Would you still enjoy Hitman if your targets were "good" people?

[Ebullientprism]

So I am playing through Hitman 2 and it struck me that the series has (almost) always gone out of its way to make it clear that your targets are awful people and kinda-sorta deserve to die. I am sure there are exceptions to that but by and large you are generally killing off awful people.

And honestly, that seems kind of unnecessary. I would have no compunctions offing regular people. Would you?

 

[Jintor]

i think a large part of my initial enjoyment comes from a sense of come-uppance? Like, these guys deserve 47 to just waft out of the ether and drop a chandilier on their head.

It'd be a lot more difficult to do if your client was Big Pharma and your contract was a non-violent environmental activist who just happens to be asking inconvenient questions.

This of course ignores the ability for 47 to literally murder the entire map if he so desires, but still. It's about the framing of the whole thing, I think.

I do enjoy it when the targets are a bit less cartoonish villainy. My favourite target in 2016 was Caruso because he had a pretty interesting set of neuroses about everything, basically. And I liked the target and Sean 2 in the 2018 tutorial because of how regular their night routine is (even though they have to put in a few threatening phone calls in there just to remind you that yeah, they're regular people, but they also kill dudes way bad).

I did find it funny that the terrorists you're hunting in 2016-2018 are 'militant leftists' though.

 

[stinkyguy666]

I don't think a lot of people would take kindly to a game about offing innocent people and idk if it'd sit right with me.

I'd like to think that the targets are scummy awful people because there's a sense of catharsis about it I guess.

 

[violent]

Usually it's bad people that are wanted dead. Also, I wouldn't mind if I had to put a hit on Abraham Lincoln. Escapism can be cathartic.

 

[Joeku]

Part of the humour in the series, especially the last few entries, is in the darkly ironic things happening to terrible people. Every asshole target in Hitman 2 has some smarmy line that sets you up for a one-liner as you kill them. It's part of the charm. So yes, I'd still enjoy the clockwork goofiness, but it's more entertaining this way than it'd be without.

 

[blacklotus]

Yeah, would certainly mess with my game.

 

[petethepanda]

I feel like that'd introduce a level of darkness that wouldn't mesh very well with the tongue-in-cheek tone the series has.

Or what the hell, go full-on absurdist with it. Murder four civilians to craft a bigger wallet.

 

[Whales]

it's just a game after all, so I don,t think it would bother me

I can understand why this would throw off some people tho

 

[Oreiller]

Not at all, I very much enjoy knowing my victims are dirtbags, it's an important part of this weird power fantasy.

I probably wouldn't play this series if they tried something too dark tbh.

 

[Acorn]

Yeah if it was done with the same dark humour.

Contracts is already kinda this. Just picking random npcs for death.

 

[clickKunst]

I wish they would do that. These games appear to deconstruct almost every other facet of society instead of the very mechanics and design they employ.

 

[LiK]

Killing bad people feels good. Killing good people is a turn off even in video games. I don't even like killing innocent NPCs in open world games.

 

[Deleted member 11370]

Well, killing "good" people can be a bit of a bummer.

On the other hand, it's a game called "Hitman". Not "Cool Antihero Guy Who Only Kills Bad People Like The Punisher". You gotta set your expectations accordingly.

 

[MasterVampire]

But you kill innocent people blocking your way to the target anyway

 

[Bradford]

I would be fascinated by a legit "hitman"/assassin game where you are just given a contract and each level is a different person with their own backstory that you have to suss out in the environment. As you progress through each level you find out more about them -- maybe one day you get an awful insurance person who funds sex trafficking rings on the side, and the next you find out that you've been given a contract to kill a genuinely good philanthropist that trains rescue dogs or something.

Make it up to the player to decide if they go through with it or cancel the contract and deal with the consequences. Throw some branching endings on there based on what you do. Could be pretty cool!

Spoiler

If this already exists let me know and I will buy it, thanks.

 

[Zhukov]

I prefer it as it is.

One of the major things I liked about Hitman 2016 (haven't played the new one, probably never will) was how the world was populated by such flawed people. Almost everyone, from targets to nameless NPC bystanders is mean-spirited, petty, manipulative, pretentious, deluded, corrupt, pathetic or some combination of the above.

It makes it fun to go around disrupting the whole scene like some kind of bald barcoded poltergeist.

Plus it's just funny. Reminds me of Grand Theft Auto humour except actually good.

 

[ShinUltramanJ]

I've murdered innocent people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

*shrug* It's just a game.

 

[Gevurztraminer]

It would detract from the carefully executed tone and I wouldn't enjoy it. Hitman is as much a game as you make it out to be, sure your objective is extremely macabre but the framing makes it a fun time for all involved.

 

[CrazyAndy]

Why not. It's just a game.

 

[GMM]

A big part of the charm in Hitman is how comically evil your targets are, removing that would shift the tone of the game in a really dark direction that would make the morbid humor in the game sit a lot worse with me. The game also portrays Agent 47 as somewhat of a hero, he's not a good person since he kills people, but he is making the world better by removing far bigger evils than himself, forcing him to kill completely innocent targets would make him no better than the asshole from Postal.

The game intentionally punishes the player for killing innocent people by giving you a poor rating, so they have made considerations to discourage the player from going full on serial killer.

The last level in Hitman 2 is literally the developers serving agent 47 a blimp full of assholes, just the worst humans imaginable and all in one place.

 

[Lashley]

Yes

I'm a right bastard anyway

 

[TiltedParadoxes]

I would be fascinated by a legit "hitman"/assassin game where you are just given a contract and each level is a different person with their own backstory that you have to suss out in the environment. As you progress through each level you find out more about them -- maybe one day you get an awful insurance person who funds sex trafficking rings on the side, and the next you find out that you've been given a contract to kill a genuinely good philanthropist that trains rescue dogs or something.

Make it up to the player to decide if they go through with it or cancel the contract and deal with the consequences. Throw some branching endings on there based on what you do. Could be pretty cool!

Spoiler

If this already exists let me know and I will buy it, thanks.

Click to shrink...

This is good. Great idea. I haven't heard of anything directly like this but the Witcher series scratches a similar itch along with the Connor storyline in Detroit become human although not exactly the way you described.

 

[TickleMeElbow]

I feel bad when I accidentally run over pedestirans in GTA, so prolly not lol.

But idk, maybe it would depend on how it's presented. I imagine an actual Hitman would be quite psychopathic, so if they're able to convincingly put me in that mind set I might enjoy it.

 

[Spring-Loaded]

The targets being evil makes it more feasible for them to be generally difficult to get to. So long as the game design allows for elaborate plotting and progression, it'll be good.

It also makes it more satisfying to kill them in ridiculous ways—it'd be harder to rationalize some of the more elaborate methods on some decent people, whereas pushing a war criminal into the speeding racecar of his war criminal-in-training daughter killing them both seems perfectly reasonable

The targets being despicable are a part of the appeal.

 

[Opto]

Hitman 2016 and Hitman 2 (jesus that can be confusing) did go out of their way to make the killing of those people seem somewhat gray. In 2016, you kill four people in one mission that are fighting a better fight than you are, even if they're by no means good people. Hell, I'd say Mumbai in is the murkiest

Spoiler

Queen of the slums is not a good person, but she's a power structure in a place where no one else seems to care. And the main target you're after in the mission is a revolutionary against the powers that Hitman 47 will face off with by the end of the game. And then in Vermont you kill one guy that just doing a protection detail.

 

[Jintor]

This is good. Great idea. I haven't heard of anything directly like this but the Witcher series scratches a similar itch along with the Connor storyline in Detroit become human although not exactly the way you described.

Click to shrink...

I liked the idea of the Open World Cult thing in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey but it doesn't play out like that in any way really unfortunately (aside from me stalking someone from the rooftops trying to get close enough to merk them like an idiot)

 

[NoKisum]

Maybe in Hitman 3, they can make the targets' morality highly ambiguous until after you've performed the kill.

 

[Spring-Loaded]

I do enjoy it when the targets are a bit less cartoonish villainy. My favourite target in 2016 was Caruso because he had a pretty interesting set of neuroses about everything, basically. And I liked the target and Sean 2 in the 2018 tutorial because of how regular their night routine is (even though they have to put in a few threatening phone calls in there just to remind you that yeah, they're regular people, but they also kill dudes way bad).

Click to shrink...

This is something I'd like to see more of though. Show more human moments and aspects of villainous targets. I'd rather the mere act of killing be turned on its head by fleshing out the targets a bit more rather than having targets suddenly be really decent people.

 

[Captain of Outer Space]

Can't you do that with Contracts? People can pick their own targets in any of the missions, unless you're assuming that everybody in the level is a terrible person.

Also, I've killed tons of good people in Hitman games. Agent 47 gets the job done at any cost.

 

[NightShift]

I think it would. The world of Hitman is clichè as hell but that's a part of what makes the comedy work so well. You don't want to think about the family the target is leaving behind as you feed them into a cocaine machine and use the cocaine brick covered in their insides to smack someone else over the head with.

 

[finalflame]

I actually might enjoy it more.

 

[kaishek]

I would but only if Hitman now has a moustache and goatee

 

[Khanimus]

It's hard to take joy in trying to comedically murder a good person. I mean you can kill anyone in Hitman, and 47 sloppily triggering rampant chaos and walking away like a master assassin is plenty funny, but the game clearly leans towards you only killing your target, who very much has it coming.

 

[daybreak]

Huh, never really realized how much I wanted an "evil" Hitman game until right now. Would make for a very cool expansion or something.

 

[ThereAreFourNaan]

A large part of the fantasy in works of fiction involving violence is the righteous justifications for it. You get to ignore normal moral boundaries and do bad things to people who broadly deserve it, or at minimum who would kill you if you didn't kill them. This isn't universal, but it's a very common theme and to answer your question yes, people would find it more unsettling/uncomfortable if the people they were killing were very nice.

 

[KomandaHeck]

If the level design was still as strong as it has been, then probably. The trend of your targets deserving their comeuppance is certainly additive to the experience though. The last map in Hitman 2 is the ultimate revenge fantasy, particularly in the modern climate.

 

[Z-Beat]

I don't think a lot of people would take kindly to a game about offing innocent people and idk if it'd sit right with me.

Click to shrink...

Never stopped GTA

 

[Siggy]

I think it could still work; the writing mainly needs to justify why a presumably expensive agent like 47 and his agency are being tasked with killing a particular target, but with that established I could see anything working. It could even be used to add more character to the fairly flat (yes, I know that's intentional) Agent 47 as he has to deal with different moral situations.

However, I remember a great interview from Dev Game Club including one of the original developers Janos Flösser where he said providing a sort of fantasy wish-fulfillment of going after corrupt and powerful people was an intentional appeal of the games from the get-go. Granted, a lot of time has passed since the series start, and it has been soft-rebooted since, but old habits die hard.

 

[Toybasher]

Eh there were a few targets that I felt a bit of an asshole killing. "Zip Master" in Hitman 2 (As in the sequel to Hitman Codename 47, NOT the new Hitman 2) was some cult leader, IDK exactly how much evil he directly did, but I just felt a little bad killing some old dude while he's unconscious on an operating table undergoing a heart transplant. Dunno why but it just felt a little unfair, would have rather gone after him AFTER the procedure once he was on his feet, would have been a good opportunity for more character development since not much is really said about him. (There's paintings of him in other cult areas so he was influential.) At least Erich Soders in Hitman 2016 was plenty damn evil and I enjoyed both destroying his transplant heart, and going out of my way to murder him on the operating table to make him dead twice-over.

Sidjan and his bro were two hacker-dudes. Same type of thing, just felt a bit dick-ish considering we had to kill both him and his twin brother. Was a fun set of levels though.

Clarence in Blood Money also was kinda depressing. Imagine owning an amusement park, having a accident kill tons of people, get sued for everything, manage to win the lawsuit but lose all your money in court costs, lose your reputation, your wife, then having to rent your property out to an abusive crack cocaine ring to stave off bankruptcy who takes advantage of you. Then one of the fathers who had their child die in the accident hires a hitman to kill you.

Aside from a select few others, (World of Tomorrow, Silvio Caruso, some mentally ill savant who was abused his whole life and working on some sort of bio-weapon and the company working on it has both him, and the person who warned everyone about it killed.) the rest pretty much deserved it. Especially the guys in Traditions Of The Trade who were terrorist bombers.

 

[Kinsei]

Yeah. I only really care about the gameplay mechanics.

But you kill innocent people blocking your way to the target anyway

Click to shrink...

Not really seeing as the game actively penalizes you for killing people other than your target.

 

[RestEerie]

it's just a game and entertainment, aka it's fiction.

why does people need to take everything so 'personal'?

If i can enjoy a good slasher flick where the killer slash up a bunch of innocent teenagers on a summer camp, i think i can deal with a game where the main character kill a bunch of innocents (GTA anyone?)

Because i don't take what i consumed 'personal'.

I don't think there's a need for every piece of entertainment that i consumed to abide to some sort of personal 'moral' code...because if so, then art and entertainment will be totally sterile (aka boring).

 

[Acorn]

Never stopped GTA

Click to shrink...

Yeah they literally had hitman contracts in iv iirc.

 

[Odeko]

So I am playing through Hitman 2 and it struck me that the series has (almost) always gone out of its way to make it clear that your targets are awful people and kinda-sorta deserve to die. I am sure there are exceptions to that but by and large you are generally killing off awful people.

And honestly, that seems kind of unnecessary. I would have no compunctions offing regular people. Would you?

Click to shrink...

I would still enjoy it because I already like the game in spite of all the killing rather than because of it. I generally get turned off games where you kill people, Hitman is just the first game since Fallout New Vegas that's good enough that I put up with it. I wouldn't have more of a problem killing someone if I didn't hear them spout off a comical speech about how they personally orchestrated global warming first... in fact I'd be a little scared if someone thought many of the villains in the Hitman series deserved to die from their crimes since they're generally things like "he's an unscrupulous lawyer" and "he's a long-retired Russian spy".

 

[Dyle]

Most players kill lots of innocent people anyway, particularly in the escalations and contracts. I think they could do some great, really dark stuff with having 47 be tasked to kill good people, particularly if Diana has to struggle to justify it, but it would be hard to pull off

 

[Laughing Banana]

If someone is seeking to hire 47 to kill an innocent, would he, as the world's greatest professional hitman, take the offer? He doesn't strike me as the kind who would have moral qualms over stuff like that.

 

[nded]

I wouldn't mind more targets that aren't quite on cartoon villain levels of evil, just to remind people that 47 is, in fact, an amoral killer for hire. Something along the lines of Clarence or Caruso where you understand why someone would want them dead but you can feel for them a little bit.

 

[ASleepingMonkey]

I really don't care who they are, as awful as that sounds. I usually just get the surface level understanding of what their schtick is but it's not what's motivating me to kill them, I just like the challenge and sandbox elements of it.

If someone is seeking to hire 47 to kill an innocent, would he, as the world's greatest professional hitman, take the offer? He doesn't strike me as the kind who would have moral qualms over stuff like that.

Click to shrink...

Absolution slightly wrestled with this.

 

[Lord Vatek]

Nope. Not at all.

 

[gcwy]

Umm, yes? It'd be just as interesting if not more because that could open up some really creative narratives.

 

[tusharngf]

No way I am going to kill innocent good people. Even in GTA5 I avoid hitting people on street.