Season of The Drop Roadmap - Fall 2024

[Melusca]

@Dribbleondo

There’s no reason to ever disguise as it.

@Melusca

there are contracts based around that disguise

Example taken from the latest FC selection. If you ignore the baseball player disguise you won’t get 5 stars. Seems like a pretty good reason to go for it.

@Dribbleondo

Essentially having a no-consequences free kill button is not a healthy item to have around irrespective of the contract’s conditions.

A “no-consequence free kill button” that will be of absolutely no use to you in the contract from the picture I posted previously, since there are no electrocution accidents involved. I’ve played all the FCs from H2 and H3. I can only think of a single one where I thought “wow I’d be glad to have the electric phone right now to take care of that annoying electrocution kill”, all the others were perfectly playable without it and the only thing it would have given me is a few less seconds on the final timer.

[Heisenberg]

Guys, forget it. Drib doesn’t like anything fun that doesn’t require the effort of removing your own appendix to accomplish. If IOI just hands it to you, it ruins the game, somehow.

[Hotel_Pollisya]

@Dribbleondo

I like the outfit as well, but this should’ve been redesigned in my opinion, again, just like the blue flamingo.

Agreed. And it seemed to be part of IOI’s MO as well as can be seen with outfits that serve as stand-ins for flamingo, Kashmerian, ninja and scarecrow outfits.

A black robe reskin would have been the most obvious choice, as the disguise was already a pretty obvious reference to Ghostface from Scream movies – why not go a bit further?

@Dribbleondo

Also, the Motorcyclist, Baseball Player and Vampire Magician have no effects in a level and are basically suits anyway. They’re just placed in trespassing or hostile areas.

Not really. First of all, the former two are hostile everywhere and Vampire is trespassing at auction areas unlike the suit, so they are different. (And Plague Doctor, which is another outfit you mentioned, is involved in a mission story and provides some degree of concealment with the “Hide” prompt – not that big of a difference, but still)

Second of all, even if they were “not that different”, there is a handful of dilemmas when it would come to their implementation (would love to see how they will go with the Fan outfit) – do you make them identical in the technical sense to the respective disguises on the levels? If yes, then does it mean you can’t do a Suit Only walkthrough and that you can “cheese” challenges like Chameleon and contract disguise requirements by starting in those outfits? If no, then how are players supposed to distinguish between the two identical outfits? It just goes against the intended game-design no matter how you look at it.

Just to clarify – I would absolutely welcome a reskin or an otherwise slightly changed variant of any of the mentioned outfits, it’s just that they should be distinctive from their in-level counterparts. As for everything else – in my boring opinion, all suits should be purely decorative and have as fewer gameplay differences as possible. Might be a fun concept on paper with suits offering their bonuses but it’s way too late to add that to the game that never had such a game mechanic in mind.

[Diana47]

The DJ Suit is such an odd choice, but I guess it appeals to its target audience. The other items in the pack are super neat!

[LandirtHome]

One ICA Proximity Micro Taser, please.

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(I don’t know how others are using it, but it’s not like a coin, and not an Electrocuion Phone 2.0. It attracts NPCs to its location if thrown. But otherwise is just not seen, even less picked. As all “micro” items. It eliminates only by interacting with water, oil, or gas)

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As an aside: calling the Drop Arcade “The Base”, is a choice…

[Dribbleondo]

“The Bass” makes more sense.

[Lewisnic1]

Well, The Drop roadmap and DLC is pretty damn cool!!

First thing first, I went straight to the standard Drop Elusive Target and completed it with a 5 star Silent Assassin rating! Pleased with that Threw an emetic grenade at his bodyguard, shot the other bodyguard standing in the lounge and Alexios Laskaridis with the Sieker 1, then used the fiber wire on him. All went smoothly, so I’ll head to the Arcade version over the next few days.

Great to see Freelancer getting some love in the roadmap and update as well. Love the new Safehouse decorations, especially the hot tub outside! Shame we don’t have a ‘blend in’ option for it, but awesome nonetheless!

Speaking of the Safehouse, interestingly, although it’s not mentioned in the patch notes, the kitchen table, which came with the Undying DLC where it had the ‘floating banana’ on the table, appears to have now been fixed. Might be worth others to check their game to make sure it’s a full wide fix?

[LandirtHome]

“The Bass” would indeed make more sense.
It would also have the added benefit of not using the name of two internationally recognized terrorist groups…

I kinda want to know what the arabic translation of the game named this arcade.
Not that the english version is better.

[Dribbleondo]

Those are all honestly fair point (I also straight-up forgot those suits were hostile to their locations, so thank you for reminding me).

[Lindolfo]

@LandirtHome

but it’s not like a coin

In freelancer, if you place it in front of any NPC they notice it as a coin and go to pick it up and then get eletrocuted. Maybe it’s freelancer only? Maybe IO fixed that?

[DrVortep]

Oh well, micro tazer’s coin behaviour was removed, both in freelancer and missions. Probably for the best then.

Weird difference though: in freelancer you can’t pick it back, while in missions you can and it won’t electrocute you.

[DrVortep]

So it is more or less a duplicate of micro tazer, which is not that groundbreaking.
Makes other tazers for non-guard kills obselete though

[Dribbleondo]

if you need to remove your appendix to complete a level in Hitman, then I think something has seriously wrong.

Trying to discredit me by making me sound like a killjoy doesn’t disprove what I was saying, if anything it just distracts from what I’m saying.

If IOI just hands it to you, it ruins the game, somehow.

It just simply depends on the context of what’s being added to be honest. E-phone? Yeah, that’s game breaking. Durian? That’s annoying, but indicative of a wider problem with emetics. A suit that lets you roam a church and nothing else? Not really game breaking, just making that level a little easier and perverting the original chain of events to get said suit from the level. It’s not the end of the world, but it is something the devs have avoided doing in the past to avoid this exact sort of level advantage situation.

I also frequently explain my reasoning as to why something doesn’t work whenever I brings such things up; this is just dismissal and exaggeration. Please stop that, even in a jokey context.

A while back, my mind was changed when someone told me the Pinot Noire bottle wasn’t all that beneficial as, while Tamara looks for it, they take quite a long time to reach the bar, so any possible benefit of cheesing a level is basically lost. I still don’t think it’s a good unlock (it’s a bit boring looks-wise; kinda feels like something you’d get from an in-level randomiser), but I was wrong about the effects of it when it came to player using it.

If you don’t like any of my opinions, fine. But do not try and dismiss them as “for some reason”. That is completely unfair.

As a matter of record, I do like fun. Some of my favorite suits are goofy as all hell Hell I made a goofy suit of my own, I laughed my arse off alongside Frote7 earlier today with the cake reveal, and some of my favourite items are not all that balanced (Silverballers, lockpicks etc; I know these aren’t well balanced but I still use them because they’re too damn useful).

[Dribbleondo]

That’s…weird. Maybe the freelancer version is different somehow internally? That’s the only thing that makes sense to me.

[Heisenberg]

Whoa, hold on, @Dribbleondo; I was joking. It was a deliberate exaggeration, I know you’re more nuanced than that. I thought I’d made it obvious, but I guess the snark sounded weaponized. It was meant as a friendly jab, not an attempt to actually insult. My apologies.

[Urben]

Personally I think it is a sad principle that IO kept around that bonus missions only have one pickup and one starting location. Having a disguise from one of these missions makes it a bit better for the mission, even if some contracts around this disguise are ruined.

[thrison]

Since The Chameleon ET goes live just after the oil canister unlock arrives, I wonder how many people will fail the ET because they’ll shoot the canister thinking it will cause it to leak and then be a fire accident.

IO seem to love to troll with this ET, fire and a new unlock. They did it in Y2 with the molotov when there was a chance of getting an explosive kill and failing.

[Heisenberg]

Oh yeah, I forgot that crap about no explorations with that one. And I’ve never shot the canister, so I didn’t even know it explodes.

[Patrick_McColloch]

HITMAN 2 can still use a one-time-only update to remove the phone and to reset SASO on the highest difficulty but only if IO can determine which player used the phone in the unlock and which one didn’t.

[Frote7]

@thrison

IO seem to love to troll with this ET, fire and a new unlock. They did it in Y2 with the molotov when there was a chance of getting an explosive kill and failing.

I honestly dont agree with this statement. Players not properly testing how a tool/weapon exactly works and using it for the first time on an ET is completely on them.