By Kermath Davies
Agent 47 is about to rack up countless headshots on mobile devices around the globe.
Debuted at E3, Hitman: Sniper is a new game being developed for mobile and tablet devices by Square Enix Montreal.
I had the chance to chat with Hitman: Sniper creative director Ollie Sykes to find out more about the game.
The Hitman series has been big on consoles, so what made you choose to make it into an app game?
Well we've set up Square Enix Montreal to do games for tablets, and we have some fantastic franchises to work with like Hitman, Deus Ex and Tomb Raider. The one that appealed to us the most was Hitman to start with. We released Hitman: Go a few weeks ago which was one take on Agent 47's assassination career, but distilled down for mobile, and we did exactly the same for Hitman: Sniper but instead of the broad approach that Hitman: Go has, we've gone very deep into one aspect of Agent 47's repertoire which is sniping. So we decided to take that experience, put it onto a tablet, make it very simple, easy-to-play and easy to access and we made a game out of it.
Is it just sniping, or is there still a lot of stealth involved like in previous Hitman titles?
There is a stealth component to it but it is a fixed position game so you're looking through the sniper scope the whole time. There are still a lot of the core tenants of the Hitman franchise in there, however, so you have to be quiet and very strategic about how you approach your targets. You can dispose of bodies by knocking them off ledges and into swimming pools; but a lot of the game is based around this tension of killing your mark. If you do kill the mark, the contract ends and you get paid, but it's about how much you can score and how much you can do before taking him out. But the more you do, the more bodies you leave around then the more likely it is that he's going to get spooked and you're going to fail the contract. So there's this tension where you're asking yourself, 'how long can I keep going and how long can I keep pushing my luck maximizing my high score before I take out the guy I've been hired to kill?'
Is the game motion based or touch screen on the tablet?
It's just touch screen and touch controls because one of the main things we wanted to do was make the game really accessible for players; so you can actually play the entire game with one hand. Seeing as there are a lot of similar games to this that have a variety of different types of controls we just wanted to make this game as simple and straightforward as possible.
Is this game like the console games where there is a lot of guns-blazing violence, or is it a bit more dulled down?
No there's some blood in this, there's headshots and so on but it's not quite as graphic. We wanted to try and keep the feeling of you're a badass, and we definitely didn't want to distil or dull down Agent 47 when we brought him to this platform.
So do you think it's going to be a big hit? What makes this game so special?
I think it's going to be an immense hit! What could go wrong? Well one of the key factors of the game is that it is very competitive-driven, it's a leaderboard-driven game. We're using Facebook to power competition between friends. You always have a rival to beat, and a rival is the guy that's just above you on the leaderboard. So you're never chasing this unobtainable goal of being number one unless of course you are number one, but you're always given these sort of bite size mini-goals to go through. We've also got around 150 different missions to go through for each one of the contracts that we're planning so there's a lot of evolution in the game. So you can keep playing, you'll get a new high score, go back in and try a different approach maybe set things up differently and you get a better score. You'll be rewarded for every new high score so it's very much a socially fuelled and competitive game.
Is this a totally new type of Hitman game then, as the others normally just focus on the mission?
Yes. I mean obviously you do still have the one guy to kill, but there's a lot of stuff around him that you can play around with as well. It's kind of a fun toy as well as a game seeing as how you can push and manipulate the environment and targets in different ways. There are also a few hidden easter eggs around the place depending on how you kill people. For example, if you electrocute someone for the 20th time, they may do a robot dance or something.
Will this game influence the console series, or is it a standalone title?
For now it's just going to be standalone, it's going to be its own experience. We've actually made it a little bit storyline-agnostic so that it can fit really anywhere in Agent 47's career. We're not getting bogged down with narrative, we just want to deliver super fun gameplay.
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Hitman: Sniper will launch on iOS and Android later this year as a free download with optional in-app purchases.
3 News
source: newshub archive
