Let’s try this again….

To clarify my point, when I say that the game manipulates you into thinking like a psychopath like Agent 47, I don’t mean that as a negative criticism of the game.
Hitman: Blood Money is trying to convey a certain experience to the player. That is, it is trying to make players feel like they are Agent 47, an extremely capable assassin who is able to think, plan, and execute a hit. He’s not against killing anyone, and will always find a way.
If they want to place you into that kind of headspace, they must then therefore make the player feel that they are okay with killing any one person in the level if it means making the job easier (or even if it doesn’t, as is often the case). People don’t tend to want to kill others whom they identify with. The targets, or even the random guards and civilians inhabiting the level, can’t be characterized in any way that would engender sympathy. Otherwise, some of us would have issues with killing them, and call afoul of the morality of their actions.
However, if they are given personality traits and backstories that are more disagreeable, then we can distance ourselves from them emotionally. This makes all of them much easier to kill in this little sandbox. Make no mistake, the assassinations are about as moral reprehensible as that the guy from Hatred. The difference being is the killing in Hatred was just done for controversy in schlock. Here, the act of killing is the almost secondary. The true thrill lies in the formulation of the plan, and experimenting with the game’s mechanics as you form that plan. 
The actual kill is little more than the punchline to a well set-up joke. So while the game dehumanizes the population to make it easier to kill, the killing isn’t the point. That’s why so many of the possible assassinations are grandiose in their scope, or provide provide some amusement in their absurdity. It’s not so much an assassination as much as it is the payoff to an elaborate and well-executed Rube Goldberg machine, as a reward for thoughtful and bold play.
I’m sure someone smarter than I has made a point similar to this, but it bears repeating nonetheless.

This next one is short, but I promise to make up for it.

It only occurs to me now, but they could easily solve that subtitle problem by just shifting the subtitles down into the black space under the cutscenes. They’re half-in and half-out of the shot.

One thing I should make a note of now, since it could cause some confusion: I can barely hear what’s going on in the game when I record.

The mic I use to record my audio is extremely sensitive. I’d ideally have a headset set up to pump the game sound directly into my ears, but I already have headphones in my microphone so that I can hear my own voice in case something happens to the recording.

I have my TV set to a really low volume to compensate. Generally, this causes no problems, and I would take the same set of actions regardless of whether I had sound or not. However, there are occasions, like when a guard is stopping me, that I can’t hear their warning. So I’ll keep doing what I’m doing despite the game waning me against it.

That guard stopping me… was one of those times.

Welcome to the party. I hope you remembered your chicken suit.

One thing I noticed about this mission after watching the tape is that the chicken suits serve an second purpose, other than just being a joke.

When you consider the massive crowd roaming this space, you realize that the designers needed a way to separate the NPCs that have an effect on the mission from the ones that don’t matter at all. It’s easy to do that with the police officers and the waiters, since they have their own uniforms and large exist on the outskirts of the crowd. You’ll see those guys in plain sight anyway.

But what if you need to make an NPC visible enough to spot and tail at a glance, like the diamond deliver guy. Well, a chicken suit that goofy and flamboyant stands out among the otherwise nondescript NPCs that are scattered about the area.

Or if you choose to not tail the delivery guy and instead look for Mark Pariah’s base on your own, then we need another type of chicken suit so that you can spot your destination once you’ve arrive. This is where the yellow chicken suits that the target’s guards wear come into play. Since they are only in the one building, their presence can tip off an observant player.

At the same time, we can’t have the actual targets blend into all the other chicken suits. I/O Interactive needed to give them their own color palate. This is why they have black chicken suits. As a bonus, they can use the crow motiff for a punny title.

And since this contract takes place during Mardi Gras, the player won’t even question the fact that these guys are all running around in chicken suits. It even adds to the charm of the universe that something so silly can just exist.

And thus, the iconic Hitman chicken suits were born…

And thus we begin one of the most well known and loved missions in Hitman: Blood Money.

This video talks a lot about one of the problems in Blood Money, and that’s how quickly guards are willing to open fire on you.

The guard’s in this game are almost binary. With very few exceptions, they are either fine with you or open fire without any sort of middle ground. You won’t notice it in most situations, since the player openly strangling a character in full view of another should cause alarms.

Entering and exiting a bar at Mardi Gras… isn’t one of those situations. You can argue (and I will fight you on it), that it could maybe be considered suspicious for someone to enter a bar. Even if that were true, that doesn’t warrant being shot on sight.

Even worse, one guard open firing will attract the attention of other guards. And as soon as you know it, you’re either dead, or causing the next St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

This would be solved if there were more states that guards could enter, like Suspicious (but not hostile), which could be cooled off over time.

It’s part of the jank that comes with the game. I love Blood Money, but there’s no denying that it has flaws.

You’ve been invited to a very special day. It’s the day where Suzie’s dad dies during her own birthday party…

This is without a doubt my personal favorite mission in the game. Though the actual house is small, there’s so much going on within that house that you’d be surprised. There are donut-loving FBI Agents, seductive housewives, used panties, pool boys, waiters, and even a party clown. And any or all of them could come into play during the mission.

But the area of play isn’t limited to the house itself. You can also pilfer supplies from neighboring houses, like sedative and a BB gun, to make use of during your real approach.

Players with for knack of sneaking can even sneak in through the basement or the garage without even getting a disguise at all. It’s tricky, but certainly doable.

All sorts of playstyles can find something that caters to them in such a small field of operations. This is where Hitman is at its strongest. The way I demonstrated is only one method of getting Silent Assassin (and admittedly one of the easier ones).

Creativity, exploration, and experimentation is encouraged more than anything else. Shame about the guard who sniffs the panties… 2006 humor doesn’t really translate well into the modern day, but we’ll comment on that in some of the later episodes.

In this episode, we redeem our failures from the previous run:

You can kinda see the genesis of the Contracts Mode that I/O Interactive introduced in Hitman: Absolution (and Hitman 2016 later) here. Even though we have a clear, primary target to take out, we also have two other targets that provide bonuses.

And all three of these targets have their own separate set of opportunities, schedules, and blind spots that can be taken advantage of. In essence, you have three separate contracts in one level, along with the mission to save Agent Smith.

So it’s easy to see how the concept of “focusing on someone other than the mandatory hit” could come about from that. Back when Absolution was first released, I/O Interactive talked about how they took inspiration from players doing something much like all over. We’ll see similar kinds of characters in later missions, but this level is where that starts.

As for the level itself, it other one of those smaller, but very dense locations that I like most in Hitman. They tend to make for some the better levels in the game.

In this episode of Hitman: Blood Money, we save one dude in order to murder three.

…or we would if I didn’t screw it up.

I’m really glad that I messed up the way I did though, because this is a lot of what Hitman ends up being. You try one method, make some mistakes, and learn from them. Then, armed with what you learned the last time, you try something new. This process keeps going until you can make stunning assassinations flawlessly. Going back to that video I mentioned in the last episode, this is a good demonstration of that.

Next time, I manage to do this right…

In this episode, we enter the opera house to enjoy the show… and murder some people!

In order to elaborate a point I made in the episode, this game operates on a “realistic surrealism”. What I meant by that is that the things that Agent 47 can do are completely absurd in the context of real life. There’s no way that his disguises should work, and many of the props in the game (like the over-sized laundry bins and trash cans) are deliberately created out of proportion to facilitate gameplay.

That said, there is a internal consistency with our actions. Even though the disguise mechanic is crazy, we can believe that Agent 47 is skilled enough to pass himself off as someone who belongs there. It’s an abstraction, but it’s a plausible enough abstraction and it creates enough fun opportunities that no one will notice or mind. A lot of game suspends or alters what one would expect of reality to facilitate the feeling of being a master assassin, and that’s largely why the game works.

As to the point about the game making you think like an assassin through repetition, I said I got that from an article. However, it was actually a video. Weirdly enough, Sam linked to me a few days after I recorded this episode. I had already seen it, but he did save me the trouble of having to find it again.

Another new series for you guys, and this time it’s just me, going solo. I’ll be running through and talking a bit about Hitman: Blood Money.

To start off, I should acknowledge the absolutely terrible quality of my audio during this recording. Unfortunately, by the time I started editing these videos, I made already completed three assassinations.

I also admit that I found it extremely hard to keep the dialog going. I’m used to playing off other people after all the many projects I’ve been involved with. Without that buffer, I suffered a bout of stage-fright and just kinda went blank. It’s something I hope to practice and iron out the more I do these solo LPs.

I have written about my experiences playing From Software’s “Soulsborne” games a couple of times on this blog. For that reason, I can distinctly recall my time in these games, which colored my expectations going into Dark Souls 3. To my surprise, and somewhat to my disappointment, the game didn’t feel the way I expected it to. Though it certainly is a shining example of what could be described as a Souls game, Dark Souls 3 felt different than its predecessors. 
As I explored the desolate lands of Boletaria and Lordran, there was a palpable sense of loneliness to the proceedings. It was as if I was cold and alone against a world out to kill me, with its bands of diverse and terrifying opponents setting their differences aside in a concerted effort to block my path and take my life. Despite in many ways going against those same odds, I never had that feeling of isolation and hostility in Dark Souls 3. Rather than a world against me, it felt as if every area was merely a stage for I and my fellow players.
Much of that simply stems from the fact that there are many more players in Dark Souls 3 than there were in previous Souls games I had played. My first runs of Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls were both in the summer of 2015. By then, the games were 6 and 4 years old respectively. There were certainly stragglers like myself who were still engaged with them, but by and large most had already moved on to greener pastures. And even if people were playing these games, my efforts to work with them were minimal. In Demon’s Souls, I spent almost the entire game in Soul form, preventing me from summoning phantoms to aid me. Likewise, I can count the number of bosses I defeated with other players on a single hand. My experiences in both games are mostly mine and mine alone. When push came to shove, I could only rely on myself to get out of a hairy situation.
I can’t say the same thing when I look back on the total sum of my Dark Souls 3 experiences. Strangely, I was excited to, for once, be a part of the community as the game comes out, exploring it together with everyone. In a way, this ended up being counter to what I most enjoyed in its older siblings. Talking with my Twitter friends, being guided to secrets by random strangers, aiding other people and being aided in turn, these were all wonderful experiences in their own right. However, it meant that my journey was less a result of my own effort and accomplishments, and more the gestalt of all of those who joined me on my path. Random strangers who I will never know, and who will never know me, were all working together to achieve a common goal. Even when I was invaded/invading, it felt like a respectable contest between peers and less an attempt of one person to sabotage another. I could use many adjectives to describe my adventure, but “lonely” is not one of them.
The NPCs also seemed a lot more welcoming in Dark Souls 3 than they have been in the past. My runs of Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls are marked by a sense that there weren’t many people in the world that would even think to assist me. Outside of the Nexus, I remember that non-hostile NPCs were scarce. It was at least 10 hours before I brought my first new NPC back to the Nexus with me. Until then, the ones I had encountered had either perished unceremoniously (sorry Ostrava), or actively screwed me over (which is why, to this day, I murder Patches every chance I get). Just finding a truly friendly face was a rare treat. The same can be said of Dark Souls. While there are certainly a few kind folks who inhabit the Firelink Shrine, most of them are battered and broken when you find them. And by the time I finished my journey, the most friendly of the lot, like Siegmeyer and Solarie, had met with terrible fates.
By contrast, in my first 10 hours of Dark Souls 3, I encountered a Robin Hood-esque thief, a young woman who knows miracles and her protector, an old pyromancer, a Darkmoon blade from the Sunless Realms, and Siegmeyer’s more capable descendant. All of these people had offered their aid to me in some form, either as a vendor or a companion. Where friendly faces were rare before, they were quite common place now. I did not have to look far to find someone with a vested interest in my success. Far from the isolation I once felt, Dark Souls 3 provided an almost constant comfort by offering me my choice of assistants and allies.
Even though the abundance of other players and NPCs are large contributors to why I have lost that adventurous, yet isolating spirit of the previous games, there is another reason. At this point, I have played so many Souls games, and particularly so many Dark Souls games, that the mechanics and world are largely ingrained into my mind. When I was a new player braving the perils of Boletaria, and later Lordran, I often fell for the tricks and traps laid about. I would die to ambushes than I should have seen coming in hindsight. I spent many deaths learning each enemies attack patterns and figuring out the weaknesses therein. I crashed through broken boards and into traps that would be noted and avoided in the future. The designs of From Software were alien to me. Learning them was half of the battle, and half the fun.
Unfortunately, there’s only so far the Soulsian “fair” ambushes can go before they reach the territory of just spawning in mooks in lieu of hiding them in creative ways. That’s not necessarily From Software’s fault, because it is infinitely easier for players to figure out their tendencies than it is for them to think of new ways to surprise those same players. But it does mean that I have gotten much better at predicting when an ambush is likely to happen than I used to be.
I don’t remember ever being truly caught off guard while exploring the shattered remains of Lothric and the lands surrounding it. At the same time, I have a distinct memory of an archway in Irithyll of the Boreal Valley. I had not seen nor heard any enemies in the room on the other side, but I suspected that something was “off”. Looking down and to my left, I saw a ledge that I could easily reach by dropping down. Going into the hallway through the opening on this ledge, I climbed a ladder that lead me to the other side of the room beyond the archway, bypassing a group of enemies waiting to ambush me. By just following a slight “off” feeling, I had anticipated and subverted a snare that I would have easily fallen for before. At the time, I felt smart for having trusted my instincts. In hindsight, all I really did was just fall back on knowledge I had gained from 4 previous games’ worth of experience. Not only wasn’t I surprised by the enemies’ tricks, I couldn’t be, because I had already fallen for them before.

Instead of making me believe I was a single man out against a world which wants nothing more than me to fail, Dark Souls 3 felt like reuniting with an old friend I hadn’t seen in awhile. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that quiet nostalgia. But the dreadful anxiety I experienced the first time, as I explored the worlds of Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, is a large part of why I fell in love with the franchise. As disappointing as it is, I’m not sure that one could ever adequately capture that atmosphere that drew me in when I first started Soulsborne. Though I want so badly to feel that isolation, that growing sense of isolation and excitement. I just don’t believe it’s possible given how large an influence Soulsborne has become. It’s hard to feel alone and afraid when in the comfort of your home, surrounded by the old and familiar. These games have become as much a home to me as the house I live in, and that’s exactly what I don’t want them to be.
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