Hitman dev: "stealth is a tough genre both for players and developers"

There was a time when stealth gaming took gumption, a time when escaping the enemy's notice required more than the willingness not to enter every single area at a headlong sprint, cackling like a hyena. A time when murdering discreetly involved careful planning and on-the-fly cunning, rather than mere patience and luck.

Driven to prominence by the likes of Tenchu and Metal Gear Solid, the sneakily-does-it genre has diffused (like its cousin the role-player) into action gaming at large, supplying otherwise bombastic shooters with cooldown periods and losing identity in the process. With Metal Gear Rising now a fabulous-looking, but distinctly un-Metal-Gear-ish brawler, and Splinter Cell as comfortable firing from cover as lurking in shadows, has pure stealth died a death?

"I never thought about it like that, it sounds so sad!" comments IO Interactive's Tore Blystad, game director on Hitman: Absolution. "Stealth is a tough genre both for the player and the developer. It requires patience, persistence and the margins of error are small. Pair that with tenfold development budgets and an audience that wants quick rewards and I guess that's the reason that the classic stealth genre has changed."

The Hitman series is well-placed to answer these changing tastes; stealth has always played a prominent role, turning on minutiae like audible footsteps, but IO's slaphead assassin earns his bounties through adaptation rather than discretion alone.

"We didn't design Absolution to be a pure stealth game, there is far more to it and the gameplay diversity is more in focus than any Hitman game," Blystad continues. "Hitman games have always been more of a mixture of stealth, puzzle and action and Absolution is no different in that regard.

"When it comes to the stealth part we try to make it a very broad and diverse affair, we want the player to be able to experiment and find his balance of purism and violence.

"There's a lot of diversity in weapons and approaches, and even if the ultimate goal for the classic Hitman player is to be a silent assassin there is plenty of challenge in it for the slightly more casual stealthy player."

Absolution's sandbox structure turns on its AI, which is "way more complex" than any previous Hitman title and will thus, IO hopes, test players' capacity for improvisation. The game also offers more and more "unusual" levels than its predecessors.

"I think every genre has dealt with the changing times in its own way and the stealth genre has had to reinvent itself to fit the changes of its audience," Blystad adds. "Every title has done this in its own way and it is going to be really interesting to see for instance the new Metal Gear Solid and Thief 4."

Hitman co-op has been discussed but IO feels it would compromise the game's setpieces. Absolution launches this year.

For more from Blystad, check out issue 81 - you can order a copy online with free delivery, find it on Apple Newsstand or download it from Zinio.