Level Design in Hitman: Guiding Players in a Non-Linear Sandbox

[Music] hello everyone hello and welcome to the level design and hitman guiding players in a nonlinear sandbox game today we're gonna talk you through the journey that we had with our tutorial and the guidance system that we implemented in the latest installment of hitman and this doesn't work excellent my name is Jakob and I'm a principal level design IO Interactive I've been there for 13 years made a number of hitman games hitman contracts where I was a script er hit my blood money where I was in script her and I also worked on the tutorial and then Kane and Lynch where I turned into level design and became owner of the tutorial again and then we had hitman absolution where I became the lead level designer and also did some work on the tutorial and then last as principal level designer I also

designed the tutorial so that's what I'm gonna talk about today that's great I'm a level designer at i/o and while Jakob he was making amazing titles I was going to school like literally I started in ninth grade when Jakob started at IO but since then I've gone to the University of Aarhus where I studied interaction design work at my Master's then I went to daddy where was a game designer and I went to Academy Avadh I produced a few tablet titles and I learned how to paint a little and then after my thesis I got my dream job at IO where I designed the guide the agenda for today first of all we would like to introduce a hitman of course and then the level showstopper which takes place in Paris which is the big level that we launched in March then we want to talk about the closed alpha report which was a yeah quite a pillar

in our in our development of your hitman and then we don't want to talk about the mission which is also kind of function a little bit as where we talk about the tutorial and the guide and then hopefully you will have time for questions yes all right so what is hitman for those of you who don't know hitman is about agent 47 the guy on the screen here he's highly trained assassin and he travels the world and killed people for money the game is a third-person creative stealth action game and it's an episodic game which means that we're releasing it in episodes roughly a month in-between the first one went live March and that allows us to engage with the community in a whole new way where we can look at the content and actually react to what they're saying about the game and how they play it and what the like involved in don't like and also today we're actually releasing a new episode so that has launch party we just shipped it three hours ago and the game

is a lot about disguises and social stealth that's one of the key mechanics for having it it's about infiltrating and going close to your target under disguise we also have a very very very important part of the game and that is the freedom of approach we don't tell you how to complete the missions it's almost like a puzzle game where you have to figure out how do I get away with murder so if you want to use explosives that's one thing that's fine if you want to use poison that's fine if you want to use your sniper rifle that's also fine just as long as the guy dies these are the five games that led up to hitman I just want to talk about Blood Money and absolution for a bit because from a level design perspective these two are different Blood Money had these open sandbox levels where again you had a lot of freedom of approach and then hip tonight hitman absolution we did more kind of small levels like 70 and then divided by checkpoints and so they were

a lot easier to kind of digest for the player but this time we wanted to combine the sandbox missions from Blood Money with the AI fidelity and the game mechanics and that are higher a lot higher fidelity that what we saw on Blood Money so we want to combine two into hitman and just to show you guys what it looks like I have a trailer that will kind of explain a bit the essence of a sandbox game like hitman is freedom of approach where you go how you infiltrate who you become knowing which disguises give you access is key but beware some individuals are more observant than others be prepared to improvise as you experiment with your

play style each hit to a genuine masterpiece of assassination complete mastery of a level is rewarded as your skills evolve over time so do your options prepare equipment in advance and plan the perfect hit new locations will appear over time [Music] you know travel the world new missions new targets some targets only [Music] they are gone forever yes our story today starts with our

alpha build this was the first time the public outside of Iowa actually got to play the game and we of course weren't finished but we created this palace obviously here it's a four story building located in Paris and there's a surrounding garden and this is the entire level the palace it has a complete interior so that's a lot of square meters to to kind of knock yourself around with the mission fighting 47 is to infiltrate the palace to eliminate vixen avakov and Dahlia my goal is the two targets when the mission starts you start up front and then you're on your own so you have to figure out how to pull it off vixen avakov he roamed the ground floor where he is attending his fashion show he's a fashion brand owner and then on the side he's running this spy community where they sell secrets in this secret auction on the top floor of the palace where Dahlia is and then we in the other build we sent this out to the players they have a lot of things to

do in the palace a lot of items hammers disguises fire extinguishers fireworks setups a diorama there's escape helicopters rat poison in the basement so there's tons of options and ways to go about completing your mission so that we gave to all the players but what we got back was that some of them they actually define yeah thanks a lot man real considerate but others they did it like this [Music] [Applause] that is Victor no because Edison win' and ringleader of e ogres [Music]

yeah so Dahlia and Nabokov one and hitman zero yeah they didn't use the pallet right yes and then we had the closed alpha and we were really really proud of what we were presenting to the players in this build the closed alpha is the first time we went live hitman is a live game so we wanted to do that as early as possible in the process and this was absolutely the biggest user base ever who got to play our level we knew maybe this would be a little bit tricky because there was a lot of stuff in this level and we knew that they didn't have a tutorial we didn't have any guidance and we were of course working on both at this time we already had prototypes and our fears were confirmed and maybe with a little bit on top they didn't really have a good understanding on how to navigate they

had a hard time getting an overview and they just generally found it very very difficult to approach we were prepared for this kind of but what we were not prepared for was the fact that they felt that the level was empty when you are presented with such a big level it can be a little bit intimidating and you can feel like a like a tourist sort of just being dumped there and that can be a little uncomfortable and we realized that maybe they were just presented somehow with the tip of the iceberg maybe they didn't know how to find all this stuff because we knew it was there we're pretty sure because we put it there so maybe we should do something in order to to make sure that they could find it so the direction became make the best hitman tutorial ever and teach the players to think like hitman and also design a level guidance system that would help them find the

rest of the iceberg but it was very important for us that we wouldn't like shove it down their throat we didn't want to force their hand so this became the mission wanted to teach them how to operate the game wanted to teach them the hitman fundamentals of the game and we wanted for them to be able to set their own goals because for us that really felt like that was that was what it meant to think like a hitman to kind of you know find those possibilities those weak points and think hey I'm gonna use that data and then the second part became well we need to show them the iceberg we need to find a way to illuminate it and we need to encourage replay while we do this so yes now yeah I was gonna talk a little bit about the tutorial yes at this point we had the showstopper that you just saw and then we had a prototype of the tutorial and the tutorial is the idea is that it's set in the past it's 20 years before the

game it allows us to peek into the background of agent 47 where we we've never been there before in the story so we would also give something new to the fans about 47 and and what his how he was trained and where he's coming from so the idea was to create a at the ICA which is the agency that employs hitman to create their training facility and what they do is that they create these training mock-ups where you could then you know get taught like hitman would break be told so what we did for this prototype is that we kind of we if imagine that this is all the mechanics and hitman games so the way we looked at them was that okay they can be roughly divided into these five categories we have the ever-present ones we have the item dependent ones ever-present once is like running and crouching and all this stuff you can do without it's like you and the controller they can do item dependent once that's things that requires specific items that unlock new kind of actions with 47 and then we have

the environments of the dependant ones just agility drainpipes cover systems and all of that and and then we get to the juicy bits which at the end to see dependent ones of course you need people to subdue and kill and all of that stuff and then on the far right we have the NPC alert behaviors which is the the when they get angry right there's something that we also want to do so what we did was that we looked at this and then we created a number of test chambers where the idea was that each chamber would then be an isolated kind of proving ground for a specific feature so we could teach you how to throw stuff we could teach you how to subdue people all of that and then have them in small compartmentalised chambers that wouldn't affect each other because what we saw in the show stuff is that when when they get spotted then the entire thing cascades and then they affect the entire level by getting spotted in one corner so here we could harness this chaos and have it under control and then we gave that to the users and if we use the

tested and I was pretty fine they got the idea but then we looked at the level it's like okay this tutorial is not really representative of the game right it's like we're distilling it into some very simple mechanics but when we add everything together the complexity just explodes and the tutorial didn't do this so they weren't really any better they just got a little more time to agent adrift and kind of tried so it was back to the drawing board we sat down and looked at each other and say okay we need to do something about this because we have to change the way we think about this tutorial so we came up with the mantra you fight as you train it's no saying in the army that you fight as you train and the idea is that once you get stressed you lose all ability to reason so we need to have all directions and you kind of deeply inside you so you don't have to think about the stuff you just do it so we have to create as real

a training scenario as we can then we need to build sand boxes because that's what the game is so we condensed the these the show stopper idea into a tiny sandbox which is the drawing that you're seeing here this is a paper prototype I made where I just cut you know cut up papers and so I get the shape that I want and but this is what we need to do then we need to team up with the user team user research team and do rapid prototype testing where we just do it every second week punch out a new build try it out again with a smaller group of people and then we need to stop calling into the tutorial and instead we're gonna rebrand it to the prologue and now I have to say the prologue for the rest of this talk that's gonna be a challenge because this is something different because people came to me and say okay I'm gonna put this in the tutorial and I go put this mechanic in tutorial they had this linear compartmentalized I mentality about the whole tutorial so we had to call it something else so what we

came up with was a new structure for the opening of the game part 1 the arrival where we kind of open up the scene the the whole training session part to the training where we learn agent 47 there and the player mostly how to be agent 47 and then we have a final test which is the second sandbox of the prologue where we will test his skills I'm just going to go through each of these parts the opening of the game there's that's this helipad and this is the ICF of its training facility it's a concrete construction far up north and 47 is just dropped there by a helicopter and then he's on his own and so is the player so we don't tell you how to do anything this is nothing really happens here it's just nice and cold and then your job as the player is to figure out okay I'm in control and then you need to find the doll up here sorry things are getting ahead of myself here there go so you

just have to I'm out of power I'm not so you have to find the door that leads inside the facility I am out of power yes yes sir about that all right so one step back for a seventh as a helipad learn how to navigate to learn how to use the camera into the facility then we have part two which is the guided training and this is where the juicy bit of the teaching actually happens to the untrained eye this look exactly by the drawing I shown before and it kind of is but this time we actually sat down and then we found the meaningful mechanics to learn the player in order for him to kind of do a hit so this was about infiltrating eliminating and exfiltrating so instead of just going through all the mechanics one by one we picked the ones that you need you picked

the ones you need in order to complete a mission and then we created a story for the mission that you have to infiltrate this yard in order to eliminate the owner who's an art thief and then all of a sudden that there was kind of a small story that all of sudden and then it turned into that these missions that they do at this I see a facility actually reenactments of former hits so what we did next was okay but is we need to add the rest right because it's the sandbox so we have all the things surrounding this as well and then in order to help the player do this we then use the guide which is kind of pointing you towards the next point in your mission example here so the requirements for the product training here it was that it has to be a real sandwich mission we've just been through that we need a very very robust guide

because at this point you haven't played any hitman so far so we had to make the guidance system the thing that tells you what to do very very robust because things can go wrong right and and and in my experience is three different ways to play a game right you do as we expect you to well we you do your own thing because you want to see how far can you push this game until it breaks and that's fine with us because then you're in on it and you're breaking it on purpose just to see what happens that's fine but then you have the last group of people which of these people who really wants to play your game but they for some how they somehow mix it up and they get confused they do it doesn't really work out for them and those are the ones that we really have to take care of because those are the ones that's gonna throw away the control and say I'm done with this and then yeah so those are the ones that I'm very very careful about doing this guide for so it had to be taking into consideration that you would play it backwards or infiltrate it in a different way then it had to be easy but

not boring we have a wall of difficulty in the showstopper we learned so again instead we need to kind of get them on board and have them yeah get them rolling and actually have a small success experience here to begin with the only way to fail is death if you can't play the training reason wrong right that would be kind of weird in a way but we punish you severely so the only way to actually get punished is if you die we do not feature [ __ ] you which means that we're not cheating with what 47 can do he is as real as he is when you play the showstopper it's yes that's a very important thing to us because otherwise you wouldn't train as you fight fight as you train and then we only want you to kill the target because agent 47 is actually a very very professional assassin so in in the fantasy of a lot of especially the fans then he is only going for the targets he doesn't kill the cleaning person to get the disguise he finds other ways a quick

breakdown of the first playthrough here right we start outside the yacht and again it's made of plywood it's not a real yacht it's something they built inside this facility and you're told off by the gut you can't enter here they say all right cool I need to go in you do some infiltration you do some agility you're going to cover you and things are prompted using different systems we have this front up there and then you subdue the mechanic if you drag him away you get his outfit and now you're on your way onto terms of the yard here we push a sign about threats this we had a hard time getting people to understand these dots which is kind of the only the easiest way for us to occur that these guys know who you are so they can see through disguise you have to be very careful about that and as a result we saw people infiltrating and what they did was that you have the guy over here who's a threat he can see if he sees you then he's gonna get angry and then people were gluing themselves to the car over here so we that really worked well we teach her how to use instinct to

locate the target we follow the target and then he is foot seven is rejected again so okay my disguise is no longer valid up there I need to get a new one so 92 yeah disguise yourself as a crew member and here we actually yeah if the throwing thing wasn't really a part of the original pan Hut but we added it because it's really fun and so the poor guy he takes a wrench to the head and then ping and into the freezer so hide buddy and at yet another disguise as if 40 70 is taking on disguises he opens up new options in their missions where he can he can use the disguises to his advantage so in this place he's blending in which means that he's taking the role of someone in the game and in this case he's taken role as the bartender and the target is standing right there in front of him so now we're very very close but as you saw before if I just get out my gun here and just start shooting then it wouldn't work so we can't do that with the player we followed the guy the target into his office and it's a bit

hard to see but that's actually buddy got denying your access here so again you're denied access okay we do disguise it's not good enough for this either you sneak around to climb the window and we prompt you for cover again we prompt you for inventory how to shoot an aim and then the Tigers off and then it's about exfiltrating it's about leaving the yard no one notices this when you shoot the guy and then once you're off then it's find another way off because the guard because of the threat and then crowbar lock doors and eventually a complete the mission so this playthrough was designed in a way where we knew from absolution that we had to show we had to ask the user to do things several times in order for that to kind of stick and become something he would do without thinking about it and in this case we had three times we told you about threats three times we told you about centuries because that's core of the design and

ended up the level design the sisters hold who has exes where the whole disguise game playing twice cover hide body and change disguises and some climbing for Windows and then once we had actually we're down here we have the gun right which is yeah interesting in terms of what we think is important right so we put a lot of effort into getting the players to understand the this guy's gameplay after that the training wheels off we have a final test of no guidance in a way but not heavily tutorial iced and then we introduce you to the player guidance system in this mission agent for the seven have to eliminate a guy who is being flown away in this jet and and you have to figure out how to get to him and that involves using the his ejection seat and it also wraps up our story so the whole training at the ICA one thing we do when we start the mission that we meet Diana and then here when I when we over we're back at the helipad and we talk to Diana we give 47 his name and eventually he

leaves and he is on his way into the show stopper twenty years later so now the flow looks like this was fine we had the arrival we had the training we had the final test and then the show stopped and people were playing this and trying it out and it worked fine so that kind of checked off the Hitman fundamentals excellent so now they know how to infiltrate they know how to eliminate the target they know how to excellent rate and that's fine but we were still lacking they set their own goals because we really felt that that was important for them in this giant showstopper context they had to figure out how to do to kind of figure out what they wanted to do so if we just looked at mechanics again from before as I said before we had picked the mechanics we thought was important enough for you to actually be put into the training but we didn't put everything in which means there was something left out the most important ones were actually this one the NPC alert behaviors again we saw people getting stressed out when the a I became

angry at them when they were trespassing when they were discovered doing something bad so this was very much about they haven't actually seen this so when things go wrong in the showstopper they're still gonna see new things they haven't tried before so they needed more training so we literally asked them to play the level again and we give them a different briefing that was the idea we sat down okay so we need to give them a new briefing we need to explain them that now they have to do it again and people were like okay again and the idea was that before we had the guided playthrough with the guide but this time we wanted them to kind of seek out other things in the mission is kind of again set their own goals find these other things so we created a challenge prototype which was an alternate version of the yachtie I just stripped out the guidance system that was on top of it and then created and inserted some items and we just had a vanilla version of the yacht and we created a challenge paper

handout because we did we decided that okay this is actually this fits very well with our challenge system because we hadn't talked about that for the play in the players perspective yet and the challenge system is the way that you progress in the game you level up your locations instead of levelling up agent 47 this is how you unlock all the good stuff fancy explosives and fancy sniper rifles so this would also be a great opportunity for us to actually show the player the challenge system so we designed a group of challenges for the player that would be deliberately simple and easy and they would also be deliberately kind of revealing about themselves so find the rat poison and take zero I think it's called disguise at the as the yacht crew in level 0 then we have eliminate the tile around the target in the toilet and that the tricky part about that is that actually requires the rat poison so that's the thing you would have to find out for yourself and generator use that to distract the gun fire at the target instead of just shooting him disguise

yourself as a that's the targets guest so we kind of pointed you in a lot of different directions inside the game when as you were playing this we threw in some extra items so when you start up then for the 7 is placed in front of a table with some explosives and lockpick some coins and then behind him we had assault rifles and shotguns so we could kind of give you all the tools we kind of wanted you to play around with and then get an understanding of how the game worked there was still tutorial ization in this version we created these we use the Papas because s before this is the same pop/imap a pop up you saw over the threat but this time it was telling you about how to place explosives in the world so whenever you picked up an explosive this would pop up and only two times in the lifetime and then it would disappear forever so even if you kind of tried it again a bit later then you wouldn't get this then off to use a test and we the first prototype was just a piece of paper with these ten challenges right so it's like they played it the mission started to say okay now you get this piece of paper

and these ten challenges and you have to complete some of them and then complete the mission again and then all of a sudden we saw them roaming around the yard and they actually began to set goals for themselves right so they picked a couple of challenges and then they began to explore the app to find the these solutions for these challenges that were using and as they did that they actually stumbled on the other things in the challenges so all of a sudden they were connecting the dots in the head they began to okay so there's also the generator over there so armed with the knowledge of the first playthrough the layout of the yard then we actually had them kind of go nuts here and and some of them they actually because we we clear then later on created so it would prompt you again if you wanted to train more when you did this and because there was still unchecked challenges of course some people had to go back because they had you know they had to find them all and we also learned that this is that the setting was very very tolerant it's okay to do experiments in this place because as I said before when the Paris Fashion Show level kind of cascades into chaos

it feels very expensive you're breaking something very very very expensive whereas here it's a plywood job right what that's fine so that worked really well plus the whole training metaphor that he is there for the 7 to get better that actually also resonated very well for these people and then last but not least we also got into the NPC reactions where they provoked the NPC's in ways that would be very very hard for us to actually tutoral eyes and use the real game plan without heavily scripting it so they got the reactions from the characters in the game as they would react on the showstopper so again we them something real something that would be exactly the same when they would be playing it inside the showstopper so this is the final version we ended up with the arrival scene a guided playthrough and then again the freeform playthrough and then the final test and that then allowed us to check out this one now it goes okay

so now we're back and standing in front of the showstopper we're a little bit better prepared this time we got a nice suit we still got a silly hat sorry but yeah but things will be fine now so now we just have to concentrate on making these experiences visible as I mention about this this iceberg that we had to illuminate somehow and if you look at other games that are doing the same they often make quests if we look at a quick breakdown of the quests you often have a guy saying hey I have information for you there's something cool over there you can go and get it you travel great distances and you may come and come find a clue that will then unlock a conversation that you can have with the person somewhere else you'll go and find this person and engaging in this conversation will activate maybe a sequence or something that will then lead you to a new cool location where there's a bus fight and when you're done with a bus fight you will get the treasure it's a classic breakdown not all games

the sandbox games of course doing this but this is this is how one of these could look and if we look at what really defines these types of quests they are often story dictated they have this checkpoint structure often and some kind of clue will unlock something that will unlock something and that's that's completely okay often they are a part of or they are like a big epic quest of sorts that will maybe go on for a longer run and they have these unique endings now if we look at how quest would maybe look like in hitman and if we look at him hitman in general it's not a story dictator that was kind of one of the the goals for for hitman that we didn't want to make it story dictated wanted to make it more free anything can happen at any given time this is something that's a little bit frustrating sometimes level designer but also what makes this game so awesome

and unique anything can just happen anytime you can kill everyone and and that's actually the problem when you're making a quest because someone could just go missing um we want to encourage replay and often these big unique quests they don't really they want to give you this one really really cool experience of course we have lots of stories that can be replayed but in general this is more about that one one time when you meet it that's going to be really awesome and of course all our quests have to end with target eliminated we're not looking at unique endings necessarily well for each mission that is that is sort of your your goal we want you to kill the guy get out of there so we want you to to kill and we want you to do it again and again and when we look at this kind of structure we realized that it was strangely applicable to the movie Groundhog Day

I don't know if any of you in here have seen the Groundhog Day I'm guessing maybe you have it's from the 90s it's a great movie starring Bill Murray who was trapped trapped in a time loop he has to experience the same day again and again and again yes and when you realize did you have to do it again like in this tutorial again really it can give you that kind of emotion that's going on in his face but there's also this really really positive sides to it because all of a sudden you get this amazing control because you know what's going to happen at any given time you know exactly when that waitress is gonna walk through the door you know exactly when Nava cough is gonna go smoke and you know just where the sniper barges so this can be an incredible empowering tool that we have to use in a nice way but you can also design it in a battery where this constant recognition of patterns can become a little bit unbearable maybe

the point of view just wanted to kill yourself or rebel for the sake of rebelling that's the negative side of it and we didn't want to of course design for that so if we look at Groundhog Day quests we knew that they have to be optional that was one of the big problems that Bill Murray's facing but he is feeling trapped we don't want to give you the trap feeling it had to be something nice that you could do if you wanted to I want them to be flexible because anything can happen you can kill everyone and anything and you can do whatever you want so it's it's a playground we wanted it to continue being a playground while still having this sort of having described there and then we need it to be consistent again you need to know exactly when Nava cough is gonna go smoke that is really really important so with these things in mind let's look back at our little quest breakdown and see what it would look like if we try to shove that onto hit and hit man you probably don't want to

walk up to the guy and say hey you don't know how I can kill another cuff or you probably want to hear two people talking about a secret meeting somewhere or some guy who's in town that no one has met yet so you can easily take his place we don't want you to travel great distances we want you to infiltrate instead of like classic sandbox games often very very large I was a large four hit man but there we want you to really engage in the space that is there and not spend hours traveling clothes are fine we can take that directly I we can have conversations with people that's okay we could use that in our quests but we want you to be incognito when you do it we want you to use social stealth change disguises and so on and we can use cutscene sequences are fine as long as you can get out of them very fast and there's no cheating because everything needs to be

consistent that was one of the rules so we cannot teleport you we cannot just end the next part of the sequence somewhere in the back of the garden that's not okay we don't have precise we don't do that now and for the treasure chest we would like to make sure that that we leave the player in a spot where they know what to do next but we don't want to hand everything to them again we want an autonomous player we want real hitmen and we want to keep encouraging that so hitman quests became opportunities because there that is what they were they were opportunities to get close to your target this is an example of an opportunity and this is the the helmet Krueger or the male model opportunity where you can listen in on these two stylists I don't forget see them who's talking about Helmut Kruger this new model in town and he kind of looks like

you it's just really practical and when you run around in this world and you can listen in on these conversations and this is where we have the opportunity revealing again you can't just walk up and say hey tell me how to become a male model because I really want to kill someone we need to let you sort of feel sneaky and listen in on people who are having this conversation and really empower you in this in this Groundhog Day so we needed some kind of system where you would still choose to track it and we wanted to have a system that will I can illuminate the iceberg show you this is interesting this is something that you can use so we have the opportunity revealing that then becomes only revealed or you can then track it directly and say yes this sounds great and of course this is there's volume sand stuff so if you run away it's fine nothing's gonna happen and it's gonna be available for you later in your menu because we really want you to play and

not like stick around if you feel like you have to yes so here you come into the menu where Diana will give you for briefing and explain to you why this is such an important opportunity because here you can take home with Krugers plays obviously yeah and then have a secret meeting with Dahlia who's one of your targets and these are the different opportunities that we have in the level of the blue ones will lead to Dahlia or the orange ones will leave to Nabokov we wanted you to be able to just browse through it again we want to show you content and this is such a great way to share your content instead of your saying we have a huge level there's lots of stuff have fun we can say well this it's a huge levels of sorts of stuff have fun and you can just go in and choose one of these if you want a little tour I can if we use the tourist metaphor because these will definitely take you around the whole level so if we continue you find the helmet Kruger that's one of your one of your

opportunity steps you have to investigate him find out what he's up to this is one of the clues I have from the quest breakdown and you hear that he's he's on the phone with Dahlia and he's planning to meet her and she says they call me back later so I will tell you then where the meeting is that's also practical then you become home in Kruger and get rid of the body that's part of it right we don't tell you to get rid of the body that's something that you can just do we just tell you to become helmet program then we asked you to called alia you find her phone or his phone and then you call her and you say hey you want me to come up now and she's like no it's essential that you walk the runway we want you to have a little fun while doing this so you got your makeup on and in the classic style of hitman you can also just subdue that poor stylist since that and you got your hitman on you get your makeup on and then you have to log the catalog yes and you are back out I'm

not gonna show the video you have to go and play it um so here you walk the catwalk and then Dahlia thinks that's awesome so now you can go and meet with her and this is actually where we're gonna sort of step back and say great you've earned it now you're alone with her and you can do whatever you want the her assistant is leaving she's great helmet good to see you and then you can sit down and do all this roleplay with a huge conversation and you can just you know take your time think about what you want to do or you can just shoot from the throat I realized this is a bit extreme I didn't notice I was even catch a throat that's also an ISO poison the opportunity I can really recommend playing this one it's also fun so when we design opportunities which is also a really important lesson learned we're also designing how to fail it um again we have a pretty extreme environment is very organic anything can

happen and that means that this guide needs to be flexible and we need to then say when you can't do it anymore because what if you accidentally dumped his body with the outfit into the river and it's gone right you know so just meet helmet while being him that's also a little strange you can just shoot the people who's going to reveal it then you're not gonna hear about it and then we can't really we can't really say that we can guide you anymore because we don't really have our reveal anymore that's lost forever but in this case you can actually still play it the guide will sort of shut down and say well no no we can't do this anymore but you can keep going if you if you know it by heart yeah so around Paris we have a bunch of opportunities spread out you saw them in the menu and this is some of the points where you can listen in on conversations

all the yellow ones for nava cough and in this case also all conversations and this is an example of a static reveal this is the guest list that will tell you which room shikaka Sally is living in and will then help you to become him basically this is from the other side yeah we have them spread out and we also the opportunities allows us to show you some really cool sites the pavilion here in the garden is one of those cool sites and you can also have this really awesome moment where you can blend in as a bodyguard and yeah here participate in the super secret meeting and then get a little alone time with Novikov afterwards so during those ever loved the the opportunities allowed us to really show the players the iceberg but now we really had to make sure that we were still encouraging replay now this led us

to some design principles and I may say up front that we broke all of these and that is why we have them lesson learned information should never be a prerequisite for progression an example could be in the home a Krueger opportunity where you hear about the meeting in the beginning when we did this you would Krueger would only drop the phone if you had heard about the meeting that would be no phone unless you knew about it that's not a cool way to fix things and of course we fix it very quickly made sure that wouldn't happen again because that doesn't support consistency that was one of our rules and be very mindful of this if you are doing anything similar make sure that you use real things in the world use items use anything else just don't use information if you want this playground ever tuned this should let go before the kill again

I kind of mentioned it before we want this autonomous player we wanted them to have fun but this is also this also brings me back to the whole fail condition part let's say that we told you to kill Dahlia my weasel you to kill her in a very specific way and we told you to listen to some of the conversation and then stand up and shoot her that means that you have to fail the opportunity if the player does anything else and that is kind of that's a tall order and you shouldn't do that to your players so think about what you're actually doing when you make these type of guides because you may end up giving your player a really bad experience soon you should always be available even without the guide yeah that's just again the consistency you don't want the guide to be dictating anything we don't want the story to dictate anything we want the level to dictate if we want the player to be able to be in control and

not around and then we added some technical changes to support this we added the persistent pool which brings me back to the phone once you've heard it the first time the persistent booth come true and that means that and this is across all playthroughs and so when you go back he will definitely have that phone we also use this fall of the reveals so if you've heard it once you never have to reveal it again you can still go over and listen to them and the widget will show up and all that stuff because we wanted players to feel that consistency in the hot design as well but you don't have to you can just skip that stuff go right ahead and we added in so hot message we hadn't so long but it wasn't very prominent so we decided to push it a little bit and to make sure that players felt like they had that option as well instead of just using opportunities I'll show you an example in a second and then we added different levels of guidance so you can decide if

you want full opportunities if you want to have this this minimal version where we don't give you the marker in the world but only the objective and it's up for you to find out how you want to do it yes and this is an example of Intel this is fireworks schedule you read it and you a view until take you to the menu and here you have a description these are kind of all the little parts of the opportunities and if you are that type of player who just wants to investigate on your own we encourage you to use this and stuff they compromise yes I call this a compromise and not the perfect solution because it really is a compromise and it's something that we keep adjusting what is the most important part is it the sandbags bark so I said the guidance and then we also have replay value on top of that so fancy so this is something that you

constantly have to adjust I have because there's always some really really cool idea about some narrative part that would be great to do and then you have to think about what would that do to sandbox and then what would that do to replay value and this is something that we do all the time it's not that we made up our minds and then we said go everyone this is a template design design every time we have a new opportunity idea we sit and we talk about this every time we had a step to an opportunity we talked about this this is a constant readjusting and it's something that we're still working with thanks to our episodic model we can keep adjusting this so yes so we managed to show them the iceberg and still encourage replay in a balance that we were happy with and we got really really positive feedback we're really really excited about this and we were also

personally very happy with the with the result and so that was awesome um it seemed that they managed to find the iceberg which is he said I wanted to do and I felt like they were prepared to find it so it's awesome yeah yeah so we just want to wrap up with some learnings that we made you fight as you train turned out to be very true of us it turned out to be the right way to teach people how to play it man make it as real as possible and we just used the right space for that because if we had done that this in absolution and asked you to play the the opening of that once more that would kind of break down because that's the story mission right so you would kill an important person that you have to do it again and then it kind of loses all meaning but in this case we managed to create these sad boxes that would actually behave as the real game because it was the real game we like prototyping a lot it worked really really well for us here we teamed up with the user research department as I said and then we did rapid rapid rapid

prototyping so I would punch out a build rundown and then have it evaluated the same day and then two weeks later we would do it again and then paper versions I am a believer in paper versions of anything before you go digital because it's a lot easier to cut your paper in half and just paint on it if we do a live game then go live early this closed alpha was the first time people outside IO had contact with the player with our game and that is also what allowed us to do these British dramatic changes to the to the tutorial because we all of a sudden we saw a lot of problems that we could fix before we shipped so highly recommended because this is also a kind of internal fight as you train exercise because all of a sudden we have to release content outside and we have to make sure that we have servers that we have deployment methods that we have the development team behind the online team so all of this became the same for ourselves we

had to do it the right way yes and as I mentioned before adding a guide in the game like hitman means to signing fill conditions please remember it if you're ever in the same situation as us it's yeah it's just really important and it saves a lot of heartache to do it as fast as possible and then sandbox guidance means compromise this already said that a lot and I'll say it again because it's important but it's ok it's ok with compromises they're actually pretty great it really makes you wonder a lot it makes you discuss a lot and talk about what is actually the core experience that we want to create with this game why are we doing it and the constant adjustment keeps you sharp so yes that was our take on how to guide the player in the sandbox game thank you

yes and as usual as you know there is time for questions so if you have some then please raise your hand does one in the back there I'm sorry about the sound by the way I hope you can all hear still ok hey ok so two questions for you guys first I've noticed that the list of opportunities is breakdown by color but I was wondering if you guys are doing by difficulty as well and if you do that how are you differentiating those and the second one about the dance Blazek approach is it a no-no from the get-go completely out of out of the game or are there going to be opportunities that actually allow the player to do something like that something like what sir glance blazing all guns blazing guns

blazing but you can always go console acing I mean there you mean like from the get-go so like it yes blazing in one of the opportunities that you oh so like us and we're not just like we're like encouraging you to go guns blazing well we kind of have this no kill rule in the opportunities which may sound weird since it's a hitman game but we really really wanted you to be able to choose your own style we don't want to pressure you to do anything you don't want to do but I think like I mean you can really go guns blazing if you want to and we also don't want you to to limit yourself to opportunities we want you to go out there and have fun yeah as a general rule we try to avoid telling you to kill a lot of people and because we some people really want to do the opportunities but still go silent assassin and do it in their own way your first part of the question was yeah

I was wondering if the opportunities are differentiated in difficulty by you guys and if you reward the player specifically for completing an opportunity over the other can i yeah well we have it let's say that we have an opportunity that we know it's very very difficult we have one in in Paris the light break opportunity it is kind of difficult and we actually just started in the in the roof so it's behind like layers of trespassing so we're trying to do a little bit more in that style so we say that the really hard opportunities may be further in or something like that but we try to vary them so so yeah it does that answer your question do you mean like categories like saying level like this is difficult this more and if the player completes a difficult opportunity he's you're doing differently at the end of the mission right the opportunities are all I think

they give the same amount of points when you complete them so they're not differentiated in that way no no but they could have more challenges associate to this challenge yeah that's true so if it's long and complicated that's probably more challenges associated yeah thank you yeah we have outrun a friend I just want to ask I was speaking to someone you stay and I didn't know about this but there was a certain amount of controversy that was generated by I dose stroke square-enix appropriate the the black lives matter thing for the dr6 claim that's come now like it's called all glass smell I don't know too much about it but with regards like the political climate how much of what's going in the world world how much of that effects the design of your games

for example obviously it has like are you sure you know a woman in the neck and you know you assassinate like a black person yes so it's we're not like I think that's a very very very very good question and thank you assess everyone and we are also just people right and I believe that this game and this character is is here's an antihero right so what we do is that we actually give the moral dilemma to you as a player because the people that we are going after and the story are the bad guys of our universe so the what we do is that we actually hand the responsibility of the big of the munition kind of how you perform it that that's that's you are kind of morale because the everything is designed in a way so you don't have to kill this innocent people again that it is something we are in this moral zone of how how do we go about this I hope that

answers your question just like there's just so much blowback that's happening right yes he's got too much time in the hands anyone else anyone else basically I was wondering as you showed how the users kind of interacted when they didn't have the prologue with the level yeah you know they just went in and killed Eric how did it change when you added the product did you have to do some you know block blocking gates as well because initially they could just walk through the main entrance and just kill the character do they instantly know after the prologue to not do that or did you also change the level design well what we what we typically see when when a seasoned player plays the mission when they have knowledge about how to

approach the game is that they rarely actually enter through the main gate at the first thing right that they they'll know that the target is just in there just by looking at the thing right so they will seek out the surroundings and so the example I showed was kind of like the worst case of course we saw people who were infiltrating and experiencing and playing around with the game but but we didn't change the but there was one thing we learned from the Alpha and that it was if you went right that was this place where we had a fence that was guarded and what would happen that was that people would approach the fence get told off by the Sentry guys and then because the layout was a dead end they wouldn't turn back they they were I should just keep pushing forward and then climbing the fence and then getting into a lot of trouble so what we did was that we pushed the fence a bit back because there was an opening in the in the garden a kind of fence so they could get up to the guy get dismissed so you can't enter here and just continue to the right so the were these kind of

changes why we discovered some bottlenecks but but we didn't we don't want to block you off in this setting here this will have to be the last question hey thanks for a great talk so my question is how do you go about user testing these things because it's a very big sandbox and SSA there's lots of stuff you can do and everything interacts with each other and I mean you could watch a video of every player playing the game but that's probably a lot of work and you probably had a lot of alpha testers many years yeah exactly so how do you go about that and do you have like some metrics that you go about or do you do like just kind of a questionnaire testing yeah we do several different kinds of user testing right the ones that I talked about the rapid ones we also have bigger user surveys where we interview a lot of people a lot they play the game and there's surveys and then we also have we send out

questionnaires to the players and ask them directly and we also have a user panel where we are in kind of continuous dialogue with the players about how they do it so that's the user testing thing anything else to add well that and then we also like we're doing an episodic game that means people are playing the game in their own homes right now so we have a very like we are really trying to listen to the community and we spend a lot of time just finding out what people are saying and how are they feeling do they like it but what don't they like and we have a lot of people who's spending a lot of time on that and so so yeah so both with the user research but also just listening to our players right that's nice question thank you for coming [Applause]