get Blood Money fans across the world nervously clutching their Silverballers. Blystad is at pains to tell us not to worry: “The Hitman games have always been about choice, and very much so with Absolution. Everything is designed with choice in mind. We’re not scripting things so you have to play through in a linear fashion.” The mission I saw reinforced this statement, with the man at Hitman’s helm showing two very different ways to approach the same section of game. Both begin with the dead nun.

The first victim is a nun because Agent 47 is in an orphanage and dressed as a priest, for reasons developers IO don’t properly explain. He’s halfway through a mission in said orphanage, infiltrating the building to extract a girl rather than to hit hitmen. But depending on how you play Hitman: Absolution, that second action can happily be a by-product of the first.



The first approach is psychotic, and involves the fire axe. The scene opens with the nun murder in the orphanage. Agent 47 is relaxing on the roof of an unpowered lift, the nun spluttering her bloody last as the perpetrators waltz off into the main building to find the girl. Hoisting himself up from the lift shaft to the corridor, 47 overhears whimpering from the next room. There’s a security guard being trussed up by stocking-headed thugs; he’s shot in the knees for not knowing where the girl is. See? Bleaker.

As six-year-old kids and people who kill people for a living know, the only way to stop violence is with more violence: 47 grabs a fire axe from the wall and wades into plain sight. He swings the axe towards the chest of his first victim, the game immediately popping into a slow-motion mode. Agent 47 has lost his innate clumsiness in Absolution – the developers repeatedly refer to him as “a weapon” – and his attacks are graceful and QTE-like. The first man falls when the axe is driven horrifically into the side of his leg; the second goes down after he stumbles and gets it embedded into the top of his skull.

Still 47 pushes on, bullets ripping through his purloined priest outfit as the last torturer standing opens fire on him. He ducks behind a piano for a second – showcasing the game’s new cover system – before popping out and twatting the guy in the chest with twelve inches of metal. The pop to cover feels natural for this approach: this is Hitman as darkly deranged thirdperson shooter. Captors offed, 47 speaks to the tied-up and bleeding security guard. Apparently he keeps a shotgun in the chapel downstairs. Guess where psycho-47 is going next?

The second approach is perfection. Starting in the same lift shaft with the same nun-ny death, the second Agent 47 creeps behind the murderers until he’s under a bookshelf. The cover system hides 47’s shiny pate behind convenient objects, and a standard crouch will put him at a similar height. Blystad mentions that players should feel comfortable moving around out of cover, knowing they’re out of sight even when they’re out of hard cover.



And when they are forced with their back to the wall, they’re not constrained by invisible barriers: Absolution’s bookshelves, sofas, and 3ft-high walls have ‘soft’ edges, letting 47 traverse their planes without stickiness, hopefully reducing the frustration of detection.

The sneaky version of 47 is either more callous or more sensible, depending on your viewpoint, leaving the orphanage’s torture victim to his eventual fate. The poor bastard screams his last as 47 opens the door and sneaks out of the room, closing it behind him as the room’s occupants are focused on their kill. He’s out and through in total silence.

This Agent 47 is able to make limited use of his environment to aid his stealthy cause. Where his maniacal alter-ego nabbed an axe from the wall, sneaky 47 picks up a vase from a table. Blystad argues that “previous Hitmans were very predictable for the player, and there was a very strongly directed way the levels were designed”. He wants Absolution to feel more organic, with 47 able to get out of trouble by using whatever he’s got to hand.

Now 47 is into the next area, semitrapped in cover. He’s not under immediate threat from the level’s guards, but their patrol routes have conspired to pin him in place. He can either wait for a fortuitous crossing of paths to create a convenient blind spot or, even better, heft the vase into a non-essential part of the room and scurry onwards while distracted guards investigate it. He does the latter, with the room’s occupants immediately directing their attentions vase-wards.



Detection is less binary than it was in previous Hitman games. Players are notified of guard suspicion by a circular splodge close to a shooter’s hit notifier. AI characters piqued by the presence of a crouching baldy in their midst cause spikes in the circle – let that spike grow too large and you’re busted. It feels more organic than Blood Money’s unpredictable suspicion bar, more analogue. And psycho-47 doesn’t care for it.

He’s too busy popping shotgun cartridges into the stomachs of his foes. After making his way down to the bloodsmeared chapel, psycho-47 finds himself behind a glass door, eavesdropping on the invading thugs’ leader’s briefing. They’re here to find the same girl as he is. IO wouldn’t explain exactly why she is important, but it’s likely to be something to do with Diana Burnwood.

Burnwood was Agent 47’s handler for his earlier career, and one of Absolution’s first targets – 47 doesn’t let something petty like years of friendship get in the way of his kills. The thugs seem to have another leader outside the orphanage, and the man berating his colleagues behind the glass door doesn’t seem to think he’ll be happy with their efforts.

Those efforts are diminished further by 47, who springs from behind the door with his shotgun spraying. I didn’t get to try out Absolution’s shooting, but it looks understandably similar in feel to IO’s Kane and Lynch series, the camera snapping to 47’s shoulder as his shots tear through soft thugflesh. The boom of the shotgun draws enemies from around the contained area, and corpses pile up in doorways as they come to investigate the noise.

Back on the more sensible side of the tactical divide, a sneakier 47 has to be more careful with his bodies. He catches one behind a thick bookcase, snuffling him to sleep with an insistent “shhh!” before nabbing his clothes, taking him gently by the wrist, and pulling him into a freezer. This is Absolution at its most Blood Moneyesque. Like that game, 47 is free to put on the clothes of most people he subdues, giving him some level of immunity when wandering around in the open.



Previously, donning an outfit would give you near-invisibility, with the game conveniently ignoring the fact that your peers would notice when Santa’ changes from a short fat man into a 6ft killing machine with a shiny head. Wander Absolution’s hallways in someone else’s clothes and people will squint at you, trying to work out if you’re actually meant to be there.

To counterbalance this, the game is seeded with interactions that let you hide in plain sight. 47 saunters into one of the orphanage’s larger rooms dressed in his new clothes. It’s stuffed with enemies: most are busy with their own concerns, but one’s wandering around. His eyes alight on 47’s hairless head, a spike appearing on the suspicion notifier. In response, 47 ducks his head down, suddenly extraordinarily interested in a leaflet stand. The guard walks past, happy to believe the new guy loves leaflets.

But sneakier assassins won’t always have leaflets to hand every time they need to avoid suspicion. Instead, they can dip in to 47’s new ‘Instinct’ bar – this resource is earned by doing good things like avoiding patrols, performing silent takedowns, or getting headshots. Using Instinct in the face of guard suspicion lets 47 cover his face for a second, affecting a stifled yawn or a head rub. It’s somewhat artificial, but it does offer a handful of escape opportunities to otherwise perfect players who’ve put a foot wrong. Harder difficulties shrink the amount of Instinct you gain, making such moves more difficult – especially when it can be used for other vital purposes.



For instance, 47 can use his spare Instinct to fuel a few seconds of Magic Vision, which lets him anticipate patrol routes, picked out on the floor in a line of flames. It’s a mechanic that turns Agent 47 from the superhuman to the supernatural, but it fits in well with his suite of abilities. Blood Money forced dedicated players to watch and wait to learn patrol routes, wasting time to hardwire movements into their brain. Absolution still has the space to let players on harder difficulty settings use this manual method, but those with less time to burn can spend some of their Instinct to preternaturally anticipate routes and come up with a plan.

IO demonstrated another Instinct usage during 47’s time in the orphanage – one that’s better suited to a less cautious playthrough. With his signature Silverballer pistol in hand, 47 pops into an occupied room and stops time for a moment. During this pause, he starts to queue up headshots, pumping a few spare bullets into exposed gas canisters in convenient locations around the room. As the shots rattle off into faces and necks the camera follows, giving a gorily cinematic viewpoint of each messy kill. Once the dust settles and the blood has finished spraying the walls, the room is clear and 47’s Instinct metre has been drained.

From what IO have shown so far, Absolution’s level design is sniper riflefocused rather than machine gunexpansive. That will scare fans of the previous game, but Blystad argues that as the game gets closer to launch, IO will start to show the open environments and inventive murder tools that the series is known for. Blystad assures us that there’s no need to worry, as he and his company know their audience: “Our hardcore fans, the first thing they do is turn around on the spot and go in the opposite direction to see if it’s possible. We’re trying our best to accommodate every conceivable way of playing the game.”

Even with such a tight play area, the range of choice open to the player’s own Agent 47 – be he careful, psychotic or any of the shades of grey in between – make Absolution look like a comfortingly professional job.

Agent 47's back! ...Again! Absolution's not even out yet, but Square Enix is already diving head-long into sequel territory. So said the publisher in a tweet announcing its brand new Montreal studio, which will apparently open up a whopping 150 jobs. Take that, the economy.

IO Interactive, meanwhile, will continue to meticulously craft sets of murder dominoes for Agent 47 to knock down, so this is beginning to sound a bit like the year-on-year model Call of Duty employs with Infinity Ward and Treyarch.

 
We've seen the sixteen minutes of Hitman Absolution footage above before, but not with an informative developer commentary layered over it. Their main focus is on the instinct system that powers Agent 47's guard-prediction and stealth abilities, and on all the different ways that they could proceed through the level differently. They reveal that it's possible to assassinate the sergeant directing your manhunt if you're skilled enough, and you can start a gunfight with the police force whenever you choose. As the fight continues, SWAT officers will start appearing to try and take you out.

The developers say that this is an early level, too, and it's worth remembering that Hitman: Blood Money opening mission was a completely linear turorial. After that, it opened up enormously. At the end of this video we also get a glimpse of the upgraded crowd tech that wowed us in the memorable Mardi Gras level in Blood Money. Combined with an impressive new engine, Absolution will hopefully be a worthy successor to the superb fourth game. Are you looking forward to Absolution?

Christian Elverdam is Hitman: Absolution's gameplay director, and that's his face hovering just above these words. Our combined E3 force caught up with Christian in LA, and pinned him to the wall with the full force of our questioning. In response, he talked about the varied approaches players can take in Absolution. Blood Money fans (of whom our own Tom Francis leads the charge) will be pleased to hear that the videos and demos they've shown so far aren't pointing toward a linear, prescribed route through the game. Instead, Christian points out that 47 will have a range of options at his disposal to complete his grisly duty.

Tim and Graham have seen the fifth Hitman game in action now, and it comes with some surprises. A cover system? Actual stealth? Donnie Darko predicto-vision? A rooftop chase under helicopter fire? What is this, a game that's slightly different in some way?

I don't know how any of those things will work out yet, or how much of the game they really represent. But the last game, Hitman: Blood Money, was so nearly perfect that you can see what they need to do next. This is what they need to do next.


1. Don't let the story interrupt the jobs
Every one of the best missions in every one of the four Hitman games has been a straightforward hit. Every one of the worst missions in every one of the four Hitman games has been a story-driven scenario with a different objective. Whatever story you want to tell with Hitman Absolution, IO, please tell it with the contracts and the briefings between them.

We don't want to rescue a priest, we don't want to steal a tribe's idol, we don't want to walk across most of Japan in the middle of winter, we don't want to save Agent Smith again. Even if you write a great story, any time it asks us to do something other than get to a guy and kill him, it's going to grate. That's not what we're playing for.


2. Make disguise more of a game
Disguises are what make Hitman interesting: it's a game about deception rather than conventional stealth. And every major leap forward for the series has happened when the deception logic got better. With Blood Money, it's finally reliable most of the time. But that also means Blood Money seemed to reach the limit of what you could do with it.

Each disguise type gets you access to certain areas, and each mission has one type of disguise that'll let you go anywhere without the guards hassling you. Once you figure that out, your strategy becomes a little reductive: get that disguise, and you're basically done.

I think the next stage is to have no perfect disguise. To make the player seriously think about: "Would this guy know I'm not a cop? Would that guy know I don't work here? Who's the one guy in this room I need to steer clear of?"

That's actually pretty simple to translate into game logic: your disguise is convincing to everyone except guards of the same type. Cops know you're not a cop. Bodyguards know you're not on this detail. Garbage men know you're not their buddy Frank, who's being slowly compacted in the back of their truck. Whoever you're dressed as, that's who you've got to keep your distance from.

I mentioned most of this to Graham, and he explained a bit about what they are doing for Absolution:
Yeah, they've worked on those a lot, and they were one of the things they specifically flagged as being improved, mostly as an extension of the better AI.
In the demo shown, 47 disguised himself as a cop. That prompted different groups of people to treat him differently. Like, one cop thinks he knows you, and chats away. Or you head into an apartment owned by some potheads, and if they see you, they get panicked, frightened, threaten you, might attack you. If you just go in dressed in a suit though, then they'll be more friendly, invite you to party, etc.
There is a ton of dialogue in the game, and it changes based on what you're wearing.

3. Playgrounds, not warzones
Blood Money got this, for the first time in the series. I'm a little worried that Absolution won't. The scene Tim and Graham saw has the cops hot on your tail, shooting at you from a chopper. That's a warzone - albeit an escapable one. Hitman is at its best when you're free to roam the levels, because it's only by scoping out an area that we can come up with an interesting plan to pull off a hit.

Graham did ask the developers about this. Here he is, telling me that:
I specifically asked: would there be missions where no one knows you're a hitman, and you can just walk around and plot and set stuff up? And they said yeah, there would be. I don't know if that's the majority of the game or not - the game is certainly more cinematic, and the cover system and movement makes it look more action-oriented. But there was enough potential choice in just the one mission they showed that I'm pretty confident there'll still be plenty free-form stuff even if you are being hunted a certain portion of the time.

4. Let us upgrade what we like
Each Hitman game brings us closer to a decent character progression system, but they haven't quite pulled it off. Blood Money had copious upgrades for every time of weapon and equipment, which is the right direction, but then it made them all ludicrously cheap to buy, but locked off until certain points throughout the campaign. In other words, you could easily afford everything available to you after each mission, so there were no tough decisions to make.

How about: don't do that. I know, they're worried we'll just upgrade the pistol to be silenced and awesome as soon as we can, and they're right: most of us will. That's because we like the pistol, and want to use it. It's the perfect assassin's weapon, which is probably why IO keep showing it in every concept piece and game box in the series. By all means make the upgrades for it pricier, and more in depth, but don't just artificially lock them off in the hope we'll give up and try other weapons.

I'd also love it if we could upgrade weapons we find and take from the scenes of our crimes. The silenced .22 in Hitman Blood Money is one of the most satisfying weapons in gaming history, so it'd be great to hang on to it and make it a little more accurate. I'm sure everyone has their favourites.


5. Reward subtlety
That's the motif of the series, of course, but it feels like they're only just getting started with it. Hitman 2: Silent Assassin was about being a silent assassin. Blood Money introduced accidents: ways to pull off a hit without anyone even suspecting foul play. But there was no particular incentive to do so.

I'd like to see them keep running with that idea. Give us the satisfaction of seeing an obituary recounting a tragic death with no-one to blame, if we're smart enough to make it look that way. Better yet, give us ways to frame other people. The opera mission let us put a real gun in an actor's hand without him knowing, but again - no acknowledgement for it. Brief us on the victim's known associates, who'd have a grudge and who'd make a likely fall guy.


6. React to our performance better
To be fair, the Hitman games are already far better at this than most. We get graded on both violence and noise, and even given a special title for our performance. But there's still plenty of room to expand on this.

The current system isn't great at understanding the difference between violence and sloppiness. Bodies discovered during the mission destroy your rating and increase your notoriety, making your face better known to guards in future missions. Yet the newspaper writeups after each mission detail every casualty, so clearly all bodies get found one way or another. If no-one sees you, why does it matter when bodies are spotted? Why would that give the cops a better photo-fit of your face?

I'd like to see Absolution track heat and visibility separately. How badly the cops want to catch me has no influence on how clear a picture they have of my face.

If I open fire on a crowd and let witnesses get away, then of course I should be more easily recognised in future missions. But if I silently stalk and execute every guard on the level, and no living soul sees my face, I should be as inconspicuous as ever.

The difference between that and a minimum-violence approach should just be how much manpower the police think they need to devote to guarding VIPs in future. This guy took out 20 armed guards? Let's make sure we have 40 on this VIP.


7. Don't make the tutorial the demo
The frustating thing about being a Hitman fan is that when you tell someone Blood Money is one of the greatest games ever made, they can say this: "Oh yeah, I played the demo of that. It sucked."

It's frustrating not because they're wrong, but because they're right. It really did. The demo, which was just the tutorial level, advertised the game as being precisely what it was not: a linear, scripted obstacle course where the challenge is to figure out what you're 'supposed to' do.

Obviously IO should try to make a better tutorial, but even if they pull it off, it's not going to be a good way to sell the game. I want everyone to know why Hitman is inventive, rich, ambitious, brave and incredible. Put an actual mission in the demo, please.


8. Maybe don't delete our savegames?
Yeah. That was an odd one. Blood Money limited the number of saves you could make per level, which was annoying but not actually a felony per se. What was strange, or 'pointlessly dickish' to be more specific, was that it would delete these savegames if you quit mid-mission.

I don't mean that in an abstract conceptual sense, that by not storing them it was effectively deleting them. I checked: it creates the files, you can see them on your hard drive if you alt+tab out. Then it deletes them.

It's the kind of treatment you might expect from a virus rather than something you paid for. And it had no effect on the game's difficulty, it just arbitrarily punished people who didn't always have time to play a long, thoughtful and creative mission in one sitting.

Maybe don't do that.

Both Tim and Graham came away impressed by Absolution, and it does sound like they're doing something cool on the disguise front. I just hope they're not going too crazy with the scripted stuff, and that they don't change the basic formula too much. It was just hitting its stride with Blood Money, I couldn't bear to see it turn into the sort of guileless beat-em-up the first trailer shows.