The Bjarkhov Bomb is good mission
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Can understand the logic of your POV: massively disagree with it myself but it IS a very Unpopular Opinion About Hitman, so take my upvote @Franz.
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My suggestion would be this: Let people save as often as they want, even in custom contracts. But you only get a highscore if you complete the contract without saves.
That way you can use saves at strategic positions mid run to explore different approaches and easily investigate NPC behaviour in order to plan your route.
But at the same time you can‘t abuse the save system to get crazy highscores.
Thanks, especially since you helped in making it reach “nice reply” status, meaning IOI are contractually obliged to implement it.
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Contrary to what some people say, Absolution’s disguise system on its own was not bad.
On paper, it’s a great middle ground between having practically foolproof disguises, like in C47 or BM (think WoA without enforcers), and constantly getting spotted for seemingly nothing because of unintuitive suspicion mechanic, like in H2SA and Contracts. The only people who could blow your cover in Absolution are the guys who wear the same outfit, which makes sense, is easy to remember and is fairly self-evident and straightforward (you don’t have to guess who can or cannot blow your disguise).
WoA elaborated on this concept and found a way to indicate which NPCs can spot you with UI, which in turn allowed for enforcer mechanic, leading to a perfect compromise. Absolution is quite similar, but instead of the enforcer dot it’s the uniform, everyone else is not gonna bother you.
However, as many other aspects of the game, this disguise system suffered from a much greater flaw in Absolution’s overall design – scale and mood of the levels. With most of the levels being very small, there simply wasn’t enough room for many disguises; and with most of them being themed around evasion (47 is on the run from cops, ICA, etc) or highly secured areas (47 enters Dexter’s or ICA compound), on absolute majority of the levels it’s just guards and their outfit being the only present NPCs and the only worthwhile disguise respectively.
And because of this, during 90% of the game process the disguise system is reduced to “Get guard disguise from the closest NPC so you get spotted more slowly and can use Instinct to bypass NPCs”, occasionally followed by “Get the OP disguise like Chef, Judge, Barber etc. so you can roam around freely because there are no other judges/barbers etc”. Only a handful of levels have multiple disguises that all differ from each other, have some actual use and can be handy in their own way each.
If Absolution had levels with bigger scale and that were themed around social stealth with multiple equally useful disguises, this system could have been much more enjoyable. Some areas could have been easier to navigate in one disguise and more difficult in another, which could prompt players to get the former disguise specifically to get past this area or to get rid of the blocking NPCs; one entrance to a secured area could be “guarded” by a staff member, and another one by a security guard, and so on and so forth. Sadly, the game had a much more restrictive and limiting level-design, dictated by the story.
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Well said.
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A very fair analysis of Absolution, describing why the disguise system was a forward movement mechanically in the series, but also a clear-eyed description of why the system failed in spite of the innovation - bravo!
(I still can’t get past my personal distaste - nay, loathing - for the content and tone of Absolution’s story which, as I’ve said before, I can’t describe as anything other than repulsive.)
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I think Hitman VR is great
(Get ur tomatoes to through at me here: 
)
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IIRC Absolution’s highest difficulty hid the UI almost completely. I used to speculate whether the enforcer system was designed that way so it’d be easy to understand who to avoid without any extra clues.
Still, that doesn’t excuse how it ended up. Good writeup.
Tutorial’s greenhouse area where disguises are first introduced tried doing something like that, with gardeners and guards being mostly stationed on opposite sides of the greenhouse. I don’t remember any other examples of such, but I also haven’t bothered with licking every wall of every level after King of Chinatown.
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I found VR Hitman to be rather fun. Extremely clunky (there’s a reason difficulty defaults to casual in VR mode) but embracing the jank and just trying to make it through despite it was a silly experience. Largely flawed compared to the regular game, but fun.
Though my PC struggled a lot with running the game in VR, which combined with the movement being very straining for my guts, meant I didn’t get to play it a lot.
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I actually really like the VR versions (both of them). I have a Quest 3 and it works really well. Love the fact that I don’t need the cable to play it natively on the head set too. The controls seems to work a lot better and, honestly, the graphics don’t bother me at all.
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I’m glad that I’m not the only person to love this game for it’s jank, it often means I have to find new ways to play rather than mission stories.
Embrace the chaos fr
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Great points about the Purist difficulty and the greenhouse enforcers.
There are some levels where you do have multiple disguises that have fairly even amounts of enforcers – cops and workers on Streets of Hope, truckers and guards in the last section of Dexter Industries, the Patriot’s fans and guards in Fight Night, court workers and cops at the Courthouse etc. There are only a mere few instances and they tend to sway one way or another anyway, but it’s still better than nothing.
What’s baffling is that some levels already have two separate disguises but they work exactly the same. Like a normal cop and a SWAT team member in Run For Your Life, or a normal ICA merc and a heavy one in ICA missions, or two kinds of guards at the Blackwater Park penthouse – in all of these cases both kinds of guards still enforce both kinds of disguises. Why not make them separate and add some actual value to changing between them… Ugh.
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