Would you play a Hitman spinoff where a bunch of people are dropped in a map with the task of assassinating a target (another player)? Each player would need to blend in with the NPCs to inconspicuously assassinate their target while trying not to be assassinated themselves or be noticed by the NPCs like in the normal Hitman.
When you kill your target you get a new one among the remaining players who aren't currently being hunted (because their would be assassin got killed or logged out), until only one is left.
Perhaps it could even be that killing someone who isn't your target would result in an instant loss, to prevent people from killing random players they encounter to reduce the number of opponents on the map.
Is this a stupid idea? I think it would be more fun than the typical battle royale games, but i don't know how popular can something like this get.
I dig it, kinda reminds me of the ol' AC multiplayer.
Jeremiah Gutierrez
Never played any AC game. Got any link that talks about this multiplayer you mention?
Nathan Myers
it was basically a conga line of assassinations. you get the objective to assassinate one person and only get a marker to their general area. once one person assassinated someone and gave them themselves away usually shit would go down and everyone just starts rushing to each other. was pretty fun up until you hit high level and everyone starts using the broken poison item which ruined multiplayer. poison has no animation and you die 4 seconds after being touched so you never really know who killed you
Noah Hughes
>poison has no animation and you die 4 seconds after being touched so you never really know who killed you same shit in hitman but the poison only a 1 time use so i guess it is something
Ryder Reed
Ah, sounds fun. With the Hitman gampelay you'd have long-range weapons, as well as silent/discrete ones and the game mechanics, so you can more easily get away with an assassination without getting killed, and the instant game over for killing a non-target would make other players not care about you killing another player unless they were the ones tasked with killing you.
Would this solve the issues in AC?
Easton Cruz
yea but in asscreed poison was a replacement for the hidden blade. so instead of the animation where you fuckin shank them in the back and anyone looking for you can see you doing it, it had nothing and all you had to do was graze your target so then they die with without knowing who the killer looks like and anyone looking for you can't spot you in what would normally be the give away action where you need to hide quickly. hitman the needle has a shanking animation and the bottle you're clearly drugging food/drink
Sebastian Scott
asscreed brotherhood which is what i did multiplayer on had the single shot arm pistol where i sometimes i would just jump rooftops and kill from a distance. AC the problem wasn't people killing non-targets. you were definitely a target when you got poisoned. but it allowed for revenge kills which became impossible with poison
Cooper Martin
That basic premise has been done in a few different games, and as much as I love the concept, it'd honestly never work or play out like you'd want it to.
First of all no one would "blend in" with NPC's, because that's simply not the most effective or efficient tactic, everyone would just corner camp with heat seeking briefcases or run around like absolute fucktards and the amount of effort you'd have to go to in order to curb player behavior would completely kill the experience.
Sadly nuanced social/stealth games like The Ship simply don't appeal to the vast majority of the market, they're conceptually brilliant, but they just don't quite work, maybe that'll change one day, but in a world where rubbish like PUBG, Fortnite etc take centre stage, not any time soon.
Completely unrelated note, whilst I know IOI have been hiring network engineers for the last few years, I can tell you right now we are so fucking far away from being able to network a game of Hitman's complexity that you're not going to see it in the next 5+ years, maybe not even 10 with Hitman's current level of fidelity.
Zachary Lee
it's called space station 13
Austin Bailey
yea all we got is ghost mode where you compete for the same target and toss coins at each others parallel universe games
John Long
I'd play a horror themed hitman game where you have to slaughter your targets in the most brutal way and get more points the most interesting way you do it, maybe killing people ironically like an old sea captain getting drowned or skewered on a ships bowsprit, scaring people who find the body and such. Could even have different kinds of killers like a cleaver dude, a ghost that sneaks and kills silently or someone who likes to poison
Yeah, that was my main gripe with this idea. Couldn't there be some game characteristics that would prevent people from acting stupidly? For exmaple you could make running around make the NPCs suspicious and follow you around or something. Or you could have some stats about the way you kill your target, and the more stealthy you are the more points you get, then, people with a lot of points that the game thinks are god players would be paired together while people who fuck around would play among each other like in racing games.
>Completely unrelated note, whilst I know IOI have been hiring network engineers for the last few years, I can tell you right now we are so fucking far away from being able to network a game of Hitman's complexity that you're not going to see it in the next 5+ years, maybe not even 10 with Hitman's current level of fidelity. Not even a toned down version of it?
Evan Myers
I'd love to play a horror manhunt game like the idea in the OP, but everything is dark and you can't see shit anyway. You have an arrow (or some other visual clue) pointing to your target and the only way to know that your killer is getting close is the increased heartbeat or breathing.
Andrew Brown
>Couldn't there be some game characteristics that would prevent people from acting stupidly? You can certainly encourage people to play in a particular fashion through mechanics, but Hitman is already a total shit show of exploits and "role playing" within the game literally only works in a SP, and possibly COOP setting, the second you make it PVP or competitive at all it becomes an entirely different beast.
>Not even a toned down version of it? Not even a toned down version of it, Hitman is so reliant on exact positions of NPC's, their view cones, AI states etc that trying to network that information between two clients in a large open map just isn't feasible with current methodologies. You would be horrified at just how out of sync most MP games are that entail AI. If a zombie is standing a meter to the left and facing a different direction on one client to the other in L4D, it really doesn't matter, in a Hitman game that completely breaks it.
I mean AAA games struggle to accurately network a few dozen players with no AI in the mix, you start throwing literally hundreds of AI, that are way more complex than mere zombie fodder into the fray, in addition to layered systemic design where even *slight* de-syncs between clients can be absolutely catastrophic and you're fucked.
Not to say it can't be done at a basic level, Payday 2 did it, and whilst far from perfect, it was pretty serviceable, but in most cases you're only talking about extremely basic AI and rarely more than half a dozen guard AI at that, and even then the de-sync issues were rampant.
Ryan Scott
Sounds like the ship or bloody good time.
Josiah Sullivan
Oh, I see... Thank you very much for the insight, user.
I guess we'll just have to wait then. Hopefully we'll still be into videogames when this is actually implemented properly.
Easton Gomez
Not quite the same thing, but it looks interesting, thank you.
Nicholas Martin
>Hopefully we'll still be into videogames when this is actually implemented properly. As long as we still have awesome devs like IOI willing to push the envelope there's hope, and it's pretty evident they're pretty keen.
It is an absolute wild concept, it's just that a lot of current networking is literally smoke and mirrors, the effort is on making it "good enough" and then just trying to hide the networking imperfections rather than shooting for kind of accuracy.
I mean shit, even Siege has issues with corner peeking and people getting killed by people who aren't even visible on their end and MMO's are still using the same basic setup as Everquest 20 years ago etc
Daniel Williams
I rarely if ever notice such things in normal gameplay, but now that you're mentioning them it does make sense, and I can definitely see it. It's very interesting. I'll definitely research it more in depth when I have time. Are you a game dev yourself?
Adam Peterson
>Would you play a Hitman spinoff where a bunch of people are dropped in a map with the task of assassinating a target (another player)? Hitman Battle Royale Put Fortnite in the grave
Hudson Ortiz
>Are you a game dev yourself? For the better part of 15 years, now i'm just a burnt out, jaded, 30 something who makes bad animated television in between bouts of alcoholism.
And even if you have no interest in Fortnite, I highly recommend all of their GDC talks on the game, this one in particular delves into some good detail about a lot of the considerations with networking. youtube.com/watch?v=KHWquMYtji0 youtube.com/watch?v=1xiwJukvb60
