Feeling flush: Hitman's new Colorado episode refreshes old toilet mechanics
It takes guts.
After a whirlwind tour of Paris, Marrakesh, Bangkok and the Amalfi Coast, Hitman touches down tomorrow in Colorado, USA.
More than six months on and five episodes in (six if you count the summer bonus release), Hitman developer IO Interactive faces a challenge to entice players back to its episodic Hitman series.
Hitman's formula is now well established - and one difficulty of an episodic release is that Hitman's experienced players are now very, very experienced. But Colorado introduces some new tweaks to its bodycount-building recipe IO hopes will entice players of all skill levels back to the fold.
One of the more bizarre additions? A poison syringe that makes people run to the nearest location where it is socially acceptable to vomit.
"It's an awful wrapping for a mechanic that can push an AI out of their original path, onto a new one and - depending where you use it - can expose them to a kill," Torben Ellert, Hitman's lead online designer told Eurogamer in an interview at EGX.
"When a character is made sick from emetic poison their AI will choose the closest toilet and/or rubbish bin, or item tagged as that, to throw up in for a certain period of time and if you've [poisoned them] just right, you'll get them in the bathroom, hold their face down in the water, and you've got your kill."
Barfing in bins and chucking up in toilets is nothing new to Hitman, of course. Emetic poison has been in the game already, although not via a syringe. And it's small changes like this Ellert stresses should have unexpected consequences.
For example, players worked out that the Elusive Target in Paris would only take a drink once, as you approached. So they came up with a method of barrelling into him, stopping him drinking immediately so there was time to poison him via his next beverage, triggering him then to traverse all the way across the level to the only toilet marked up as a place to vomit.
Had IO thought it was possible to poison this target, Ellert said, they would have made it a little more straightforward.
"We would have just tagged a closer object in our geometry so he could simply be sick in a nearby flowerbed," Ellert admits.
Colorado also introduces a collapsable baton that passes through pat-down checks unnoticed.
As for your targets, for the first time the US location introduces four targets, which can all interact with one another. There's also a step up in the overall story arc, which links the various episodes together.
After Colorado, Agent 47's passport is stamped for a finale in Japan - in a location which Ellert is not yet allowed to disclose.
"We will be showing you a kind of Japan level that is exotic," he concludes. "It may not be what you expect."