Welcome to the Paris fashion show: Home to chic design and fabulous murder.
One of the things I am grateful to Absolution for is that it forced IO Interactive to seriously improve on the sneaking/stealth mechanics of Blood Money. Where we once had this terrible binary of “detected/not detected”, there now exists a ton of states and transitions between those states.
Hitman didn’t have any of the things you’d expect from stealth games, like detection notifiers, searching/suspicious states, distractions, etc until Absolution. For all of the things it did well, this was an area where even Blood Money faltered.
I disliked Absolution when it came out, and frankly I still dislike it. But in a weird way, this episodic Hitman game almost redeems Absolution in retrospect. Without the new engine, gameplay improvements, additional mid-mission challenges, and UI adjustments, we wouldn’t have this game. We might have a different Hitman, but it’s doubtful that they could make a game of this level without first having worked on many of these ideas in Absolution.
So in a weird way, thank you, Hitman: Absolution. You suck, but you also made a good game possible.
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