If the score is not important, the competition is not important and the challenge is not important, why not use the Explosive Phone now instead?
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You CAN disregard trying to get the highest score , not care about competing or being #1 and disregard challenging yourself while still caring about getting a 5 star SA rating (there’s people on this forum like that).
And that"s impossible if you openly kill a target with the Explosive Phone. 
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That’s true, in that case I’d say maybe switch to the EMP and place a propane where you want to kill the target. Or set up a trap with propane/taser. It is not like there are not many ways to get SA.
I know, people here ask for that specific item with that specific behavior. But I still think it was more fair to remove one of many ways to SA than making facing challenges needless for main missions and contracts. I would have liked for the phone to remain but nerfed (like in the poll) but IO seemed to not want to invest into that (yet).
Balance still matters. Are we just ignoring this now? It doesn’t matter if it’s single player or not, if a weapon is badly made, then it causes headaches for the balance team at IOI, and can make players feel dissatisfied for using it, finding it unfair and fun.
Oh right I wanted to comment on this too. It is nice people are willing to share their opinion. I might be biased but it seems the “against EP” camp tries to be more objective than the other camp. I get it, pointing out there are personal preferences is important and also valid. But it is kinda sad the arguments are often disregarded with “I see. Let me repeat why this does not matter for me personally…”. 
That is also why this discussion seems to be so heated up. By putting preferences above the desire to play with each other in this game, it is doomed to never reach a point of conclusion. It is less a discussion about the E-Phone and more about how much more one side wants to ignore an aspect of the game that expands from being a merely a single player game.
Ideally all content of this game should not violate the single player approach and at the same time not the “multi player” approach. And in this case that meant to remove one item of many.
I try to keep in mind what you want to do with this game if you play for you alone. But it does not convince me this is such a breaking thing compared to how it was for the balance of the other players. It also is not impressing me that people try to raise their argument by admitting that all other interests are not important for them.
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Balance still matters. Are we just ignoring this now? It doesn’t matter if it’s single player or not, if a weapon is badly made, then it causes headaches for the balance team at IOI, and can make players feel dissatisfied for using it, finding it unfair and unfun. If people find something unfun, then they’ll complain about it. Personal dissatisfaction is still valid for making balance complaints. Leaderboards are not the main issue here, though they clearly do factor in their decision for its removal; players complaints were not entirely because it caused cheesed leaderboard results; a lot of the controversy was because it broke the games’ intended gameplay loop, and made the game far too easy. I feel like i’m repeating myself, but let’s try another angle so I don’t bore myself to death with information people are blatantly disregarding.
Hitman has always had a speedrunning userbase that notes any and every use of what weapons are good and bad, and IOI have made measures to accommodate for that fact. We have a timer, the SA indicator, and hell, the level design itself has shifted from using less doors because the meta for 2016 was “always carry a lockpick”. 2016 itself was in response to the community hating Absolution, and so made 2016 more repeatable for speedrunners, and less linear for everyone else. IOI takes notes, all the time.
For a game that is “purely single player”, IOI seem to base a lot of its decisions on how the game is played by other people, especially when speedrun. Also, the EP phone was removed between games, not in H2 itself, which probably made the decision even easier to justify.
I feel like i’m locked in a broom cupboard, and all I have for respite is a radio with EP discussion, and it’s driving me crazy that nothing I say is doing anything.
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You may wanna change the quote, because I changed it several edits ago, as the way I wrote it came out wrong. =P
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I think I sort of get what you’re trying to say, you think it just made the game to easy, right? This is your point?
I still disagree, since some folks want games to be easy. Easy modes exist for a reason. But that’s fine. We don’t have to agree.
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H2 (and therefore H3) already has an easy mode, and it serves the same purpose pretty well; Get players used to stealth games and Hitmans’ general mechanics in a safer environment without the pressure of camera’s, and gunfights are considerably easier, among other changes. You don’t need a EP “free kill button” to compliment it. If anything, it could come across as making the game look too easy.
Regardless of the Difficult/Easy factor, the reason I really liked the Electrocution Phone (and wish it was still in the game in HITMAN 3) is that it played really well in some specific roleplaying runs I like to do, and being able to do those runs with it is something I found a whole load of fun.
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I’m curious to know if the people who think that the phone was rightfully removed from the game also think that IOI should patch out things like the 3-bullet distractions, gun lures, and other tricks.
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And whilst they’re on it remove disguises too - way too useful.
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While I appreciate the humor in that, I am genuinely curious to know the answer. I do not have the same nuanced opinion that others do, I’m sure, but it seems to me that if you can shoot a wall two or three times and just walk right in front of a clearly marked enforcer, that’s unbalanced. If you can do a small move and lure a target clear across the map to an isolated spot or to a location they would never normally go, that’s unbalanced too.
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I said it before, and I will say it again : bring back the Electrocution Phone back in Freelancer.
There it could be balanced by the economy/ressource management of the mode.
As for other modes, honestly I’m fine with it not being there anymore. I only used it when I wanted to skip a target while making another one the center of a run. While keeping the exit. And I stoped playing this way months ago.
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The mechanics you’ve listed don’t break the game, they add nuance to it, and the rules make sense for the most part. Those are a rules-based system that contribute the gameplay. The EP actively breaks rules. I’m convinced triple-shotting is not intentional (given how inconsistent it works), it’s more a trick found by speedrunners when bullet distractions were re-added back in 2016.
I wonder if people who think that using personal experiences as the sole foundation for an argument also think that we should have more OP weapons in the game. You know, for fun and for roleplaying /s.
There is a speed running video of a guy who loads the Colorado level, climbs through a window and puts a briefcase on the ground, throws a muffin on top of that briefcase and then equips a sniper rifle. He then shoots a chandelier in the house and then the lawn mower outside the house to take out two targets.
That exploit, by your definition, does not “break the game” right? Despite that shot not being designed to be possible by the developers, it doesn’t break the game right? It just adds “nuance”?
Being able to shoot a wall and then stand right in front of an enforcer with a gun in hand and have that enforcer not notice you’re there because he’s too distracted by the bullet hitting the wall is legitimately breaking the game and to say otherwise is disingenuous, at best.
A device that was introduced by the people who wrote the game, and therefore the rules, cannot, by definition, break the game. They may very well break the way that you prefer to play it, but the game itself is still operating within the parameters of the established rules.
You cannot simultaneously argue (and maintain any legitimacy) that an unintended glitch in the game mechanics does NOT break the game while an officially sanctioned device released by IOI themselves does break it.
And all argument is based on personal experience. I have no other basis to argue from than my own experience nor does anyone else. Your final comment is clearly written out of frustration that this discussion doesn’t agree with your point of view. I suggest that the community drop it for the time being.
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I feel like the term “breaking the game” is used differently by every person. I will definitely add using it to my don’ts list. It’s confusing as hell.
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Breaking the game just depends on context;
- This Item is so Broken! (Overpowered)
- This game/ mechanic doesn’t act they way it should! It is Broken! (actually broken).
Admittedly, this can get confusing.
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3 bullet distractions is powerful to get past guards but I never had the impression that this is bypassing core challenges in my contracts. I also rarely see it applied because of how counter-intuitive it is.
Gun lure is able to bypass core challenges but, depending on the distance, is awfully slow. So while it is cheesy, it is not an issue for competitive play. I used that for my ET videos too.
Long-range lure on guards is powerful too but they often bring friends along and you have to be quite tactical about the situations and position to make this helpful.
Muffin boosts is crazy and powerful for speedrunners, I never see “usual” players use it so I don’t care for it when making contracts. Also because it is not easy to master.
The phone had no such trade-offs:
- Easy to learn
- Easy to use
- Powerful to bypass challenges
- Potentially fast
That is why I don’t use that term either. I try to be more explicit, in this case the balance of effort and result, compared to other situations/items. In the end this is a sandbox game where the devs cannot initially imagine what players do.
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Developers make mistakes too, the EP phone was one of them. An officially sanctioned OP weapon is still an OP weapon. Bugs that allow for exploits are exactly that; exploits. They are mutually exclusive ideas, and rules broken by either need to be addressed by the developers.
I tend to avoid the term too IRL and on Reddit, but I assumed (wrongly) that the forum knew the difference as the userbase is considerably more aware of the mechanics of the game, which is a fault on my part, not on anyone else.
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^^^ This.
I’d also go one step further and say that for me, the phone, emetic guns/mines, and tasers significantly diminished my passion for contract creation. One of the elements of the game I loved most, in my opinion, has been negatively impacted by adding these items.
My greatest wish for Hitman was for them to have developed a more comprehensive contract creation system. For example, disallowing, say, the use of guns, a restricted/forced starting loadout, or a number of the creative and interesting complications we’ve seen in some of the better escalations. As long as the restrictions are never overused, this would have solved so many of these disagreements, because then we simply give people a choice to play our contracts or not. The available items in the game become less controversial and can be either ignored or enjoyed by each of us.
The bottom line is that we all have different codes and self-imposed rules we play by, and we approach the game with varying levels of immersion. One of the best things about Hitman is also it’s greatest weakness. The game is designed in such a way that it allows people to play it in almost exactly the way they want. That is what makes Hitman so great.
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You can put the /s tag at the end of your post for the lulz, but FYI I would sincerely be happy with some more fun OP items in the game.
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