Hitman: Absolution

[BadKarma]

http://kotaku.com/5800429/agent-47-s...man-absolution

game on
Agent 47 Steps Out of the Shadows in Hitman: Absolution

Mike Fahey — Betrayed by the only people he trusts and hunted by the police, the beautifully bald and barcoded Agent 47 navigates a vast conspiracy in Hitman: Absolution, the latest adventure for IO Interactive's killer-for-hire.

IO Interactive makes the game official today, after a trademark filing outed the name of Hitman: Absolution late last month. According to the announcement, Absolution sees Agent 47 take on his most dangerous contract to date. He'll travel a corrupt and twisted world in order to get to the bottom of a dark conspiracy. Sounds like par for the course, really.

"For the first time we are taking Agent 47 on a personal journey which allows us to explore other parts of the Hitman fantasy," said Tore Blystad, game director, IO Interactive. "This is both a familiar and yet significantly different experience from other Hitman games; something our silent assassins will relish, as will all those new to the Hitman world."

Built using IO Interactive's Glacier 2 proprietary game engine, players can expect a cinematic story, distinctive art direction, and an original game design that combines Hitman's classic game mechanics with entirely new ones.

Hitman: Absolution will make its grand debut at E3 2011 next month for the Xbox 360, PC, and PlayStation 3. Until then, keep your eyes peeled on the game's official website for fresh intel.

Buckets everywhere.

[Mizango]

About damn time.

[BadKarma]

http://kotaku.com/5800570/youll-neve...e-really-means


lolololol

[Kyo]

I love Hitman, hope its awesome.

[Saga]

Blood Money was fucking clutch, I can't wait for this.

[Fallyn]

woooot!

[Qalbert]

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/new...me-uses-187550

The cast of the Square Enix game includes "Cowboys & Aliens" actor Keith Carradine and "White Collar's" Marsha Thomason.
Square Enix is taking a Hollywood approach to its fifth installment of IO Interactive's bestselling Hitman action game franchise, Hitman: Absolution, which is due out next year. The Danish game developer worked with a cast of a dozen Hollywood actors who brought their virtual characters to life using both performance capture and voice acting to add a more emotional level of interaction to the game.
Among the cast of actors, Keith Carradine (Cowboys & Aliens) will play the new villain in the game, Blake Dexter. Marsha Thomason (White Collar) will step into the role of Diana Burnwood, who serves as protagonist Agent 47's handler and has a close relationship with the assassin.

"Diana is 47's only true human contact," Thomason said. "They've known each other an extremely long time, and in the Hitman world, she is what Q is to James Bond. So she sets the assignments, tells him where to go and who to kill."

The performance capture was done at Giant Studios, which James Cameron used for Avatar. A first for the game franchise, the developer worked with Hollywood talent to capture complex scenes with up to seven actors on the set at once. Blystad explained that the performance capture scenes focused on the drama that develops as the story unfolds. The new game places more emphasis on the emotional human stories that evolve, which is why they opted to hire Hollywood actors to bring these virtual characters to life.

"We had actors like Marsha and Keith come in and do full-body acting with facial and voice being captured simultaneously in scenes," said Tore Blystad, game director at IO Interactive. "Some of these scenes were very complex with all kinds of props and interactions amongst the actors."

Blystad said the performance capture was more similar to theater work than movies, because there were long takes and once everything was captured, it was on to the next scene.

"The character I play in Hitman: Absolution is as multidimensional as any well-imagined character should be," said Carradine. "The vividness of the world entered by the gamer hinges on detail. To fully engage the attention of the player requires nothing less than the most completely realized universe of geography and personality."

The new game follows Agent 47, a cold-blooded assassin, who takes on his most dangerous contract to date. Betrayed by those he once trusted -- and now hunted by the police -- he suddenly finds himself at the center of a dark conspiracy and must embark on a personal journey through a corrupt and twisted world.

"We've designed a more stylized, more serious, and darker game this time around in both the story line and the visuals," Blystad said. "The hope is that the movie will be going in a similar direction, and then when they both come out they will speak the same language. They won't follow the old Hitman games, but rather go with this newer direction."

With Hitman: Absolution, gamers are in for a cinematic take on the best-selling video game franchise, which has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide since launching in 2000. The fourth game in the franchise, Hitman: Blood Money, has sold more than 2.1 million copies since it shipped in 2007.

"There are more central characters in this game than we've ever dealt with before and they all have names and an important role in the story, so working with Hollywood talent was crucial to us," Blystad added. "It's important within the framework of the game for players to be able to connect with these characters."

Blystad said it was also important that this latest game deliver on the shooting action that the franchise has offered over the years. The drama that pushes the story forward serves as a cinematic layer on top of the core gameplay, which sends Agent 47 on different missions throughout the U.S. A portion of the game takes place in Chicago.

"We've seen the grit and texture and the character-driven context that IO Interactive is going for with Hitman: Absolution and it's our goal to bring Agent 47 back with a vengeance next year in a movie," said Adrian Askarieh, who is producing a second Hitman film with Chuck Gordon and Fox International. Daniel Casey (Jimmy Six) has written the latest draft of the script.
The first Hitman movie earned $100 million at the box office with Timothy Olyphant ("Justified") playing Agent 47. The new installment will have an original story and characters, but will retain the look and feel of the new game.

If all the pieces fall into place, gamers will have both a big screen Hitman adventure and a new video game in 2012.

[Qalbert]

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.joystiq.c...erimg15125.jpg

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.joystiq.c...nabso21024.jpg

[Raz]

Was leaked a day early it seems. Higher quality one should be out today.

[Insanecyclone]

Sounds like it's going to turn out terrible

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=433126

Translations of a danish preview

Here we see one of the first innovations in the game that probably will immediately get a mixed reception from the series' fans. For while Hitman sits in hiding behind a bookcase, the ambient colors suddenly dim, and the ushers will light up in a golden glow, so you can see their entire figure through walls and other obstacles. A bright line in the floor shows the route the nearest cop follows - with a direct path to Hitman.

The new ability called Instinct, and is part of the IO's objective to make up with some of the more outdated gameplay mechanics in the series. "The old hitman games are obese and they have their place, but they are quite severe and is heavily based on trial-and-error," says Blystad. "We wanted to create an experience that captures the soul of the old games, but makes them available to the modern player."

"With the Instinct, you can see from your hiding that he will go left and you can go right to avoid him, instead of just blindly choosing one of two directions. We have removed much of this trial -and-error, and instead give the player a real choice, because you now know what you decide. "

Elverdam continues: "Sometimes in previous games got a feeling that they had an enormous amount of options, but you do not necessarily understand the consequences to those choices.

It all depends on how demanding you are asking for himself. Though Hitman: Absolution will be easier to go to than the previous Hitman games, you can still challenge themselves by going after a completely "clean" and make the playthrough. All course designers should be able to prove that their orbits can be implemented without needing to kill other than the target. And you will be discovered, it is not the world. Where the earlier games were very binary - either you were discovered or were you not - this time much more gradually. Guards will investigate further before the alarm. And you have been rumbled, you can clear the witnesses of the road before they escape, and so is your disguise still good enough.

[Qalbert]

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/10/07/hi...or-masochists/

Well, okay, you don't technically need to be a masochist, but a hardcore mode in Hitman Absolution, included specifically for veterans of the series, just may be a real blood-boiler. Producer Hakan Abrak told Eurogamer that the difficulty setting rewards methodical stealth play with Achievements and/or Trophies.

"We will get into more details at a later point, but obviously it's linked to the playing style," he said. "It's more pacify your enemies, be undetected, maybe solve the challenges in a smarter way. That will probably give you a stealth assassin achievement." It might also give you an ulcer, depending on how many times you're forced to restart each mission.

Abrak also hopes to silence critics who say Absolution ditches its stealth roots for the more action-packed gameplay we saw in the gameplay demo -- don't expect that, Abrak says. "Rest assured, the hardcore fans that like to have replayablity value in the game or want to have this stealth assassin -- you know, I'm the ultimate stealth assassin -- that playing style, those achievements, are very much in the game."

[djzombie]

"We wanted to create an experience that captures the soul of the old games, but makes them available to the modern player."

aka we want to make the game accessible to retarded chimps, everyone must win.

hope this doesn't completely destroy the feel of the game, being able to see through walls and what not.

[Kwijiboe]

Hitman: Blood Money was a 10 for me because timing was incredibly important. Also, I like the idea that one mistake will ruin the mission.

If it turns out to be like Splinter Cell: Conviction where you're like, "FUCK IT, AUTO HEADSHOTS!" I'm gonna be mayad.

[Saga]

aka we want to make the game accessible to retarded chimps, everyone must win.

hope this doesn't completely destroy the feel of the game, being able to see through walls and what not.

I understand it's frustrating, but try to see the reality of the situation: the companies putting out these games are businesses. Businesses need to make money. The people on this board aren't the average gamer -- we appreciate challenges, even when we find them frustrating. The average consumer will find it frustrating and opt not to buy the game because being frustrated isn't their idea of fun. Especially in this economy, making something accessible to a much broader audience and a larger number of consumers is an easy and effective way to increase profits.

Plus, it's not like this seeing through walls bullshit permeates the entire game -- from what I understood from the blurb posted here earlier, the higher difficulty setting won't have that mode on it.

And for the record, I don't really condone what they're doing, it's just the reality of the industry.

[Kwijiboe]

The people on this board aren't the average gamer -- we appreciate challenges, even when we find them frustrating. The average consumer will find it frustrating and opt not to buy the game because being frustrated isn't their idea of fun.

To the average consumer, Demons would like to say hello and..

Spoiler: show

FUCK YOU!

[Insanecyclone]

Everything has to be easy to do, one button, for this generation. Button awesome.

[Kwijiboe]

22 seconds.

[Qalbert]

to be fair, apparently Saints Row the Third literally has an awesome button, that when used makes your actions more awesome. I'm ok with that.

[Cydewinder]

[djzombie]

Plus, it's not like this seeing through walls bullshit permeates the entire game -- from what I understood from the blurb posted here earlier, the higher difficulty setting won't have that mode on it.

I'm ok with that I guess, as long as I have the option of turning it off.