Imagine getting that very first shopping cart ever made, and while it has potential, it’s otherwise almost a total bust, so they keep making new carts to fix everything wrong with it, and two decades later it’s successors are lauded by the industry.
By that logic, Absolution, which was unarguably a failure in a lot of ways and wasn’t warmly embraced, should have been the last game in the franchise. Reality is, such a big IP as Hitman will always have new entries until some corporate fuckheads decide that it’s not worth investing in. At least that’s my way of looking at it.
And perhaps it wasn’t quite as hated as people claim. Keep in mind, Hitman fans are not the only ones to have acceptable input on the series. Absolution seems to suffer from Nickelback Syndrome: everyone claims it’s terrible, everyone claims to hate it… so where does the financial success come from?
And yes, though it underperformed from what was hoped for, it was a financial success.
I agree with the rubber duck sentiment, we don’t need any more rubber duck items, and yet people in the forums keep asking for them (and so IO keeps following through on them). I think we are at the end of it now with the outfit (which compared to the weapons, isn’t that bad).
But I would prefer that in future games, if we get a rubber duck as an unlock, that it mainly sticks to just one item (and work like the duck in Codename 47 or the sack of gunpowder in this game, where you have to shoot it for it to explode).