I've been playing Hitman: Blood Money. Well, 'playing' might be a heavy descriptor, considering I didn't get very far into it. Beforehand I'd already tried the full nu-World of Assassin trilogy, if briefly in the third game's case. Ended up walking away a bit,,, miffed and unsatisfied every time. It's easy to say "oh the genre is just not for me" but that's never been a quite satisfying answer when I'd like to know WHY it's not for me. If you're following me, basically yeah, I dropped Blood Money after this mission. And then spent the rest of the night to this morning thinking about why that might be.
So later I was talking with a friend in another place about Hitman, trying to narrow down why its design goals weren't something I could fundamentally enjoy. Ended up going off on an analogy around cooking.
It's at least aesthetically similar, you have a whole bunch of scattered ingredients, you have a ridiculous amount of space to explore and utilize, and your end goal is rather simple when put down to paper. You can toss and mix together as much as you want to reach that end goal, and you can follow several methods to the letter to get your end result, or try to make something really creative or experimental out of it. Literally cooking up a batch of "mm how will I approach this target."
And I like cooking, but I'm very much an Instructions Andy. I find a path and follow it close, no matter how difficult that might be, and I get the satisfaction at the end. I'm not being graded for performance, the end result taste is all that matters to me (and/or how others enjoy it when I'm cooking for others).
This leads to a fundamental disconnect because Hitman is not about following instructions, or just about reaching your end result. You certainly can, especially in World of Assassin's mission set with its mission stories, but they're all very scripted, straightforward, and not as satisfying. Following any of them to the letter in WoA will not get you as many points, and in most cases it's easy to reduce it down to the most minimal components to pass through.
Which is good, force you to fuck around, but I don't really care for that!!! So I end up not really interested in leaderboard chasing or going past what constitutes a mission story. In Blood Money's case, the only reward is from being as silent and ghost-like as possible, but this has the issue where like, there's an optimal path for that. In the cases I played, it was even heavily scripted, and viscerally rewarded for doing so.
It would certainly be nice if Hitman had more surrounding sauce to it, but it kinda already has a fuckton for the type of players its targeting, so it's kind of unreasonable. Blood Money does have a very strong atmosphere and unguided ~Silent Assassin~ hand to it, and WoA has its over the top eat-the-rich energy and like 20+ ridiculously interesting-on-paper level concepts. There's sauce already. It's for a wider base that enjoys the creative aspect. I don't. Very unfortunate.
I'd maybe consider going back to WoA and do more challenging, more strict and interesting instruction kits, but I think that would just have me rubbing up against Hitman's very nonplussing stealth system. Ech.
So oh well. I'm going to go play The Wonderful 101 instead.