An exclusive interview with Hitman: Absolution lead producer Hakan Abrak from IO Interactive.
How has your new game technology opened up the storytelling?
It’s been six years since the last game, Blood Money, and the main reason for that was the creative ambitions we had back then. We really wanted to do a proper, ambitious iteration for Hitman: Absolution and we knew back then we’d have to create new technology. We had our own in-house technology, G1, and then we did a brand new one from scratch called G2, Glacier 2. That gave us the possibilities to achieve our creative goals and everything from lighting from the assets, the graphics, the look, to the dynamic music system, to our new crowd system. We can have more than 500 crowd members on screen close to Agent 47at the same time. The music system is a very dynamic system that supports the game style of the player. It’s an open gameplay, which we call the kill sandbox. You can choose to go stealthy or choose to go guns blazing, and the music will adapt from calm classical music to if you’re going combat to heavy riffs, and it’s very dynamic. As you change your game style while you play or can change the situation and try to go stealthy again, the music will adapt to that as well.
What else has G2 opened up?
We have a very advanced AI system with Glacier 2, and that makes the NPCs coordinate with each other. There’s a lot of dialogue. It’s a living, breathing world that you traverse around and listen to the stories. You will get a lot of cool stories and you will get a lot of hints as to what to do because that is what Hitman is about. You’re not always walking on this rail, it’s not a fixed path It’s open gameplay and you can go in there with a disguise and try to investigate your environments, get hints from the NPCs and try to get his disguise because then I’ll get access to here and maybe I can set this trap up or this could be a way to get to my target. There are a lot of possibilities.
Can you talk about Contracts?
In addition to the 15 hours of story gameplay, which offers a lot of replay; we’ve introduced Contracts. We have the online functionality called Contracts, where you can go back and play the story levels but you’re not restricted to the targets that we’ve put out in the story mode. You can actually traverse around and pick any of the NPCs as a target. There’s no complicated editor. You just play to create. You attack them and then if you do it in a certain way with a certain disguise or with a certain weapon, maybe a brick or something, you can set those as conditions and then have a contract with your friends. You challenge them and they can take up the challenge and complete it. If they beat it, maybe they’ll do it even do it more complex, they can send it back to you and this is really, really exciting for us. It gives a lot of possibilities for the gamers to create their own stories because you can write background stories to these NPCs that you target at hits. For a long time fans of our games have been doing kills in various creative ways, but they haven’t been able to do it within the game, or have a way to show off within the game. And with contracts you have the possibility of doing that and sharing that with your friends.
