I finally started messing around with the Hitman games for the first time and their game design would feel fantastic as a Bond thriller. I can’t wait to give this a shot.
I would love a Hitman-style Bond game with multi-path missions and just a variety of weapons, gadgets, and vehicles. Add some platforming, and some quality writing, and you got yourself a stew, baby.
To me, Hitman is more stealthy than the action-adventure world of Bond. Like, it’s possible (even rewarded) to finish an entire Hitman level with no dead bodies, no alarms raised, and nobody knowing that anybody was assassinated. I can’t really see a Bond game where there’s no shootouts, no car chases, no parkour type action, etc.
It’s certainly possible to play Hitman that way. You have access to loud guns etc. But, the game design seems to be that if you’re resorting to loud guns – or even if you get noticed, you’re not doing it the right way.
What I’d like to see is a Hitman-style game focused on espionage instead of assassination. Like, sneak in somewhere, plant a bug, then get out. Or, extract an asset from a hostile country without anybody noticing. Or, photograph the secret documents without raising any alarms. You could easily do all that with the Hitman engine. It would just require a little adjusting of the mission scripting and the victory conditions for the various levels.
Im quite confident that IO can handle this new approach. The levels in Hitman 3 have been way more experimental and almost all had a completely new feel to them. IO has learned a lot throughout the years and it shows.
Closer to Daniel Craig than Roger Moore
Is the ultimate spycraft fantasy not just getting information by pretending to be rich and sleeping with hot leaders and other influencial people to get information via pillow talk?
I think “ultimate spycraft fantasy” is up to each person’s imagination. To me, none of the Bond stuff is really spycraft. It’s more fantasy action-adventure with an espionage theme.
Even IO Interactive’s Hitman franchise is less action-adventurey than a typical Bond movie. AFAIK, the way most people play that game, if you have to use a loud gun on a level, you’ve basically failed.
What I’d like to see from an “ultimate spycraft fantasy” are things like Dead Drops, searching for bugs in a room, maybe saying something out loud that the bugs will pick up to fool the eavesdroppers, using burner phones, catching an enemy spy based on a flaw in their disguise / accent / behaviour, slipping a tracking device onto someone or something, etc.
To me, never getting noticed is the cool part of spy / stealth games. 007 is pretty much the opposite of that.
To further your point, that sounds like spycraft to me but it sounds like hell in video game form also.
Please let it be like Alpha Protocol. That game was amazing (albeit glitchy af), and has too be the closest realtime video game to the tabletop SpyCraft experience.
Got that Hitman heart 🫀
