Hitman, System-Driven Design and Patio Heaters
Hitman’s most important mechanic is one of its subtlest
I was walking into a runway show in Paris. I’d been tasked with eliminating the owner of a world-renowned fashion brand, as well as his model-turned-spymaster partner. It was my first experience of Hitman’s episodic reboot from 2016, and I had little to no idea what I was doing. Passing through the courtyard on my way into the event, I noticed rows of large patio heaters either side of the doors. A tiny, white-outline square indicates this might be something I can interact with. However, to loosen the valves on each, I’d need a wrench. I didn’t have a wrench, and loosening the valves in the middle of a crowded patio would have been extremely suspicious. So what was the point of these patio heaters that were presumably social-stealth-suicide to mess with?
Before I answer that question, let me set the scene.
Sometimes game logic can be a little convoluted, and usually we find that we’re forced to suspend our disbelief when a certain item works only once and in one place, or when a door that used to be open is now locked tight forever. Perhaps you’re walking down a shopping street in Grand Theft Auto V, but you can only walk into one or two stores. The rest are painted-on, or are real enough storefronts, replete with NPCs, but can’t be entered and browsed (or robbed, sigh). Maybe you’re paying a visit to Kakariko Village’s graveyard in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and realise you can break open some graves and descend into their crypts for treasure, or a less pleasant surprise. The player can’t reliably open each grave and expect to find a crypt to explore, nor can they immediately tell which ones have that capability to be explored.
To be clear, I am not criticising this kind of game design at all, particularly in the case of ambitious but hardware-limited titles like Ocarina. Often these kinds of choices reflect a commitment to maintaining story flow. In Ocarina’s case, the Nintendo 64 was already struggling to keep up with the game’s beefy technical demands and making a full crypt for every grave would likely introduce further unnecessary strain on the hardware. Also, adding that feature wouldn’t have added anything in terms of plot or enjoyment anyway. The Grand Theft Auto V example works here, too: do you really need an entire street of functional shops and businesses that you’ll never actually want to use? Probably not. Game developers constantly make judgement calls based on the time and resources it would take to implement features as compared against the potential value or function that feature would really have in a finished product. The fleshed-out shopping street or the comprehensive network of grave-digging sites would have taken a lot of time and would have added very little. The cost of these decisions — if there is one — is that the player is forced to buy into a game’s internal logic rather than being limited only by their own creativity. Might it initially be weird to the player that you can’t enter every grave in Ocarina, and which ones you can and can’t is completely arbitrary? Maybe. Is it a problem? Absolutely not.
What does grave-digging in a Legend of Zelda game have to do with patio heaters in Hitman? Everything.
Every single patio heater in Hitman can be tampered with, provided you’ve got a wrench handy. With a screwdriver, you can puncture the oil tank of every scooter you find parked up — there’s loads of them in Marrakesh, the game’s third level. You can shoot out every security camera, or find the room where the tapes are stored and destroy them. In short, if you find an instance of an item that you can interact with in any level, you will be able to interact with every instance of that item that you come across. You might not need to, or want to, but you can. If Kakariko Village was a Hitman assassination playground, you can bet there would be a crypt under all of those graves (Dampé would probably be an enforcer, too).
Playing any one of Hitman or Hitman 2’s levels, you’ll notice that you won’t interact with 90% of the items you see. It’s possible you’ll even pick something up with no idea what use it has, leaving it unused in your inventory of crushed soda cans, coins, and fibre wire. So, even when I chased the ‘Mastery’ rank for the Paris level (I’m referring to Hitman’s per-level progression system that pays out new items, starting locations and disguises), I did not use those patio heaters once. Not the ones at the entrance, or outside the bar, or anywhere else that I noticed them.
About five levels after Paris, a glitzy fashion show is traded for a state-of-the-art medical facility in Japan. There are two targets again this time. I dealt with the first relatively easily, but, even with my experience of the previous levels, I am a bit stuck as to how to eliminate ex-Yakuza lawyer Yuki Yamazaki. I overhear a tidbit that she smokes, and is infuriated that the hospital has a strict no cigarettes policy. I remember seeing the patient one room over from my starting location smoking on his balcony. Intriguing. After some shimmying along the balcony rails and skulking around his room, I came upon a pack of cigarettes. Score! With the right disguise, I could at least blend in with Yuki’s studious guards and at least get a little closer to the target.
Yuki’s scripting in the hospital involves her mostly circling the lobby, restaurant and courtyard, and occasionally dipping back into her own room. If the cigarettes aren’t there, she’ll curse, and simply leave, returning to her routine. This time, they were, and naturally she steps onto the balcony for a smoke. She asks her guard to leave, and a sudden moment of opportunity presents itself. I scan the balcony for anything useful. There’s a patio heater. I’d picked up a wrench earlier, and the target was preoccupied smoking. Moments later, the kill was set up. I lure the cigarette-smoking Yuki over by flicking a coin within earshot, and, well, you can probably guess what happened next.
It’s not the only way to use the patio heater, of course; such is the nature of Hitman’s system-driven design. For a less risky strategy, the player might loosen the valve and then snipe the heater from a distance, or even shoot it with your silverballer from one balcony over. But the point is that it’s simply another patio heater. And, suddenly, all of those seemingly useless heaters lining the entrance of that fashion show in Paris five levels ago make sense. Within levels and across them, Hitman is constantly teaching you. In particular, it drives home two things: both exactly what you can do, and how you can do it. I don’t mean this in the tutorial sense: Hitman has one of those too, giving a basic once-over of how to subdue, put on a disguise, and set up clean kills. Rather, this is a evolving learning experience made entirely possible by the presence of the prompt, and the information it contains.
When you’re relatively close to an object or specific NPC, a small white outlined square will appear. This alone signals to the player that this object is something they can interact with. On closer inspection, this will morph into a button prompt, along with what that action will cause. This itself is perhaps not especially interesting. However, what’s underneath it in this screenshot is at the heart of how Hitman introduces the player to the wealth of tools and options available to them; and how it never tells them what to do beyond who they must kill. The player is told exactly what is needed to perform the action, but not where or how they might acquire the tool or key they need.
Button prompts are part and parcel of videogames, especially when it becomes part of player direction. Contextual prompts, such as the now infamous ‘press X to Jason,’ can advance quests or plots in game. Countless games dedicate a single button simply for interacting with in-game objective items. Oftentimes, though, these prompts directly advance player progress: pushing the button opens the door to the next room, for example. It can even reach a point where players simply search around for a prompt to appear and move things along rather than playing through instinct or intuition. In Hitman, these prompts don’t do any work for the player or directly help their progress along. They don’t even fully explain the effects of the action: though it’s not a great logical leap on the player’s part to assume that creating a gas leak leads to some explosive opportunities, it is noteworthy that the prompt simply says ‘create gas leak’, rather than something less ambiguous like ‘create gas leak [BECOMES EXPLOSIVE!]’. Ambiguity also bleeds into, say, the size of the explosion, or the radius that an NPC with a naked flame needs to be in to trigger it.
Returning to my Yuki Yamazaki cigarette accident, it took a few tries to ensure Yuki triggered the explosion in such a way that her guards were not also caught in the blast (Hitman, like other stealth-based games such as Dishonored, rewards clean kills without bystander injuries).
Even this example assumes that the player has figured out a way to intercept their target on their usual path, or has lured them toward their trap. In the case of the patio heater, you won’t be making much headway if you rig a trap somewhere that the targets don’t visit. Tampering with level furniture might even hinder player progress if bystanders see a suspicious looking man — in an admittedly dashing suit — messing with a gas valve. It may do nothing at all: I lost countless times where I simply lost interest in my half-baked assassination idea, leaving an array of poisoned food, jimmied-open doors and abandoned disguises in my wake, pursuing a different idea instead.
The Hitman series (perhaps with the exception of 2012’s Absolution, which was comparatively linear) has always been about trial-and-error, charting the player’s journey from a messy, mistake-laden first run to a level mastery a few hours later. The point, though, is that the game never instructs you how to be great, but simultaneously does not leave the player to fumble around or work out an obscure ‘solution’ to its assassination puzzles. Everything is out in the open in terms of what can be done, but how easily is a different matter. At the core of that trial-and-error structure is how Hitman’s contextual prompts tell you so much about the options available to you and simultaneously obscure any clues as to how to take advantage of those options. This feature is so ubiquitous and, at its best, unnoticeable, that players perhaps don’t even consider that Hitman is always teaching them.
When games are announced, advertised, and reviewed, we as consumers often gravitate towards those flagship features that really make a title stand out from the rest. Dark Souls wore its punishing difficulty as a badge of pride, and it might be the first thing you associate with the series. Survivors of the Wii generation will remember every gimmicky control scheme under the sun. I personally remember rejoicing when Mario Kart 7 became what felt like the first 3DS game to not have ‘3D’ shoehorned awkwardly into the title somewhere. Oftentimes, though, these flagship, meal ticket features are closer to shrewd advertising fodder rather than what really makes a game great. Sometimes what makes a game fantastic is something pretty rudimentary: well executed fundamentals, elegant systemic design, or a well-fleshed out story and characters. The problem is presumably that you can’t write ‘precise controls!’ on the box or on the store page, even if that’s exactly what made platformers like Super Meat Boy so critically lauded. Hitman 2’s advertising spiel reads as follows:
Travel the globe and track your targets across exotic sandbox locations in HITMAN™ 2. From sun-drenched streets to dark and dangerous rainforests, nowhere is safe from the world’s most creative assassin, Agent 47 in the ultimate spy thriller story.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved those sun drenched streets and exotic sandbox locations, but they ultimately weren’t what kept me playing. It was the learning, the experimentation, and the feeling that just when I’d figured out every plausible way to eliminate a target, another cue from the game’s button prompts got me thinking again. The most effective way to enhance Hitman 2’s sales through reference to its excellent contextual button prompts is a problem for IO Interactive rather than me to solve; I’m too busy trying to take out every target in the game with patio heaters.
