By Pentadact

I’d like to defend the chestiness of Hitman: Blood Money’s female characters. I accept that it’s exaggerated, and that the reason for that is to sexualise and objectify them. I just don’t think that’s sexist; the men are treated the same way. Every male in the game is grotesquely muscle-bound and obsessed with sex. Usually women are over-sexualised in games to appeal to players, who are almost all male and emotionally simple. Blood Money sexualises them for the opposite reason.

The art direction in most games is so poor that no real artistic intent can be deduced – usually the extent to which the people are stylised is just the extent to which the art team weren’t able to make them realistic. But good game artists stylise with intent. Not often a particularly noble intent, but intent nonetheless. In GTA3, pedestrians are all charicatured freaks who shout angry or stupid things at you – they want you to feel okay about occasionally running them over, because the game is more fun when you’re driving recklessly. It sounds like a pretty terrible thing to do, and in some cases it is – they assume we’ll think it’s okay to kill someone if they dress like a slut or look gay. But it’s a clever way of imposing your character’s values onto the player without making them feel like a set of values is being forced on them. To make someone see the world the way your character does, make the world the way the character sees it. It’s a trick only games can pull, and few are clever enough to try it.

Blood Money’s vision of the world – the Hitman’s vision – is just as dark, but a little more complex in the attitude it tries to evoke. Its characters are oversexualised in a profoundly unsexy way – both genders are luridly exaggerated beyond attractiveness. The Hitman is asexual, and people’s sexual attributes and inclinations appear exaggerated and repulsive to him. Hence the chesty women, the muscle-bound men, and the endless sex-talk (conversation topics range from “fucking”, “who I’d like to fuck”, “I’m drunk and would like to fuck you”, “how hot are these girls?”, “wow these girls are hot”, “let’s fuck later”, “I’m going to fuck you later”, “I want to fuck you”, “would you like to fuck?”, and “here’s some aphrodisiac to help with the fucking”) . It’s shoved in our face to make us as disgusted by it as a cold, sexless killer would be. It tries to make killing them almost cathartic, a culling of animals rather than cruel murder.

The Hitman is usually thought of as something of a blank-slate protagonist, but he’s actually one of the best examples of effectively putting the player in his avatar’s shoes. You’re made to feel something of the way this anti-hero feels, but what he does in response to it is still up to you. The genius of it is that they’re portraying a character by how they paint everything but the character, rather than dictating the character’s actions or story. One of the reasons games are so exciting as a young artform is that developers are just discovering tricks like this. It’s not entirely new to Hitman: it’s had huge breasts and permanent scowls since the first game; the second one made you feel 47’s disconnection from other people by sending you almost exclusively to foreign-language countries; and the third externalised his stormy disposition by setting every flashback mission on a dark and rainy night, even ones which actually happened by day. But Blood Money’s sex angle is the most efficient ploy so far, and like every aspect of the fourth game, feels like the idea finally coming of age.

Inspirational Killing

It’s generally accepted that it’s okay for art to intentionally inspire dark thoughts, and indeed that can be both the point and the merit of a piece. Blood Money – like many games – intentionally inspires dark actions: you’re tasked with murdering innocent people, and if my take on the art direction is accurate, they’re hoping you’ll feel like killing more than strictly necessary. Certainly every mission is easier if you kill at least a few non-targets – police, civilians, US marshalls. In a sense, you’re even worse than the mass murderer you play – he’s killing for money, you’re doing it for fun.

I’m overdoing the angel’s advocate routine here – I skipped over the definition of ‘dark actions’, and that’s an obvious pitfall. The game is not intended to inspire you to perform dark actions in the real world – in the real world, you press some keys and move a mouse. In the game’s world, you’re doing things that look like murder, but they’re not. Murder is when you kill someone. Game characters can’t be killed in the normal sense of the word – they always come back to life if you restart the level. You’re not destroying anything when you kill in a game, you’re just toying with a digital actor. Even if you were, it would be an entity so simple as to be trivial in comparison to even an insect life – a billion orders of complexity away from a human. The resemblance of the thing you’re stabbing to a human being is disturbing to an outsider because they’re not familiar enough with games to realise how far from human this thing is. It’s not immoral to punch a mannequin, even if it’s got a face painted on it.

Does punching a mannequin or digitally stabbing a digital actor inspire real world violence? There are two questions there, both irrelevant: a) does it in kids? Doesn’t matter, they’re not allowed to buy it, and b) Does it in adults? Not unless they’re already homicidal lunatics, and either way adults get to decide what they consume, and are responsible for what they do in response to it. Boxing encourages, trains you for and desensitises you to violence against real human beings, but it’s not banned yet. The disconnect between games and real violence is a thousand times larger, and no-one actually familiar with the scientific method has conducted a fair test that even suggests a link. I can demonstrate a phenomenally strong link between alcohol and real-world violence, by the way, but we keep drinking, condone drinking and respect drinking because it’s fun. I almost like that about the human race.

Social Situations And Silenced Weapons

Hitman has always been extraordinary for mixing violence in with polite society, but control, interface and AI quirks have often interfered with the fun. Those are almost entirely gone now, and Blood Money is genuinely the game the series always wanted to be. It’s the first time they’ve consistently kept all the important elements together:

Fuzzy suspicion: Actually this one is largely new, and finally doing it right is the main reason Blood Money is so much better than previous Hitman games. Guards are just a bit more human in how they react to suspicious behaviour, in that they no longer open fire the second you step out of line. That single tweak removes 90% of the frustrating moments a Hitman game normally inflicts on you. It also adds another freedom: the ability to get past AI guards with misdirection and trickiery, rather than stealth or violence. My current favourite approach is to just slightly irritate people:
a) My target and his girlfriend are making out in a corridor. I turn the light off. He irritably barges past me to turn it back on, and they retreat to his room for some privacy, but the moment is gone and the girl walks out for some air. As she leaves, I slip in and throttle him. I am the mood killer. Also the killer.
b) A handyman is repainting a doorway to the maintenance tunnels I need to get to. I can’t kill him because the cop opposite takes only very brief breaks from his watch. Instead, I nab his toolbox and toss it across the room with a clang. Annoyed, he goes over to fetch it, and while he’s occupied I stroll through the door.
c) Two guards man the monitors in a security booth overlooked by a CCTV camera. They’re close enough that neither can be killed without alerting the other, no matter where their attention is turned. I back round the corner, and throw my gun into their line of sight. It’s a dangerous item, so of course one of them has to confiscate it and take it to the security HQ in the main building. While he’s away, I throttle his partner, steal the camera’s tape, and take his clothes so that the main building’s reception guard won’t think anything of it when I follow the gun-confiscator into the security HQ – a nice quiet place to strangle him and take my gun back. Psych!

Public areas: without these it’s just a stealth game, a simplistic and degenerate genre compared to Hitman’s actual multi-faceted magnificence. Masses of Hitman missions have lacked a space for you to move around in without disguise or subterfuge, a calm initial phase to the hit in which you can observe patterns and plan your approach. Wonderfully every single one of Blood Money’s jobs includes one, and it ensures you the quintessential Hitman experience – walking around unnoticed, observing routines, seeing a social situation in a killer’s terms: who can be taken out quietly, where the body will go, how attention can be diverted from that door. These considerations exist in hostile environments too, but it’s a stressful and constrictive situation. It’s only fun when you’re allowed to be there, but not to do what it is you must do. It adds an element of audacity: when everyone’s out to get you, killing is just a survival tactic. In Hitman, everyone’s happily going about their lives in normal society, and you’re going to stride in and do something massive and terrible and get away with it.

Subtle kills: Subltety and elegance barely featured in the original game, but as Hitman matures it starts to appreciate the finer things in murder. A simple squirt of a syringe, the turn of a dial on a pyrotechnics control panel, the clicking of a detonator, the unseen flinging of a kitchen knife, a short sharp shove to a precariously positioned target, or the removal of a prop gun and the placing of its working counterpart. Approaches that take masses of planning, but which manifest themselves in a single, simple, silent easy action. Blood Money invented most of these options, and by cramming every mission full of them, moved from the pre-scripted puzzle-solution feel of Contracts to a playground of homicidal oppourtunity.

A wealth of interesting options: In general, too, there’s a gorgeously rich possibility space. Full not just of ways to succeed, but cool, dramatic and stylish ones. They made twelve of the best Hitman missions ever, then just kept on making them, again and again, in the same environment with the same targets, adding superfluous alternatives just to suit the depraved stylistic preferences of their players, or simply to increase their chances of stumbling upon something brilliant. Steve and I have spent more time talking about alternative approaches to Blood Money’s missions than I have playing Contracts’. That’s the extent of the interestingness differential, as I’m going to poncily Christen it.

Meditations On Murder

I’d like to fix Blood Money. It makes one giant rookie mistake, and introduces three new systems that don’t quite work.

Saves: WHAT. The biggest percentage point on the spectrum of games reviewing is the one between 89 and 90, and Blood Money would have lost it on the save system if I’d been the one to review it. The first two limitations are simply mad – you can save seven times, but only in three slots – and only on Tuesdays? Do we get an extra save if we own a domesticated meercat? How about only letting us save when we’re facing Mecca? But the third is criminally derranged. The game will delete – it will fucking delete – your save games if you need to quit or restart. It will delete them. The developers should do jail time for that. I would rather they came to my house and stole some of my stuff than routinely deleted my savegames. It DELETES them!

This is a laughably easy fix, and it’s painfully obvious that it should be done. Even the creators of Far Cry, whose checkpoint system I’ve seen praised more often than any other form of limited saves, admit it was a monumental mistake to limit saving in any way, and have vowed never to do it again. It’s a myth that people actually dislike limitless quicksaving – the ones who complain about it are complaining about other people using it; they think everyone should play the way they do, because they think it’s more enjoyable. No-one is actually using limitless quicksaves and then going online and bitching about it. Certainly some games are ruined by the need to save constantly, but those games are even worse if you can’t. Our grandchildren won’t believe us when we tell them some games had only limited saves in our day. “Fuck off, grandad,” they will say. And how right they will be.

Upgradable Weapons: A nice idea, using the money from jobs – and bonuses for style – to bolt on silencers, scopes and new ammo types to your favourite bit of kit. For some reason, though, they decided to make these so cheap that even an inept hitman can afford to buy virtually all of them at every stage. To counter-act that self-inflicted spanner in the works, they then locked off the good upgrades until you reach a certain mission. Despite being the rationale behind the very title of the game, money becomes irrelevant and only progress restricts your weaponry – for no coherent in-game reason. It’s not a huge problem, but it would be so easy to make it so good: just make everything expensive. Let me spend all my earnings on a really good silencer after the first few missions, if that’s how I want to play. I’ll still look forward to getting accuracy and damage upgrades later on, and I won’t be able to afford the good ones until the very end.

Notoriety: The more witnesses you leave, the better photofit the police have of your face, the more likely guards are to get suspicious when you act out. “Hey, isn’t that guy clambering over the compound wall the one from the paper the other day?” But for some reason it’s not based on the number of witnesses – bodies found while you’re still at the scene or just lots of unnecessary killing also increase your notoriety.

It’s obvious two separate metres are needed: Recognisability and Heat. Recognisability is entirely down to witnesses escaping alive and security cameras catching you, and represents how good an idea the police have of what you look like. Heat is down to how many people you’ve killed, and represents how high a priority you are for the police. If you’ve killed hundreds of innocent people but no-one’s ever lived to tell the tale, they’ll want to find you badly but guards will be no more suspicious of you than anyone else. Security will be increased, but you’ll be able to get away with the same things. If you’ve only ever killed your targets and no-one else, sticking to non-lethal takedowns for anyone else in your way, security will be lighter throughout. But if people or cameras have seen you and got away, those few guards will be harder to slip by. Apart from making more logical sense, the point of separating out Heat is to compliment the player’s style. If he likes killing loads of people, increased security will be fun but challenging for him, and he’s not punished. If he doesn’t, but did it because a plan went wrong, the increased security ups the stakes and encourages him to get the subtler methods right.

Accidents: It’s the obvious next step in the subtlety stakes to avoid even the suspicion of foul play, but in Blood Money it’s not quite well-developed enough to be a viable goal throughout. Nearly all of the targets can be killed with accidents, but a) a few can’t, and b) there’s no reward for pulling it off. I’ve heard that the plan was for the post-mission newspaper article to be just an obituary if the death looked like an accident, which would have been great, but didn’t seem to make it to the final game.

I don’t think accidents are enough. Some of them are extremely suspicious, and there are more inventive ways of entirely avoiding heat: faking suicide, eliminating the body altogether, or framing someone. There’s one oppourtunity to frame someone in Blood Money – getting the other actor to shoot your target on the opera mission – but there could be more. Stealing someone’s gun, shooting the target, then dropping the weapon at the scene and leaving before anyone else sees you ought to work as a successful frame up. As should knocking someone out, dressing up as them, doing the hit, then switching clothes back. “Honestly, a guy in a suit came and did it! But you won’t find his fingerprints on the gun because he was wearing gloves. Also you can’t see the guy.” Getting rid of the body could be in furnaces, downriver, posted elsewhere (!) or even stolen discreetly from the scene (would require a vehicle, I guess). Suicides could be a simple case of fibre-wiring someone, dragging the body to underneath a light fitting and stringing them up. It doesn’t have to be ultra-convincing, the police in Hitman are intentionally dumb.

The Silent Assassin accolade has a few inconsistencies – bodies found while you’re at the scene mean no Silent Assassin rating, even though all bodies will eventually be found either way, the speedruns show that it’s possible to get Silent Assassin even when you flee the scene in a hail of gunfire, even in Professional difficulty. The point of this system would be to introduce a new accolade to replace Silent Assassin: Case Closed. It would mean that you attracted 0 heat on the mission, that the police aren’t looking for you at all – a much more satisfying result than having been seen at the scene, and leaving evidence of foul play.