by: Mike "The Button Man" Pearce | April 2, 2004
HitmanHQ's resident bar monkey delves deep into the next Hitman game. Real deep.
So, IOI already has a tap on an amazing resource. There are some near
universally acclaimed Hitman levels out there, and they get the chance to reuse them,
rework them, and give us an entirely new experience (even more ways of knocking off
Triad Negotiators can only be a good thing in my opinion).
Mixed with this are going
to be some new, hopefully memorable, levels, characters and situations.
On paper, it looks like they can't lose. But of course, care an attention must be had.
If there is truly just a feeling of rehashing older work, no matter how good it was
originally, then the game is in for a bit of a rough ride. Sure, new players will love
what they see, and old hands will no doubt enjoy the experience, but we want new flesh.
How can we get that with old material?
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Urban settings are what fans have been craving.
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Well, the first solution to this is level design. Just because it’s a rerun doesn't
mean it has to be the same, especially if we're dealing with a dreamlike
state - anything could be different. And one of the features that IOI is touting
is more open ended level design. We thought we were nearly in gaming heaven with
Codename 47's level design: open structures, free movement and multiple solutions
were
extremely rare at the time. Hitman 2 may have
laxed a touch here, but it was still
a fairly free affair.
However, with Contracts, IOI have claimed that they have gone to town on the
whole affair. Where there may have been three solutions to the Wang Fou Restaurant
mission in Codename 47, we might have the opportunity for many more now - perhaps adding
sniping, bombs, drugging, poisons, impersonation, underground infiltration and so on.
In addition, it looks like there may be a wider range of more useful disguises for 47's
use, and there has been mention that the disguise intelligence has been upgraded further
from Hitman 2 (more on this later). So, just because we're dropping in for a second visit
doesn't mean that we're going to have to simply repeat everything again, which is
probably good for those who don't like to see fat men in thongs.
The Engine
The Glacier hasn't stood still either. Examining its evolution, we can see some interesting
things. Glacier has been used in Codename 47, Silent Assassin, Freedom Fighters and now Contracts.
There has been a solid, gradual development over the first three of those games.
Codename 47 was an eye opener. It gave us sumptuously detailed, large, cold worlds,
reasonably populated, and with realistic physics. The impressive AI, target finding,
real time physics (don't forget the curtains outside Lee Hong's restaurant, or the jungle plants)
all added to the experience and realism of the game world.
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Pedestrians littered the streets in Freedom Fighters.
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The Glacier engine in Hitman 2 was less of a major step forward - more a bit of a hop.
It did give us even more detailed, larger levels, higher populations and the beginnings
of a weather system. It still had impressive, if sometimes foolish AI, and it added
the identification system as a gameplay element. However, it removed some of the more
realistic enhancements such as the plant/water/fabric physics, the mirrors, and the
blood spattering, and ultimately looked and felt slightly less impressive for it.
However, Freedom Fighters was another major step forward for the engine. Suddenly, we
had a fully fledged weather system, capable heavy snow and rain. Despite its cartoon
feel, we had even more detailed levels than before. Included with this were far more
detailed character and vehicle models. But the two most important additions to Glacier
here were population levels and AI. Freedom Fighters could, sometimes at a bit of a
performance hit, show twenty or thirty people on the screen at the same time, and
sometimes many of them were controlled by one of the most vicious and devious tactical
AI systems I've ever had the pleasure to play against. And this no doubt will follow
straight on into Contracts.
Looking at Contracts, the current iteration of the Glacier engine simply looks gorgeous.
The list of features is pretty astounding. We have improved shadowing, the return of
real-time mirrors, real-time volumetric lighting, improved dynamics (that red tie
should get more and more realistic), virtual cameras (for virtual cameramen), other
reflective surfaces (blood!), dynamic weather systems, post-render filtering such as
camera blur, and depth of field control.
