Today, we're going to give you Part 2 of this delicious discussion, where Tore talks of user testing, Instinct and crappy AI from previous Hitman titles. Does Tore also have an opinion on the Hitman film? Read on...
SPOnG: You’ve made two Kane & Lynch games inbetween the last few Hitman titles. Both series are very cinematic games in their own right - did you take anything from Kane & Lynch and implement it into Hitman at all?
Tore Blystad: Well, there’s always a sort of synergy in a small studio like us. Some of the people that have worked on Kane & Lynch are now working on Hitman, so we’re always learning when we make a new game. Even people from Mini Ninjas are working on Hitman now. There’s nothing in particular we’ve taken, but we’re all hopefully getting better at what we’re doing and learning what we can do in terms of gameplay.
SPOnG: What about the other Square Enix studios? Do you collaborate with the other teams at all on certain elements of your games?
Tore Blystad: We try to get as close together as we can with Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Montreal as we can, of course we’re making games that are similar. Tomb Raider and Hitman can’t really be compared, but they’re both in the same kind of action realm with stealth and cinematic values. Deus Ex and Thief are pretty close to us in many ways as well. There is still a sort of barrier between the companies, but we try to erode that because there is a lot to learn and these games are very difficult to make.
Tore Blystad: (Laughs) Well, we could try it, but they’re two kinds of clashing styles. Agent 47 is very non-spoken while Kane and Lynch are just talking all the time. We don’t know - I love this kind of crossover stuff, but let’s see what we can do.
SPOnG: You mentioned the older Hitman games were archaic. Could you be more specific as to what exactly you felt was necessary to change?
Tore Blystad: As well as assessing it from a team perspective we also had a lot of user research, where we asked Hitman fans and non-Hitman fans to try the new game and all of the old games. We watched their reactions, and we found that many people who hadn’t seen the old games got very intimidated by them because they’re difficult to control.
You never really learn how to play them... you’re never taught how to do things, and you’re just dropped into this world. Someone playing it will think ‘shit, what have I got to do, my target is over there and I have no idea how to get there’ and they just get killed a million times.
So we ended up improving how we presented the new game better to the player, both in terms of the controls and the GUI (graphical user interface) ten times over. We’ll probably do it another ten times before we release the game as well, to make it as intuitive as possible without becoming stupid.
The worst thing we can do is to dumb the game down - it has more depth now than the series has had before, with more strategies running through the game. But while we do this, we also have to present the game in a way that feels more comfortable to them and other players. It shouldn’t be hard to be Agent 47, control him and do some cool moves. It shouldn’t be hard to isolate a target and take them out in a manner of your choosing.
Tore Blystad: It depends on the game really, in its own right. We were talking about Crystal Dynamics - they’ve built a lot of contextual menus into their games, such as when you light a torch and things like that. For us it’s a little bit difficult because there’s so many things you can interact with and so different ways to do stuff. So we’ve been doing some experimentation with it but I think it depends on what kind of game you’re making.
Everybody making these kinds of third or first-person games want a very cinematic game so want to remove all the GUIs at any given time. But as a game the size of you always want to give information to the player, at least the right information at the right time.
We experimented, for instance I’m not sure if you noticed as Agent 47 is walking dressed as a cop in the corridor, and he is using Instinct to fool the other cops, we removed the GUI except for this Instinct bar running down, because you don’t need everything else. You only need to see whether you’re actually fooling the enemies or not. You have this whole screen and you want to make it a cinematic experience.
In the past we’ve had all these GUI elements telling you that you’re blending in and doing things right, but you’re just looking at this mechanical tool rather than feeling like you’re actually doing something. We’re trying - there’s this sort of struggle in the team to get GUI into the screen and to get it out. We’ll see who wins in the end (laughs)!