Tore Blystad: Basically, Instinct is an economy that you can gain as a player by doing Hitman-style moves and actions. Depending on which difficulty level you’re on, it works differently. If you’re playing on the hardest difficulty levels then the feature is removed completely - our purest gamers will probably resent it because it’ll feel like cheating.
The problem is because the AI is now so much more complex they’re really milling about as you can see, doing a lot of different things. It actually came up because the game was so difficult to play if you didn’t set up the level yourself. Most people on the team couldn’t play the game! So we needed to find a way for people to solve this, give them a tool that allows them to predict what’s going on a little bit more.
We also have a lot of interactive objects, like the fuse box that takes all the lights out as well as body containers and closets and all sorts classic things from the past games on top of a range of new ones. Before you’ve used it you can tap into Instinct and discover where they are in the game world, they’ll just pop out at you. Later in the game, when you’re getting better, you don’t really need it though and when you learn how the AI generally behaves, you will likely use Instinct less too.
It also tying into the core abilities of Hitman, like the disguises - using Instinct to better blend in for example. It ties in to a few other things that we haven’t shown yet.
SPOnG: So Agent 47 starts off unarmed in this library scene. The items you pick up, will you be able to keep them and use them again?
Tore Blystad: At the moment, no. It’s all kind of disposable, the way that you pick up the improvised weapons and the disguises. The choices that you take all have a certain consequence as you play through the game though.
SPOnG: Will you perhaps be able to select which of these weapons you start a level off with?
Tore Blystad: ...maybe (laughs).
Tore Blystad: Well, it depends. In the old games the AI was so broken that there were a million ways you could break it, and people usually did within ten seconds (laughs)! The AI physically broke down. If you run into a room, run around and then run out, they wonder what happened and start running in a different direction. Totally lost the plot!
Maybe people didn’t realise, but now it’s very much more robust, but what we can see now is that it’s much more consequential. They will react accordingly to things, and you will find a certain pattern to how they react. So we might have to throw a little bit of randomness into it just to spice it up.
SPOnG: There was a Hitman film.
Tore Blystad: There was... (nervous laugh)
SPOnG: Did you take anything from the Hitman film at all? Maybe Tim Olyphant did things in a certain way that inspired you? And more importantly, did you like it?
Tore Blystad: (Laughs) I don’t want to comment on whether I liked it! No, I think we took anything from the film. We were already rolling on Absolution at that point actually.
SPOnG: You guys are working with some Hollywood talent though, aren’t you?
Tore Blystad: That’s right, and we’re very excited about that. But it has nothing to do with the movies. It’s something we set up on our own, and we luckily found somebody we could use to conduct full performance capture with the actors here in Hollywood. The studio has taken our main story to a completely new height that we could have done on our own. We’re not ready to show any of that yet, but we’re really excited about that.
SPOnG: I notice you said ‘movies’ there as a plural.
Tore Blystad: Huh!? Oh! Well, there’s talk of a new Hitman movie, right? But honestly, we don’t know any more than you guys about that.
SPOnG: Fair enough. You’d have to prepare yourself for the Kane & Lynch movie first.
Tore Blystad: That seemed to have fallen off the radar, right? I mean, there was talk of Jamie Foxx as Lynch!? (Laughs) I don’t know, I would have liked to have seen that!!!
SPOnG: Thank you for your time.
Tore Blystad: Thanks!