Weekly Update 74
HELLO! Sorry, I hope that didn’t scare you away. I was just excited to see you again. I had to miss the last two weeks because I have been focused on moving. Yes it is finally done and I am loving it.
First: no. No agents. I got another rejection so that was nice.
My new house is great! It is perfectly “Me” sized and Winry loves it. When we first moved, I loved the novelty of her walking into other rooms. At my old apartment she was locked to the ground floor because she wasn’t shown how to climb stairs. I decided to not show her at the time because she was a puppy and chewed everything. Seeing her pop into a room I am in is just so cute! The rest of the house is wonderful: it is bigger, cheaper, and closer to school. I am excited to wake up here and I feel accomplished when I complete a chore.
Aside from unpacking and setting up, I have been playing video games and attending meetings for school. The Steam Summer Sale has come and gone by now, but I was able to snag Hitman: World of Assassination for a fraction of the cost. Now, some of you might be aware of the nasty tactics IO Interactive took when marketing the sale. It is also a little hard to describe… and super interesting to me.
Hitman is a game genre that has been around since 2000. As a “gamer” from the early 2010s I first played Hitman: Absolution in 2012. Like most of the games in the series players control a contract killer named 47. The game play revolves around infiltrating secure compounds and assassinating a target. This formula has altered slightly every game. For example: Absolution boasted manufactured accidents to kill targets. The games also had linear levels that were gone the second the player moved onto the next level. Fun but slightly aged. This all changed in 2016.
In 2016 IO released Hitman. Hitman (2016) is a reimagining of the entire franchise. It looks sleeker, more modern, and with a new game design impetus (I feel the need to specify I am not a games journalist). I used to play Hitman (2016) a lot when I was in high school and it was so much fun! Now, all levels had multiple avenues to kill the target(s) and really motivated players to replay them. Any location has twenty to thirty challenges that give the player experience points if they pull off the challenge and extract safely. This means a player can play the Paris level many, many times and still get rewarded to trying new things. With enough experience points the players increase their “location mastery” which awards new places to start the level, new places to hide tools, and more tools that can be used in other levels. So, I loved Hitman (2016). What about Hitman: World of Assassination?
That’s the thing! IO released two sequels to Hitman (2016): Hitman 2 and Hitman 3: World of Assassination. With every new installment, IO added more story missions and locations… but they never got rid of the old ones! I paid for “Hitman 3,” but I also got the full content for Hitman (2016) and Hitman 2, a game I totally missed. I got three games for the reduced price of one! I have been replaying missions from Hitman (2016) and I am having a blast. If you like games like early Assassin’s Creed games or even modern rogue likes like Hades then I recommend Hitman: World of Assassination.
Now, what about those nasty marketing tactics? Well, on the Steam Summer Sale page, Hitman: The World of Assassination was listed as 90% off. This was partially true. IO decided to dissect the game into chunks (a move that many game developers have done and that I don’t have the time or experience to talk about here) and only one of those chunks was 90% off for the sale. That one chunk was effectively 20% of the base game. This was also elevated by the fact many people were upset that the Steam Summer Sale didn’t have a lot of good sales like years past. A lot of people paid for 20% of a game expecting 100% of it. Personally I think the problem lies in how modern video game developers and publishers market and butcher their own games in order to milk them dry for profit… but you didn’t come here for that.
Well now I want to play more Hitman. So, see you next week! Please stay safe and enjoy your summer!
