Hi – I’m Hamish Black, and welcome to Writing on Games.
A couple of things before we begin today – as you can probably tell by the title of the
video, today I’m going to be talking about the newly released Hitman on PC.
Firstly, if the footage is choppy here, that’s because my technical experience with the game
matches that description - my processor isn’t top-of-the-line, but combined with my R9290
I’ve had no problems running many recent games at maximum settings and maintaining
at least a solid 60fps.
With Hitman, however, the game has fluctuated wildly even on the absolute lowest settings,
with some areas giving me as high as 110fps, and others dropping to sub-20 levels.
This isn’t to make mention of the absolutely wild glitches (both superficial and outright
game-breaking) that I’ve faced on every mission – normally I would chalk this up
to my own hardware, but a cursory Google search reveals many people facing similar problems
on the PC version, and I can only hope these issues are patched soon.
Secondly, and this is for the sake of disclosure, review code for this game was provided to
me by Square Enix PR – a gesture I greatly appreciate, but one I feel I should make clear
given my feelings on this game’s rocky road to release.
The question I have to ask myself is “if I wasn’t given a review copy of this game,
would I have bought it?”
The answer, unfortunately, is probably no.
This is to say nothing of the game’s quality, but put simply the forced implementation of
an episodic release schedule would have made it feel too much like a pre-order, and as
everyone probably knows by this point, those are unwise (especially with episodic content
where you have no idea what the deal is in terms of the quality of the other episodes).
So yeah, just felt I should put out there that I get why people are upset about this
game’s release and I urge you to take everything I say with this in mind – this opinion comes
from someone who didn’t have to pay for the game.
With those caveats out of the way then, I can finally start talking about the fact that,
despite the myriad issues surrounding it, I can’t stop playing this game.
Hitman is perhaps the most absurd game I’ve played since Goat Simulator, and I say that
with the utmost sincerity and appreciation.
The Hitman series in general is one that I’ve always maintained a distant appreciation for,
largely as a result of this absurdity – despite borrowing and foregrounding the aesthetics
of many different types of games such as stealth, action or shooters, the games themselves are
incredibly difficult to pigeonhole in such terms.
With some exceptions, the stealth system is far from robust in the way that, for example,
The Phantom Pain’s stealth system is, and the game’s action and shooting are hampered
by somewhat intangible weapons, floaty aiming, and the fact that Agent 47 cannot take many
bullets before going down.
Now, if this game were going up against the likes of Metal Gear Solid or Call of Duty,
then these things would undoubtedly be considered flaws and their mere presence has turned many
people off the games who were probably expecting more conventional stealth-action mechanics.
For me, however, the game comes closer to some bastardised form of chess than it does
any conventional video game, where you wait for the enemy AI to align itself in just such
a way as to expose a hole that the player proceeds to pierce.
In fact, this is why Hitman: GO on phones (and now on PC) worked so well - Hitman has
always basically been about pieces on a board, or even a circuit board in which the player
must find a way to place the metaphorical (or sometimes literal) spanner in the works
in order to disrupt the scripting of the AI so that the targets reveal themselves.
In this sense, we can begin to talk about Hitman in terms of what it actually is – not
a shooter, not a stealth action game, but a toybox.
A large, open-ended toybox which encourages improvisation to an extent that few of its
contemporaries in more easily defined genres can match.
Improvisation in particular is a point I’d like to focus on – in other artistic media,
it is a concept often associated with the avant-garde, or at the very least a heightened
sense of self-expression, free from the restrictions of formal guidelines and structures.
I can only really comment on music seeing as it’s the art form I would consider myself
to be most competent in (and the one in which I am most familiar and enthusiastic about
the avant-garde), but when taken to its logical conclusion (that being free and total improvisation),
the end result is often something akin to noise, or chaos, with very little resembling
traditional forms of music.
Examples of this can be found in the free jazz of Ornette Coleman, the harsh noise of
Merzbow and Masonna, or something nearing a combination of the two found in Peter Brotzmann’s
music.
This unorganised, on-the-fly style of creating art often opens up the creators to a myriad
of potential mistakes, and to the uneducated ear can often come across sounding like a
mess, or like things are going wrong.
If you watch my video on music games, however, you’ll know that mistakes in art are often
the things that draw me to art the most.
Exposing the flaws in something can open up a more intimate connection with the systems
you as the audience are interfacing with – their uncanny nature (that is, their resembling
more traditionally codified structures of creation yet not quite adhering to them) allows
the audience to become more invested in what they are experiencing, if they are willing
to put in the work to do so.
The reason I am going into so much detail regarding this is because I believe that Hitman
in particular represents a lot of these qualities in ways that many aesthetically similar games
do not allow.
Hitman is genuinely one of the closest examples of a game allowing pure mechanical self-expression
I’ve experienced.
Many have compared the game to Ground Zeroes (mainly in derogatory terms due to the game’s
comparatively short length due to lack of content) – however, whilst Ground Zeroes
felt like a very open game at the time, at its core it provided you with two very set
objectives and merely opened up the routes you can take to those objectives.
Hitman’s alternate routes, on the other hand, fundamentally change how you play the
game.
In the one non-training mission the game provides at this point (a poxy amount of content when
examined from a distance), you can overcome your set objectives in a number of ways – do
you want to disguise yourself as a waiter and serve the target a poisoned cocktail?
How about getting the target out into the open by arranging a meeting with a man carrying
incriminating documents?
Or how about dressing up as one of the supermodels at the fashion show and strutting your way
onto the catwalk?
Or you could always take the identity of a sheikh and enter a secret auction making bids
on secrets regarding worldwide security.
Of course, all of these situations are programmed very specifically and the AI follows paths
that allow for this scripting to play out, but the way in which self-expression enters
the picture is the way in which these things can and often do go wrong.
In order to explain this, I’ll go into a specific example.
One of my favourite ways to go about killing one of the targets in this mission is to disguise
myself as one of the supermodels in the show, who just happens to be close friends with
the target.
The way this is supposed to play out is that you witness the model walking to a private
place to make a phone call to the target.
You then subdue him, take his clothes and his phone, and make another call to the target
in which she tells you to meet her specifically after you have appeared on the catwalk.
You go and get your fabulous Michael Stipe makeup on and hit the catwalk.
You are then granted a private meeting with her in which you can easily take her out without
anyone noticing.
In one of my playthroughs of the mission, I knew the way this very specific scripting
would play out, so I waited until the model reached the point at which he would make the
phonecall, but decided to subdue him during the call in order to save time.
Little did I know that doing this actually locks the player out of this particular path,
as the model must complete his call to the target in order for you to be able to pick
up his phone and make a subsequent call.
Realising the potential gravity of my mistake, I continued down the path anyway, taking the
model’s disguise, getting my makeup done and taking part in the show, but then I was
left with a conundrum – with this costume I was still allowed access to every part of
the palace, but the scripting was broken to the point that no matter how long I waited,
I would never be granted a private meeting with the target.
She would just continue round her clockwork AI path as if I had done nothing, even though
I had just completed all the steps that had the model completed his phonecall, would have
led to that private meeting.
Now this could have branched out into several other scripted events, such as stealing the
fireworks remote to draw both targets out into the open, or poisoning one of the drinks
the target takes on her scripted path, but instead I chose to do things the old fashioned
way – I took out the one guard on the balcony with a silenced pistol before taking her out,
allowing me to get away quickly as the guards’ suspicions were steadily rising.
At the point they figured out what was going on, I took the disguise of a waiter so they
wouldn’t know who to look for, and at this point I was free to walk past said guards
frantically looking for a supermodel who had just shot two people in the head.
This was a messy, off-the-cuff way to deal with the situation provided to me by the break
in the AI scripting, but the inherent playfulness of the mechanics encouraged me to think outside
the box and experiment with other options – all of which I had total control over
as a player.
My point here is that whilst in many other games these kind of exploitable and somewhat
broken AI scripts would be considered flaws, in Hitman they become an inherent mechanic
designed to recalibrate the way the player considers their approach, much like they are
forced to recalibrate the nature of the game they are playing.
The goal here is not to deal with the problems presented to you in a way that a normal human
being would, or even in the way that other videogames might teach the player to examine
and approach them, but to view the characters as pieces in a board game, trying to arrange
all the pieces in such a way that you can get in and out whilst causing the least commotion
possible.
In allowing for this kind of mechanical tomfoolery, the designers provide a sense of true improvisation
within their systems.
In other games, even ones considered to be open-ended, everything the player is allowed
to do is heavily structured to the point where straying off path is rarely encouraged, and
when the game does break it is often a stopping block to the player’s progress, resulting
in crashes or requiring a restart of sorts.
In Hitman, no matter how messy the final outcome may be, the designers back off enough to allow
things to go wrong, both in the minutiae of the player’s plan and in the fundamentals
of the AI’s scripting.
This places control of the mission’s moment-to-moment narrative directly in the hands of the player,
and as a result deepens their connection to the game’s mechanics and systems.
Like improvisation in music recalibrates the listener’s ears to look for things that
might not be apparent in other, more formal types of music, Hitman’s allowance for player
improvisation forces the player to examine every part of the game differently from how
they might view the same environments, AI patterns and mechanics in any other game,
no matter how aesthetically similar Hitman might be to those other games.
In allowing for this, the game creates some of the most chaotic, messy, absurd and hilarious
moments I have experienced in a game in a long while (like I say, probably not since
Goat Simulator), thanks to the uncanny nature of a lot of these somewhat broken systems.
This is to say nothing of the fact that the game’s scripted sections themselves are
somewhat inherently absurd – for example, the idea that you can disguise yourself as
a mechanic to take a target through safety precautions for a jet that you’ve tampered
with, sending him rocketing into the night as you instruct him to pull the ejector switch,
or the fact that, like I say, you can disguise yourself as a supermodel before meeting up
with someone with whom the model is supposed to be close friends with, with the target
at no point realising that your voice is almost entirely different, or that you have a goddamn
barcode on the back of your head.
In all honesty these scripted sections almost felt disappointingly rote, like when you arrange
a meeting for your target, forcing you to blend in as a bodyguard until the meeting
is over, at which point the target dismisses his own bodyguard and places himself at a
convenient point at which you can snap his neck without anyone knowing.
Or when, for example, you steal a fireworks trigger causing both targets to open themselves
up outside, with one being conveniently placed right above the other, allowing you to push
one off the balcony crushing the other below.
These scenarios, whilst fun to carry out initially, are far too convenient for a Hitman game in
my opinion.
As I hope I have proved through this piece, the real beauty of this game lies in its ability
to eschew these scripted events, allowing the player total control over a situation
in which almost everything seems to be simultaneously falling from the player’s grasp.
This is where the true absurdity lies, and therefore where the true fun lies as well,
as the player inherently feels more invested in the outcome that they create on the fly.
As the late comedian Jonathan Winters once said, ‘I love improvisation.
You can’t blame it on the writers.
You can’t blame it on direction.
You can’t blame it on the camera guy…
It’s you.
You’re on.
You’ve got to do it, and you either sink or swim with what you’ve got.’
And with that, I’m Hamish Black and this has been Writing on Games.
Thanks very much for watching and I’ll see you next time.