If I don’t own any of these, how do I go about playing them all via Hitman III? I just bought Hitman II Gold on sale and wondering if I’ve just stiffed myself somehow.
Nah, you’re fine. I think it might depend on if you’re playing on PC or console, but I think your game ownership syncs through your IO account. It just recognizes if you bought the previous games. I’m not sure Hitman 3 even has a DLC purchase for the past missions- it just wants you to buy the old games. Hitman 2, however, does have a DLC purchase to get all the Hitman 1 missions- or you can just own Hitman 1.
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I think if you’re on console 3 will just recognize the other games you own. on pc you have to log into your io account on their website and do things if the games are on different stores.
Ah, I was wondering about that. There’s no difference then? They’re priced radically differently: Hitman GOTY Edition is around £50 and the Legacy Pack is £15.
was an io account an optional thing in 2? i looked in my email/password manager to see if i had any details but couldn’t find any, guess i didn’t make one
assuming now if i wanted to get the epic version of this i’d have to like, reinstall 2 on steam and make an io account from there
honestly i would have rinsed this game if this shit didn’t give me a headache
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I think the IO accounts are optional, yeah. I don’t know that there was much reason to go into the options to make one before H3.
I think part of that is the weird way things get priced and discounted based on whether they’re a retail game or a DLC, but the one thing I’d look at is whether the Legacy Pack includes all the DLC, including that final Patient Zero campaign. The GOTY edition should- not sure about the Legacy Pack.
Edit: This is what I have
I don’t have a regular Legacy Pack option, just a GOTY Legacy Pack option that seems to have all the content from Hitman 1 GOTY Edition.
berlin easter egg hunt at the end of the month
lmao
New DLC is out! It’s £25.
I already have the deluxe edition.
That’s…uh
I played up to Mumbai yesterday (did one of three kills in mumbai). I got silent assassin+no collateral kills (on Professional, with quicksave abuse) on Miami and San Carlos so it took me most of the day.
For me, this series with its proliferation of optional content, poses a curious meta-puzzle of what goals and mode of play I should adopt in order to actually enjoy it. I stopped playing originally because each level contains a shitton of challenges involving every single specially-scripted gimmick they made, and it seemed like maybe I was expected to be completionist there, but after a point waiting around another 20 minutes to see the predictable result of the next scripted gimmick for a target is no longer my cup of tea.
I suspect nobody on SB actually plays Hitman that way except for their very favorite levels but the thing is the game does not give particularly clear signals about how else you are supposed to play it. Simply rushing through each level using whatever sloppy method first reveals itself as workable then moving on can’t be it either: the game is trivial, anticlimactic and very brief that way.
Last time on Hitman 1 I overplayed Paris because first I did a lot of fucking around to understand and appreciate every detail, and then it seemed to me that the particular ultimate challenge “Silent assassin, suit only, murder weapon: battle axe” might be something to aim for to perform my mastery of the level. I tried that one for about 15 hours and did formulate a cheesy plan that I believe should work (causing an explosion to get the targets to flee to a stairwell where I lurk with a battle axe), but I never got the execution down perfectly enough to achieve it and after a point further attempts stopped being fun.
This playthrough I lit upon the “classic” challenges page with its serieslong completion goals for “Silent Assassin”, “Suit Only”, “Silent Assassin, Suit Only” and “Sniper Assassin”. Based on my previous experience, the famous joint SA+SO challenge requires a lot of cheesing and tolerance for frustration, so I think I’ll cease aspiring for that and leave it to the less casual Hitman players.
Instead, I think what works for me is separately aspiring to the “Silent Assassin” (+“only kill target”) and “Suit Only” (collateral kills allowed). The former exercises the stealth and disguise mechanics to their full extent and lets me embody a patient, ideal assassin. The latter exercises the on-alert/combat mechanics which are totally absent from the other style, and lets me embody a reckless, chaotic action antihero.
(As for the Sniper classic challenge, it sounds slightly dull to me as such, but I suppose part of the concept there is playing each level enough in general to unlock a sniper rifle, which means you can do a lot of the assorted challenges for XP but stop feeling the need to get more around when that gets boring. I might consider it for a few of my favorite levels.)
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that’s reasonable; my baseline is even simpler, which is to get to a point where it says I’ve “cleared” 20-25% of a level by their estimation. I can generally feel this out to the point where I’m not actively aiming for it, and I find that it gives me enough time to see most of the mission stories, play sloppily but not so sloppily that it minimizes the number of fun interactions I get and incidental dialogue I overhear, and so on. usually means two or three hours with each level, depending.
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but I should also emphasize that I find the stealth really boring on its own merits, as in most games, and a large part of why I like hitman is because there are a lot of fun ways to play the game that barely involve stealth at all
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If you allow any level of slack the stealth seems as dull as any other game, but with the full score-maximizing conduct the stealth game starts to bloom, I’ve discovered.
For example, one universal aspect of stealth games I’m kind of done with is the thing where you accidentally alert a guard but then hide somewhere until the alert status expires. Another aspect of semi-stealthy play I thought was anticlimactic is how easy it always is to just headshot your target in a crowd without yourself being spotted. It’s like why bother with any complex kill when that’s so easy.
The Silent Assassin+target-only rules each have a function of denying boring solutions to problems like the above. And then what finally emerges is a pretty tightly designed stealth puzzle game. The pathing of your target is well-thought-out to almost never be out of sight of any NPC, and additionally it always inconveniently crosses several “perceptive” NPCs who can see through the disguises you’re likely to be using. So it requires an exercise of logic both to trail the target and to create a window of opportunity where you can dispatch them out of sight.
All that said, to be fair, it’s still videogame stealth mechanics and not always great. I think I’ll play the game in bite-sized sessions from now on because I was all stealthed out yesterday after completing 3 levels in a row like this.
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Do the more recent Hitmen (after 2016) get more freeform? I play 2016 on-and-off and keep wanting to like it, but each time I come away half-disappointed. Each level opens with a ton of oepn-ended promise, but that is negated by the feeling of being trapped in the designers’ rube goldberg device. Your verbs are very discrete and fairly limited, they are closer to an adventure game than a 3rd person assassination simulator – “interact”, “pick up”, “hide”, “throw”. It’s like I’m directing Agent 47 rather than actually playing him. Many of the interesting kills feel like nudging 47 and other characters to a pre-planned conclusion rather than doing something clever myself.
I want to like these games, but I wonder if I’m wanting it to be something it’s not.
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Short answer: No it doesn’t change, it remains pretty much that
Long answer: Each level offers a range from extremely scripted to quite emergent/systemic depending on which assassination style you go for. You can get Silent Assassin on the entire game either by discovering and executing the exact scripts left in the toybox for you, or by totally ignoring them and abuse the stealth mechanics and physics like Goat Simulator. The SA+SO challenges in particular force a high-skill version of the latter where it really feels like you pull one over the designers instead of them controlling you, which is one of the reasons that’s emphasized by the playerbase.
But, what I’m saying doesn’t really get at the root of your question, so the short answer is still right for you I think
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I was thinking that this series is like the real-game incarnation of Facade: both in the scenario of an impolite guest messing around with the equally asshole hosts and also in its aspirations for realism (including open-endedness) that cannot have any other outcome than devolving into either scriptedness or inhuman behavior
Hitman is more self-aware and embraces what it’s kind of forced to be
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Working my way into getting 20/20 mastery (not necessarily 100% completion, though) on all of the levels.
Made me appreciate the Hitman 2 levels I just kinda burned through back when, though now that I’m on the Hitman 3 set I…still kinda don’t like them? As much, anyway?
Anyway I’m a hypocrite because even though some of the more story-heavy levels skew towards standard playstyles on repeat plays, it is kind of a bummer that the Berlin level highlights all of the ICA agents right away. That first time going through that level, carefully looking for people acting weird and talking into their earpieces, was pretty intense!
Honestly though, if I can replay Chongqing without having to do that escape from the ICA facility every time, I might forgive it. I’ll find out in about uhhh five or six more plays of Berlin.
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you can just leave through an exit after the first time in chongqing/colorado. and if you pick the default start for berlin you still have to find all the agents
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Ah OK, good to know!
(Colorado didn’t use to be that way - you had to either drag Sean Rose down to the basement or use the 3D printer every time. Was kind of a drag!)
I still think colorado is underrated, it was the only level that really changed things up in the first game and I loved how dense it was
just could not get into chongqing though I got a funny clip of some of the deskbound employees glitching and standing on their desks and minority report-style paging through the air over their monitors
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