Hitman is a “platform,” not an episodic game

Last month’s announcement that Hitman would be adhering to an episodic release format, in which new locations and missions are released each month, was greeted with an understandable degree of anger by an audience expecting to get its hands on a full product this March. While episodic structures are nothing new at this point, the decision to change Hitman to an episodic release just two months prior to launch raised questions. Why was this not communicated earlier? Is the game unfinished? Are players eventually going to get all of the previously promised content? Will it benefit the consumer?

As Hans Seifert, studio head at Hitman developer IO Interactive tells Ars, going episodic was not a last-minute decision, at least from a development point of view.

“We started talking about it when we finished Absolution [in 2012], actually,” says Seifert. “Six years passed between Hitman: Blood Money and Hitman: Absolution, and we thought that was too long a period for us to react to any feedback that we had off of the back of Blood Money. After all, every game is a child of its time. Tweaking the game after it has been released has become more and more important. When you look at the current games that are out there some have a very long life. A lot of these haven’t relied on adding content over time, but the game itself has been tweaked after release. Then there are episodic games which do add new content, but the game itself hasn’t necessarily been changed or improved.”

Seifert’s plan with Hitman circa-2016 is to have the best of both worlds: to tweak the underlying formation of the game over time, as well as to add to it with new content. This, says Seifert, is potentially more impactful than attempting to rework or upgrade something launched as a standalone product. Rather than spend time figuring out what the audience does and doesn’t like about a game, and subsequently releasing a patch to address such feedback and, potentially, undo work already done, releasing a game piecemeal means timely feedback can more easily be fed into the development cycle.

But that doesn’t mean players will see it that way—and Seifert knows it. Hitman isn’t an “episodic” game, he says, but—buzzword alarms at the ready—is instead a “platform.” Whether that means Hitman will enjoy the kind of long-term support a true platform demands remains to be seen.

“We want to create a platform for Hitman and I know that that’s controversial,” Seifert tells me. “A lot of people have said: ‘why don’t you wait to ship the game?’ My answer to that is that we are shipping the game at the end of the season. So, if you’re a traditional player, you can buy it on a disc at the end of 2016, if that’s what you want. No one is stopping you doing that, but why should the people that want to come on the journey with us have to wait for all that time to pass?

Whenever we ship a game we think it’s the best possible Hitman game we could have done. Of course, that’s the same this time: we think it’s the best possible Hitman game we can right now. But, you know what? That’s not always true. There are sometimes things that you only realise could be better when you observe people playing, and we can make those improvements now because of this episodic structure.”

The other problem is price. In this age of free-to-play and subscription models, discounted early access and episodic releases such as Hitman mean players don’t have to part with a significant chunk of cash upfront for a game that they might not necessarily end up enjoying.

“[That’s] something I’ve personally wanted to solve for a very long time: how we make a triple-A accessible to people that cannot spend $60 [£40] on day one… as well as for those people that don’t want to spend $60 on day one. Still, the promise remains that if you spend $60 you will get absolutely everything. We will not have micro-transactions and we will not have additional DLC. The whole of season one is a $60 offering, but there are different ways to buy that.”

Locations are impressively complex in their design.

Locations are impressively complex in their design.

Blending in is the most essential of all skills.

Blending in is the most essential of all skills.

Different disguises allow you to get away with carrying different weapons.

Different disguises allow you to get away with carrying different weapons.

Blending in is the most essential of all skills.

Different disguises allow you to get away with carrying different weapons.

Observe your environment before making your move.

If you’re going to attack guards, do it quietly.

A Hitman scene from Paris.

Just one hit of man…y.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Change, however, sometimes meets resistance. The first Hitman release, Hitman: Codename 47, arrived in 2000. As such, the series has a 16-year relationship with its audience, and some of those fans will be fearful of any sweeping changes made to the series they love.

“When you do something new and groundbreaking then it’s normal that people will scrutinise us, and I think that’s only fair,” says Seifert. “That is true for everything when you try to change something that is as entrenched and as old as Hitman. After so many years people have certain expectations. We do try to fulfil those expectations, but we also know that we have to do something to move us into the future. Releasing [the game] in this way opens us up to so many more opportunities then we’ve had in the past. Those opportunities apply to the players and us as developers.”

The message, then, seems to be that progress is not always easy, but the final result makes any pain worth the ride.

Success will come down to how IO Interactive manages itself. The studio has no real history of maintaining a game post-release, with nothing significant released in the form of downloadable content or major additions to existing products. That has to change, at least over the medium term, in order to keep providing players with monthly content. No longer will the production cycle involve a mad crunch in the months leading up to a release, followed by a period of downtime before development starts on the next project.

“When we release on March 11 that’s when our stressful period really starts,” anticipates Seifert, “because this approach is more like running a TV show or a newspaper. You always have to do something and keep working in order to keep up with the promises we’ve made.”

If the game is a success then the plan seems to be to continue the Hitman platform over the long term. The idea is for what Seifert calls “season one” to conclude at the end of 2016, with each of the monthly locations having a narrative arc that works both in isolation and as a plot that spans the whole year. That will be just the start, he hopes. Past Hitman games have tended to kill off characters quickly, which is understandable given the premise of the series, but now the writing team needs a longer term vision in order to keep players engaged.

Seifert wouldn’t be drawn into just how long the story might continue, or how many episodes there might be.

“When we set out to make good on our plan we need to know what we’re doing over the course of the year. If we were to set out a plan for the next five years then our promises would fail because that’s too long of a time for us to structure and it wouldn’t allow us to listen and react to what the audience wants. The further we go into the first season the more we can react to all of the information we’ve got up to that point.”

Will the rest of the gaming industry go episodic?

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Hitman, and about IO as a studio, is how the decision to release a triple-A game under these conditions is going to affect the rest of the industry. Given the commercial and critical stagnation many major blockbuster games and franchises currently suffer from, there will undoubtedly be a lot of eyes watching how Hitman is received.

Through Hitman, developer IO, and publisher Square Enix, will either reap the benefits of a first-mover advantage, or crash horribly and be heralded as an example of why you shouldn’t interfere with something as big and unwieldy as the mainstream gaming market. Personally, given the rise of different distribution methods at present, particularly on PC, I think the latter is extremely unlikely—but stranger things have happened.