That major decision had ripple effects throughout the development of Hitman 3, including the linear design of the game’s final mission, which has proved controversial. After lengthy deliberations, IO’s designers held firm: They cared too much about their ending for Agent 47’s story to allow that to happen.
If you’ve trained players over the course of two games that they don’t need to pay attention to the story, it’s difficult to convince them that they shouldn’t also skip over it this time around. “And we realized when we were developing this story - the conclusion of the trilogy, closure - that we cared a lot about this story, and we wanted players to care.” “For the previous two games, we made it really easy for some players to not care about what was happening in the overarching story,” said Forest Swartout Large, executive producer of Hitman 3, in a video interview with Polygon last month. In concluding the trilogy, though, Hitman developer IO Interactive not only wanted to lean more into the story - it wanted to delve into the character of Agent 47, the bald man with a barcode who had mostly been a cipher just following commands.
These sandbox playgrounds afforded players all the freedom in the world to figure out assassination strategies, and to ignore the threadbare story that linked the levels together. The real stars of the show were the locations: massive levels that felt like living, breathing environments. For the first two entries in the trilogy, 2016’s Hitman and 2018’s Hitman 2, series protagonist Agent 47 didn’t have top billing. Early in the production of Hitman 3, the developers of the game found themselves in a bind - a conundrum of their own making.
0 kommentar(er)
