Be Excellent To Each Other

Here's why we should be excited about NEW HITMAN!



You hear that? "Complete player freedom." It's back, baby. A proper Hitman. Yay!

Hang on...



... er, what? Jesus, we're being drip fed campaign material now to stop us trading in our games now? Oh, get fucked.

Here's the fucking trailer anyway.

"Hitman: Again"

..........................................

Alternatively, they are releasing things when they are playable, want to spend time fine-tuning things prior to full release, but still meet company suit demands for an FY16 release.

Get you, business suit man!

shouldn't you be re-aligning some business needs or something?

SRLY?

The drip-fed of campaign material is being billed as a "feature" of this "product" in the "franchise."

I'm skeptical that this is just the developers being somehow generous to players by allowing an unfinished game to be released early. Plus, this is a massive irritant to me as a gamer since "consumers" won't know whether the full game is even worth purchasing at "retail price" since a chunk of the content won't be complete when it is boxed on the shelf.

No, this is not a good thing for gamers. It is a very bad thing.

Yep, it's total fucking ballsacks. I've got no problem with episodic content but if you're doing that then you charge me individually for each episode and each one better be a damn sight cheaper than the full game. Otherwise you're asking me to pay you money for something that doesn't, and might never, exist. So at best I'm buying it without being able to see any reviews to know it's not utter shite and at worst you might not deliver it at all. This is basically an enforced season pass and it can get to fucking fuck.

It's worse than that - at least a season pass gives you extra content on top of a full price game. This is basically saying that you'll buy the game and it won't even have a basic standard campaign in it. What's the average playthrough time of something like this, 10 hours maybe? Imagine buying it and only having 2 hours worth and having to wait a couple of months for the next chunk. That's ridiculous.

Yeah, I'm totally uninterested in that whole set up even if they do end up finally delivering a good and decent length game. I want to play a game from start to finish in one go then move onto something else, not keep coming back to mop up new bits. Though I realise that might be specific to me and the way I play stuff.

Lol, and it keeps getting more and more stupid:



So you need to play stuff on their timeline or you might not even get to experience some of the stuff you've paid for.

You are cordially invited to go fucking nuts over this.

Hitman "launch content"



http://www.videogamer.com/ps4/hitman/ne ... _date.html

Well, on the upside, they're obviously taking pains to be very clear about what exactly you get and when you get it and how much it costs. Which shouldn't really be something worthy of remarking upon but in this age of millions of different SKUs with purposely muddled DLC tiers and all that jazz it's depressingly refreshing. Also, there's only a few quid difference between the two purchase options so they're not massively gouging anyone who doesn't jump in with both feet.

Of course it's just really fucking stupid when they could instead just take their time to finish all the levels and then charge a single price for the full game. Though I realise that entire idea marks me out as some kind of quaint luddite these days. Fuck sake.

Reminds me of this dick I was talking to in a line at EGX who loved everything about Assassins Creed, how great it was and how collecting all the collectibles was "fun" and "rewarding" and had preordered every AssCreed blah blah. She was cute but, boy, that put me right off.

Oh, how's that related? Gamers are dicks.

How's that related? Some idiots will accept, buy and vocally endorse these new ways of wholesale rinsing the consumer.

I'm disappointed there aren't any sexy nuns in this one that the feminists can lose their shit over. That was such fun last time.

I don't buy any games unless I know 100% what the content is. This is why I don't buy season passes for DLC.

I'll wait until it's fully complete and see what most people think of it.

In unrelated Hitman news there's a game called Alekhine's Gun coming to PS4 soon which seems to be old Hitman set in the Cold War. I've watched a video or two and it looks significantly less refined visually than New Hitman but looks much closer to Old Hitman.

Alekhine's Gun Is coming out in March. The full game. All of it. Not 20% of the game. The whole game. All the content in it. The entire game. Released in one package.

If it's any good or even if it isn't I hope people buy that instead of New Hitman. But they won't, because gamers are idiots (present company excluded) and they'll just buy New Hitman because, well I don't know, maybe they say things like "this franchise iz tha bomb" or "I just freaking love subscription gaming." Idiots. Don't buy it.

Projection!

The reviews for the first part of this are coming in and they're pretty good.

They finally settled on three different purchase methods if you want to end up with the full game in the end. I'm quoting here from this EG article:



The actual content is divided up as follows:



So you basically get up to £15 off the full price if you're a fucking idiot you trust them enough to buy the full game up front. I like that they're offering a lot of flexibility here and it's certainly not as offensive as their original plans. Ultimately though I'd rather they just delivered the full bloody game in one go so people knew what they were getting and could just buy it or not by choice. Or, at the very least, if it cost the same to get the full game no matter how you bought the individual bits. I've never actually played a Hitman game though and I'm not sure this massively interests me so it might not impact me at all if I don't ever pick it up.

My interest is piqued. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2 ... _b-gdntech

I've got season 1 and ... it's pretty alright so far. I'll tell you this much, it looks the business.

I downloaded the free version of this a month ago or so but have only just got around to playing it. I've just spent two hours playing the training mission getting each different way of eliminating the target. A lot of fun!

I’ve got back into this.

I’ve decided that this is a proper Hitman game, like Hitman 2 and Hitman: Blood Money.

I’ve also decided that it’s bloody good.

Every level is a proper sandbox and there’s a myriad of ways to smoke each target. The systems of play all work - you know exactly when you’re in the wrong place, when you’re safe, which guys to avoid, when you’re being hunted, there’s a map again, bat-vision is back etc. It works brilliantly. There’s hand holding but only when you want it.

They took all of the shit out that they put in Hitman: Absolution and that’s the highest praise I can possibly give a Hitman game.

I’ve also decided that if you’re the type of person who hasn’t got a lot of time to play games then you won’t get the most out of this densely packed game. If you’ve got no intention of exploring creative kills and just want to kill the targets and move onto the next level then you won’t get much out of this.

I've ended up watching loads of videos about this because Eurogamer's Outside Xbox guys love it (and are incredibly entertaining when playing it) so I'll never actually pick it up myself because I feel like I've now seen a lot of what it's got to offer, but it does look brilliant for sure. If you like creative 'emergent' gameplay with bags of black humour then I totally agree with Sat and recommend it highly (based entirely on watching it as I've said).

ETA: I genuinely hope it's done well enough financially to get a sequel and that they just release that like a proper game because the release model was a load of nonsense but it's ended up being a very good and worthwhile game by all accounts.

I played the free spring pack which was basically the Italy level and really enjoyed it. Probably more so because I only had the one level so played it over and over.

I didn't get past the first village tutorial.