If the title of this episode has you confused, my attempt at “The Fixer” was… less than ideal.

I’ll be honest with you, I was really bummed that I bungled that mission at the end.

But in hindsight, it’s good that I was able to capture that on camera, to demonstrate the true finality of these Elusive Targets. Because of my failure, I will never be able to succeed at “The Fixer”, even though I know exactly what I did wrong and how I can correct my mistake if I could have a second chance.

Yet, despite my failure here, I still think that these Elusive Targets are an awesome addition to the game. This story I’m telling through my experience here is completely unique to me. No other person will be able to replicate what happened in these last two episodes.

There’s something inherently unique about video games in that even if two players have similar stories, going only similar beats, no two players will ever have the exact same experience. These Elusive Targets capitalize on that, even if the one-attempt clause can lead to frustration. The benefit of giving each player a single, unique story of how they either cleverly found their own path or failed in some spectacular, tense, and exciting manner, is worth that frustration born from hindsight.

It’s something I look forward to every time an Elusive Target is announced.

Today, we take another look at Elusive Targets with “The Fixer”.

The tricky part of an Elusive Target is that players can restart as many time as they want until they complete an objective.

IO allows players to restart because they want to offer them the opportunity to scout out the area and how the Elusive Target interacts with the otherwise established NPCs and routines. If they make a mistake during the approach, or if they learn some new information that gives them a new possible approach, they can even go back to the planning stages to account for it.

When the mission is just to kill a single target, this works just fine. This means that players are afforded the chance to plan and scout as long as they want, only sticking their neck out during the kill attempt and the escape. If players screw up before they kill the target, it’s not a big deal.

However, throwing another objective into the mix changes this dynamic. Now, players need to decide on not just their approach to each objective, but also in what order they want to take them on. Once even a single objective (like retrieving the diamonds in this contract) is complete, restarts are no longer an option.

That’s why I consider going after the diamonds so quickly to be my biggest mistake here. Out of the two tasks, killing the target was the more difficult of them. Even then, had I not picked up the diamonds, I would’ve still been in the clear to restart if things went wrong.

Because players can’t restart after completing an objective, they need to assign and evaluate risk when more than one is in play. It counter-intuitively makes more sense to go for more difficult and risky objectives first, because if the player fails, they can always restart. Leaving the easier tasks for last minimizes risk. I’m not sure if IO intended to have the effect, and I’m doubly not sure if I like it, but that’s the way it is.

Welcome to the next installment of our Kingdom Hearts Primer. This time, we cover the game that begat many of the concepts that confuse the hell out of people trying to get into Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories.

We hope you look forward to this as much as we look forward to presenting it, with the aid of our video source: AtRiley.

And now, we end our little escapade in Colorado.

The story of Hitman has always been a precarious position. As a series, Hitman has always been gameplay first. While a story exists, and there is a canon for the series, it has never been an important part of the series.

There has only been one Hitman game where the story came to the forefront and had a large impact, and that was Absolution. You might remember Absolution as one of the worst received Hitman games by fans and critics alike.

While this was partially due to the story being an absolute mess, a large part of it was that the focus on the story made the actual missions unfun. It was less of a Hitman game and more of a traditional, but mediocre stealth game with Hitman tropes thrown in every now and then. And ironically, the assassinations felt more contrived than ever in the context of the backwater, stereotypically grindhouse flick it tried to be.

There’s a story to Hitman (2016) too, to be sure. However, it takes a different approach. Like Blood Money before it, the missions are book-ended by story-related scenes. And while they have solid acting, direction, and a decent plot to go along with it, they know exactly what they need to do an aspire to do no more than that.

Each mission is given a briefing that provides context to how the target has become a “bad dude” and why Agent 47 is hired to assassinate them. At the end, they are given a cut-scene that ties the assassination into the game’s larger, overall plot. It’s not particularly fancy, and the story isn’t some highbrow melodrama, but for Hitman it doesn’t need to be. All it needs to do is tie together all the happy murder fun times.

Starring John Travolta and Nick Cage…

To elaborate on a point I was making in the middle of this episode regarding the online nature of this game.

When players launch Hitman (2016), the game will immediately attempt to connect with I/Os servers. If the game fails to connect, then the player can still continue to play the game, but in “Offline Mode”.

This is significant, because when in Offline Mode, players cannot do anything aside from the story mission, and cannot use any of the tools, starting locations, or smuggling locations that they unlocked. Summarily, they can play the story missions as if they never completed any challenges. And any challenges they complete while offline do not count and will not be applied once connection is reestablished.

In other words, unless players are online, they will play Hitman in the worst way possible. As a game, it technically works without an internet connection, but none of the really cool features will work without it.

I can understand that in some ways. I don’t mind that leaderboards and the player made contacts can’t be used without connecting to their servers. It also makes sense for the Elusive Targets require a connection in a way, since they’re timed events and otherwise players could just readjust their system clocks to keep taking cracks at them.

That said, it is unacceptable that many of these other features require a connection. Completing challenges in order to gain area mastery, level up, and acquire new gear is *the* fundamental gameplay loop intended to inspire players to repeat missions using different approaches and tactics. It is why I have personally put more time into this game that I have all the other Hitman games combined (and I beat every Hitman game except Codename 47).

But even if they wanted to prevent cheating, and prevented players from completing challenges unless connected for that reason, I still would not understand why players can’t use items they have already unlocked while they are offline. And even if players could not get credit for completing an Escalation unless they were online (because they give mastery points on completion), players should still be able to make an attempt/practice run of them.

In the face of an otherwise amazing game (remember, I still say this is better than Blood Money), it’s a serious critique. And it’s not something that should be let go of, even if the game as a whole is well-executed.

Confession: I have never watched Face Off, starring John Travolta and Nicholas Cage.

Welcome to Colorado, one of the most interesting missions in the game.

In hindsight, after taking this footage and playing Colorado many times afterward, the most striking thing about it is just how small the level actually is.

I talked a bit in this episode about how the episodic model can, in some unexpected ways, hamper the level design. Because new story missions have to be large enough to justify the month or so wait between episodes, and have enough content to tide players over until another episode is released, they tend to be fairly large.

But when I think back to some of my favorite missions in Blood Money, like the infamous birthday party level, the actual area of operations in them aren’t very big. However, they are dense with opportunities and viable methods to both infiltrate the building and take out the target. This is also true on the tutorial missions for Hitman 2016.

Colorado is larger than those levels, but it also houses four separate targets and is much smaller than any of the other maps, that each take up different (but interwoven and overlapping) segments of the level. In this way, it’s not impossible to think of this level as four smaller, compact Hitman levels combined.

It’s not as good as Paris or Sapienza, but it’s a well-designed level and the closest thing to those smaller, but denser maps I liked in older Hitman games that we’re likely to get on the episodic production pipeline.

Today, we finish our discussion on Escalation Contracts and the “stack” of Hitman.

Last time, I talked about how Escalations help Hitman players improve their improvisational skills and ability to adapt to new conditions on old missions.

Each level of an escalation adds a new condition, which could be anything from a new target to a level change, or even something as simple as forcing players to hide the bodies. No matter what this condition is though, it must build on top of the old map and the old objectives.

In a way, this is exactly what an Elusive Target is, just without the hard time limit and inability to retry after objectives start getting completed. Elusive Targets always take place on maps that have already been introduced in the story missions, like everything else. However, they are adding new NPCs and objectives, with their own routines, and asking players to either kill them or work around them.

For the player who does many of these Escalations, this is not much of a step up to what they’re already used to. In fact, many of the Escalation are quite challenging in their own rights.

Next time, we get back to the story with the fifth episode: Colorado.

And now, we get to talk a bit about Escalations in Hitman.

Continuing from where I left off last time…

In his article about the success of Hitman, Kirk Hamilton posits that Escalations help players master small subsections of a given map, and he’s not wrong. However, I would add that they add a more important tool to the repertoire of the Hitman player.

That is: They add the element of improvisation and planning to Hitman.

That’s not to say that players don’t learn these skills during the story missions. Naturally, most of the gameplay in any Hitman game comes from analyzing the environment and what tools one has access to when pulling off the assassination. However, both story missions and contracts give players a lot of safety when pulling them off. Even if one isn’t particularly cunning or sneaky, they can still pull of an assassination, and might even pull one off spectacularly.

In Escalations, that’s no longer true. Sure, anybody can complete the first few stages of a given Escalation Contract. (And I’m well aware of my performance in this episode as I say this.) However, as new constraints and conditions are added to the mission in later Escalation levels, players have to teach themselves how to handle these new complications. If a mission is otherwise the same, but tweaked in this particular way, how will you, as the player, be able to account for that new factor. The player is forced to improvise in a way that the other modes don’t force them to.

Likewise with Contracts, Escalations are usually devoid of the scripted kills often seen in the story missions. Most of the targets end up just being otherwise nameless/faceless NPCs with an AI routine, some spoken lines, and not much else. This means that instead of scripted sequences, players must learn to adapt to playing within the systems of Hitman, rather than relying on Opportunities.

This helps to prepare for the Elusive Targets, and I’ll discuss that preparation in the last part of the Escalation discuss, next time.

Today, we explore the contracts mode in Hitman.

I got the idea for making both this and the Escalation contract episodes (yes, plural) after reading an opinion piece from Kirk Hamilton on Kotaku. In the piece, he talks about the what I have come to call the “stack” of Hitman, which I also eluded to in my episodes on Elusive Targets. Hamilton and I agree on the overall layout of the stack but not necessarily what every piece of it does.

We both agree on the story missions. Those are the “safest” missions in the game. Players can save and load anywhere they want in the middle of these missions, which gives them freedom to fail and try again with impunity. However, since most targets have several scripted “opportunity” sequences that lead one through an easy path to isolate or kill the target, there’s an upper limit to know much one can learn just by going through this mode over and over.

Contracts is a lot more freeform, owing to their status as player-generated missions. While contracts take place on the same maps as story missions, with the same NPCs and AI routines, the twist is that the targets, up to 5, can be anyone on the map. And unlike story missions, players cannot save while in the middle of performing a player-made Contract.

In order to succeed as a contract player and as a contract creator, one will naturally begin to explore the maps and learn about layouts, AI routines, and item placement. Because it’s impossible to save, and because they are player-made, contracts are not as easy to perform as story missions. However, they are low-stakes and can be retried as often as the player wants.

For me, I didn’t know about that secret entrance to the mansion via the waterfall, nor did I know about the Red and Green Plumbers, until I played this contract. And that’s far from the only thing I learned about these maps from Contracts that I never knew from rising in Mastery level by completing challenges in the story mission.

Escalation Contracts are next in the stack, but we’ll get to those next time.

At long last, we have arrived at the first finale of our Kingdom Hearts Primer.

It’s a shame that Gamer’s Little Playground had to change the music in the end for copyright reasons, because that finale had me bawling as a child.

There’s not much more that I can add to our commentary on this episode. A lot went on, but not many details need to be elaborated on in these notes.

Next up will be Chain of Memories. Gamer’s Little Playground didn’t have a video for it at the time, so we used one from another YouTuber named “AtRiley”. I hope you enjoyed this first part of the series.

If you have any questions about Kingdom Hearts 1, feel free to leave them in the comments of either the video or this post. Please note that questions for later games should be saved for when we do the primers on them.