Agent 47 Had Regenerative Health to Attract New Players

At one point during the development of Hitman: Absolution, the game featured a regenerative health system for main character Agent 47, designed to attract new players to the universe, but the team abandoned it because it made the experience too easy.

Tore Blystad, a game director working at IO Interactive, tells the Official PlayStation Magazine that, “You have to think more if you want to play this as a true Hitman game. If you can constantly assault and then hang back and regenerate the challenge gets lost.”

“We actually opted for a hybrid system here. You regenerate something then we have health stations around the game if you want to use them,” he argues.

“With all the mechanics within the game we tried to apply them in a way that fits the game that we are making. We have some checkpoints to make it slightly easier to get an overview over a section of the game. So you don’t have to worry about the entire massive levels – they’re very, very huge,” he further mentions.

The design philosophy of IO Interactive seeks to create a game that allows players to test the limits of the game without breaking the experience of getting to a fail state.

The team sees this as the best way of making the Hitman mix of stealth and action attractive to newcomers.

But old-term fans will still get the hardcore experience that the franchise has been known for, with the new Purist difficulty setting apparently harder than the first titles in the Hitman series.

The new Hitman game will focus on the betrayal of Agent 47 and the extreme action he needs to take in order to unveil a conspiracy building around him.

Hitman: Absolution will be launched on the PC, the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 on November 20.