Hitman Absolution - Contracts playthrough [eu]

Welcome! I'm Tore Blystad, the Game Director for Hitman Absolution and beside me I have Travis Barbour from the community team at IO Interactive. and we are having a look at Contracts mode this time, which is the new online mode for Hitman Absolution. Contracts mode was inspired by the way that the community was using the old games in the Hitman franchise to create alternative hits on characters within the game So we're using that as a starting point for creating what we call Contracts, which is basically asking the simple question of: "What would happen if any character within the game could be a target?" and we kind of took it from there. This section of the game takes place in a dark and rainy Chicago where Agent 47 is on the run from the Chicago PD. One of the things we got a lot of feedback on after the first time showing this level was actually the little story that goes on between Fisano, the rookie officer and the Sargeant. A lot of people were asking us why we had to kill Fisano, they were saying that they would have kept him alive but we actually killed him and they suggested that we should have killed the Sargeant instead as revenge for Fisano. That sounds like a pretty good contract to set up so that's what we're going to show here: We're going to try and take down the Sargeant Yeah, basically, Sargeant Meyer as he's called, it turns out that he's actually a pretty good and interesting target in this part of the game so he was a very natural part of what we call Featured Contracts which we have in every section of the game. There's a door here marked as the exit which is a different one from the story mode, so essentially this means that a section that was simply an A-B section within the game where you have to get past all of these officers that were looking for 47, now there's a hit! And every other condition of the level is still in place, the officers are still looking for us as Agent 47 but now the added challenge is to take down Sargeant Meyer. So anything we learn from playing through the game in story mode is something we can use in Contracts as well; knowing how the NPC's are positioning themselves, how their patrols are... these are all things that you can use to your advantage. The basic premise for a contract is that you take down your mark, escape the scene and then you'll get paid. And on top of that is a number of bonus conditions that the creator of the contract can set up. For this particular contract, there is a stipulation that you should be unseen, which makes it quite a bit more difficult to manoeuver through this area especially since our target, the Sargeant Meyer is standing in the middle of the room surrounded by his sub-ordinates so it's a pretty daunting contract to pull off. One of the other conditions is that the Sargeant needs to be taken out with an elimination which means that we need to get really, really close to him and as you said, he's surrounded by lots of people so that's something else that makes it quite difficult. So you can see we had a small window of opportunity where the Sargeant was unguarded which we took advantage of and we need to escape without getting spotted. You can see there's a lot of attention on us but it's still possible to get out. They're probably going to find his body soon if they didn't do it already, which makes things a little more dificult and delicate. The patterns of the AI is obviously something which as a player you have a lot of opportunities to tamper with but the moment that they go into 'hunt' mode or when they know something really bad is happening, the way that they react is not really predictable because you don't know where they will go. If they send out search parties after you it actually gets pretty difficult to predict whatever the AI is up to. We should earn a pretty big payoff here and we managed to escape in 47 seconds which is always a nice touch. What we're going to do now is take a different section of the level that we first showed and create the contract and then show you how these contracts are actually made. So one thing we did with Contracts was having the creator play the game as he creates the contract and this 'play-to-create' mode as we call it is something that we did to avoid having a cumbersome editor or a god mode or something. So as you can see now, I'm creating the contract whilst playing it and as you can see it looks very much like the game does in story mode except that in the upper right corner there is what we call a target tracker and within the world, you can see that there is this little 'mark' that you can add to NPC's. If you mark an NPC, you are making him a target and if you kill him then the game will record how you killed him and with what weapon and in which disguise and if you were seen or loud or whatever and will store that within the data. Mr Dean Fenner here is not a very interesting target though, he is more like a sad guy so we'll try to find another target and move further into ShangriLa here. And here we can see we're in an area that looks far more interesting. Lots of things going on, lots of characters moving around and a much better place for finding a target. And we'll select a knife to kill this guy instead of just taking him down with the Silverballers because we want it to be more up close and personal and you can choose to end the contract in this window but it's still not a very big contract and we'd like to add a little bit more to it. We've still got room for two more targets so we'll try to move a little bit further into ShangriLa to find another opportunity. So you've picked up the hammer here. Is that for a weapon or a distraction, or...? Who knows? Often when you create a contract you will be more mindful about how you play through the level and you might do some things that you wouldn't have thought of yourself but just on-the-fly and finding out what you can use it for. So the hammer for instance we can use as a distraction to lure this target in to a specific place to kill him. Yeah, so now we just need to get out of here. I know there's an exit down here by the elevator and it's heavily guarded by the police. I could choose to just gun these officers down but that would also become a part of my contract and I don't want to do that. I want this to be slightly more challenging. Alright, so here we can see the elevator down at the far end but we still don't want to tamper anymore with the AI, we wan't to get past unseen and without them even knowing we were here. Well it looks like these hippies have a disco here and setting it off will also cause a distraction drawing the police away from the exit. We can see that as we do that, they are being drawn into the room and we have a clean getaway to the elevator. So that's the end of the contract and there's two targets, the conditions of how they were killed, which disguise was used and since I played through this contract pretty well, there's a lot of different conditions set and this creates a quite challenging contract and now we'll see Travis try to play through it. Yeah, so the first thing I'm going to do is actually change up my disguise, which should give me the benefit of getting through the level a little bit quicker. It's also going to mean that I might not get the full payoff because the conditions that were set meant that I had to use Agent 47's suit, which I now of course don't have access to. So straight away you can see the benefit of using the police disguise; I can sneak through this area a little quicker using my blend-in. Time is also a factor in Contracts but it only starts ticking from when the first target is killed. Well this guy's actually trying to get the safe open, he's asking if there's a combination and he's gone off to see if the other officers know where it is so I'm going to go over there and grab the combination to the safe, which is saved in this notebook and I'm going to open up the safe and see if I can use what is inside. So I've just triggered the radio to get the officer back inside and i've also armed the explosives in the safe, so I'm kind of setting up something here that's not too difficult to guess but let's see how it plays out. Rather than use the disco, I've managed to use the AI to get him to call the other officers away from the door so I have the clean geataway now but I still have to take out the target Again, I'm not going to be using the right weapon or disguise so I'll lose some points there for not meeting the conditions but... It does look more spectacular! Alright, so that was a quick look at Contracts mode from Hitman Absolution and we're hoping that when you guys in the community get hands-on with this it will create magic. And we'll see some new stuff popping up in the game that we never imagined from the development team. yeah, that's definitely what we're looking forward to the most; seeing the crazy and inventive things that you guys can come up with. thanks for taking the time to watch this whole video all the way through and we'll see you on November 20th for Hitman Absolution!