Welcome to the smartest Hitman tutorial IO has ever made.
I really can’t stress how smart a decision this was for the tutorial. While any tutorial can be used to introduce the basic mechanics, the mechanics themselves are only half of a Hitman game.
The other half of teaching someone how to play Hitman is teaching the mentality required to get the most out of the experience. This is something Blood Money failed to understand. It taught the mechanics, but not the mentality, which is why getting lost in the first mission is such a common experience.
But here, in this game, they were much smarter about it. They guide players through their very first mission in a somewhat scripted sequence to familiarize them with the mechanics and the map. Once they do that, they release the guardrails and give the player more freedom. They’re not totally defenseless, because they game provides some basic tools and they are still armed with the knowledge from the scripted sequence. But the game escalates and expects them to be able to practically apply what they’ve learned.
Even better, once player’s finish this “Freeform Training”, the game encourages them to go through again and again until they feel comfortable acting and behaving like a Hitman should. Not only does this help ease new players in, but it also introduces the idea of replaying missions over and over again. Once we’re out of the tutorial, this becomes very important.
But we’ll get to that another day.
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