They’re releasing the new Hitman game bit by bit: one mission a month, set in a new and sprawling location. Good Hitman missions have always been replayable, but this time the whole game is built around it: a Challenges list tells you of the dozens of different ways to take out the target, an Opportunities system highlights little tricks they’ve designed to let you get the target alone, and a Contracts system lets players challenge each other to take out other targets in particular ways.

And it’s great. It takes a bit of getting used to: the levels are much higher security than Blood Money’s, so you pretty much have to use the Opportunities provided to get your targets alone, but there’s still lots of scope to mix that in to your own evil plans, and the levels are so much bigger, richer, and more complex.

But each of the big systems I mentioned does have some shortcomings, and their strengths suggest an even better way to embrace what makes replaying Hitman missions so enduringly fun. So first off, here’s where I think they fall a little short:

Challenges

These are like achievements, and completing them is how you earn XP to unlock new kit – the main form of progression. But they’re an odd mix: some are single actions for which you’re rewarded immediately (eg drop a chandelier on the target), and others are more like play styles you stick to for a whole mission (eg leave no bodies or evidence). Because they’re so vital for progression, it encourages you to do the single-action ones, then reload your save and do another. On one mission I drowned, poisoned and strangled each of two targets, in that order, reloading my save after each kill so I could finish on the stranglings, since that Challenge requires you to do both in the same run. Because it’s how you unlock stuff, it encourages a weird kind of save-scumming murder tourism.

The other curious thing about it is that because Challenges are only unlocked once, the playstyle ones are only acknowledged once. I don’t know if I got Silent Assassin on my last run, because I’ve already unlocked it. Now that rating is just gone from the roster, as are most of the rest at this point. Now all I get is…

Ratings

At the end of the mission, you’re given points for No Noticed Kills, No Bodies Found, Never Spotted, No Recordings, and for not killing anyone but the targets. This is all geared around one particular way to play the game, one that many of the Challenges require you to betray. But no matter what goals you set for yourself, or what playstyle you were going for, you’re always judged by how close it was to this One True Way of playing. Previous Hitman games also penalised you for not being subtle, but you’d at least get a phrase describing your playstyle: “Psychopath”, “Bagman”, “Thug”, “Silent Assassin”. In this one, you just get a score: 3 Hitman logos out of 5, for how Hitman you are. It seems completely at odds with a game that’s otherwise all about encouraging a variety of play styles.

Contracts

Contracts mode lets you pick anyone in the whole level and mark them as a target. Then however you kill them, and whatever you were wearing, you can choose to make that the requirements for this Contract, and challenge other players to pull it off. It’s a very promising idea that is rendered completely useless by a few things:

You can never save your game when creating or playing a Contract. I have no idea why, but this alone completely kills the whole mode for me. I’d never play a Hitman game where you can’t experiment, or roll back from an unfair failure. It only has certain, very conventional weapons that it recognises – most of the times I’ve tried to make a Contract to do something interesting, the way I killed my target is not one of the ones they have in their secret list, so it just says “Any Weapon” and I can’t challenge others to do what I did. You also can’t specify anything other than the weapon and disguise. So it can never be part of your contract that the player has to do it undetected, or only in the suit, or only killing the targets, or avoiding certain weapons, etc. There’s not nearly enough here to actually specify a play style or a particularly interesting set of constraints.

My Idea

I’d break all of this down into two things: Stunts and Styles.

Stunts

These are the single-action Challenges – kill the target with a chandelier, dress as the target’s lover, etc. Having these as a big list is great for making the player aware of all the crazy possibilities, and the only change I’d make is that these are no longer the way you unlock new equipment. Completing them checks them off the list, so you have a tally of how many you’ve done and can try to complete that list if you like. But nothing practical is withheld from you if you don’t, so there’s not an extrinsic motive to save-scum these unless you enjoy doing so.

Styles

A Style is just a set of rules, and if you finish a mission having abided by all those rules, you successfully executed that Style. There’d be a bunch of Styles set by the developers, including stuff like Silent Assassin:

And on your end of mission report, you get a list of all the Styles you executed. These become your Rating – rather than a single term like previous Hitsman, or a numerical score in this one, it becomes a full description of every noteworthy aspect of your performance. On this run, you were a Silent Assassin and a Master Poisoner and a Ghost. And for every one of those you’d never earned before, you get an XP reward toward unlocking new gear. On future playthroughs, you’ll still be awarded these styles if you met the criteria, but you only get the XP the first time, to encourage people to explore the possibilities before they settle on one style.

Then, every rule that’s used in these is also available to the player, to concoct their own Styles. You can see a huge list of all of them, and just click a checkbox next to each one to say it’s part of your Style, then give it a name. You can do this just to challenge yourself – ‘tracking’ a style would tell the game to let you know if you break any of its rules as you play. But if you manage to fulfil it, you can then challenge your friends to do it too, and upload it publicly. Any time you meet all the conditions of a Style a friend has created, it appears on your report screen – even if you didn’t know about it before.

Playstyles are the soul of replaying Hitman, they’re why I’ve done every Blood Money mission at least 8 times. Hitman Episodes is a step towards a game built around replaying, but in a few big ways it fights against its own idea of you replaying in different ways – always judging you as if you were trying for Silent Assassin, forgetting about playstyles as soon as you’ve done them, and not letting you define your own with any of the interesting restrictions the developers built their own Challenges from.

To finish, here are some Styles I’d love to be able to make and challenge people to, that can’t be done with the Contracts system:

Silent Strangler

– No weapons other than the fiber wire

– No unarmed attacks

– Never spotted

– No bodies found

So you can kill as many people as you like, as long as you always use the fiber wire to do it. This gives you no nonlethal options, so it’s avoid or murder.

Tin Man

– Poison Silvio with a tin of expired spaghetti sauce

– No weapons except the tin of expired spaghetti sauce

– No unarmed attacks

Poisoning with sauce is understandably not lethal, nor is hitting people with the tin, so you’ve got to figure out a way to actually finish off your unconscious targets without using weapons.

Something in the Water

– Kill both targets

– Poison only

– No unarmed attacks

– Never spotted

– No recordings

Kill as many as you like, as long as there’s no trace that you were ever there to do so.

Loud And Gone

– Kill both targets with the shotgun (only found on certain guards)

– Never spotted

– No other kills

I set this as a challenge for myself and did it tonight, it was great fun figuring out how to a) get hold of a shotgun, b) get to the target with it, c) get the target alone in a position that you can get away when everyone comes running to investigate the shot.

Unfortunate Events

– Kill both targets

– Accidents only

– Never spotted

– No recordings

Again, no restrictions on killing, and doesn’t matter if the bodies are found, but everything has to look like an accident – and to sell it, no-one can know you were ever there.