NEWS
by Mark Barley
IO Interactive: "Teaching choices is difficult" regarding 'Hitman: Absolution'
Developer IO Interactive's upcoming stealth title Hitman: Absolution has choices, but teaching players to make those choices is the real chore.
The game's director Tore Blystad stated in a recent interview with Gamasutra that stressing choices is often the most difficult task for developers.
“It’s been a lot back and forth between level design, and game design, and technical design, to come up with something that we believe can tackle anything you do in an interesting way, and not just kill you instantly.” Blystad stressed, “Because it’s very much about the player pushing the game, and the game pushing back, instead of just using a sledgehammer and just killing you instantly, and then restarting,”
“It’s quite difficult, actually, to educate players that this is what the game is trying to serve you,” he continued, “because people are increasingly used to games where you’re told to do one thing, and if you stray from this line, there will be nothing else around. It’s like, you have this experience, and that’s it. So we’re telling people, actually, 'No, no, no. You choose by yourself'."
“If you want to go in here, or here, or if you want to kill them or not, it actually changes the way you play the game — when you understand that you have the choice,” Blystad concluded, “So in the first couple of levels, we are continuously working [on it]. And still back in Copenhagen we’re trying to find out, are we teaching the players everything that they need to understand about the gameplay and the possibilities of the game?”
Hitman: Absolution is out at the end of the month.
“It’s quite difficult, actually, to educate players that this is what the game is trying to serve you,” he continued, “because people are increasingly used to games where you’re told to do one thing, and if you stray from this line, there will be nothing else around. It’s like, you have this experience, and that’s it. So we’re telling people, actually, 'No, no, no. You choose by yourself'."
“If you want to go in here, or here, or if you want to kill them or not, it actually changes the way you play the game — when you understand that you have the choice,” Blystad concluded, “So in the first couple of levels, we are continuously working [on it]. And still back in Copenhagen we’re trying to find out, are we teaching the players everything that they need to understand about the gameplay and the possibilities of the game?”