Everyone has a dream game right? Something they would just love to play that for some reason or another it has never been made. For me, it’s basically a hitman game, but not Hitman.
Ok, so you work for an agency of some description and you are one of their agents. It doesn’t really matter who the agency is but they want people killing and you are more than happy to do it for them. Just like in Hitman, when you are given a contract you wont necessarily know why you are taking someone out, it’s not your job to know. All you’ll be told is who the target is, some intel on their schedule and how much you are getting paid. Overarching these hits needs to be some sort of story. This is going to be you tracking someone down. In Far Cry 2 you are tasked with finding and killing “The Jackal”, but you never actually look for him. In this you will – from time to time you’ll get a tip off about somebody who will know something about this elusive target making you constantly build a load of information so you can actually find the guy. (Idea stolen from Pentadact). This person and his location will be random each time.
The game can be played from a first or third person perspective, and when you interact with stuff it will all be animated. Like in Far Cry, when you pick stuff up, you pick it up – it doesn’t just disappear from the floor and appear in your hands. The action will also basically be ripped off from Far Cry as well as it did gun play brilliantly, then any creeping around will be handled like in Thief, and social integration will work like Hitman (so yeah, disguises and the likes are always a possibility).
Everything is going to be set inside a sandbox city, like GTA. In fact, screw it, it can rip off Liberty City entirely for all I care. It’s a good city with various different looking places and the roads are good for thrashing around on. The only changes are that fast food places are gone and there are less supercars.
The meat of the game is obviously going to be carrying out various hits. What will basically happen is that when you receive a mission you get a load of information about the target. The target will have a daily routine and a few special ‘events’ they have lined up on their calendar. It will be up to you decide when you carry out each hit and how. Your targets calendars will automatically sync with your map so you know roughly where they should be, but not exactly – you can only know this by keeping an eye on them. This will all be procedurally generated too so that in theory you can take on as many jobs as you like without them getting boring.
Targets will all have a risk assessment. Basically, if a target suspects that they are in trouble they will up their security thus upping the risk. You can’t directly influence this risk factor other than if you make a failed attempt at the hit they will up their security in the near future. Now, this next bit I very much doubt is going to be possible for a while, but in a perfect game this is how it would be. Each building has a full interior which you can go into and see into through windows from the street, plus you can look through windows in buildings to see through windows in other buildings. This means that if you want to snipe your target from the building opposite you can, or you can even make a rooftop entrance or even escape by some building hopping.
After each hit, 1 of 2 things will happen. If you made a clean kill so nobody saw/heard any of it happen, you can just walk away casually. On the other hand, if it was messy, you will have police to deal with. If you can blend in enough to slip past the police you can, but if they suspect you in the slightest they will come after you. Cue GTA chase but with less flashy cars, like in the Bourne films. If you get arrested or ‘die’ on a mission it costs money and also makes you more easily recognised by police and targets for a few missions. Quick saving and loading is not possible as it’s important for the player to deal with the consequences of screwing up, but this should mean that screwing up completely is never that much of an issue.
So basically, it’s Leon mashed with Bourne, mixed with Hitman, then a dash of Thief and Far Cry all mixed in. You would be living as an assassin in a proper city, carrying out missions as you see fit while always looking for leads on that main target. It’s just some rough ideas anyway, and it certainly needs plenty of work, but I live in hope that something like this will one day come into existence. It would probably be the best game ever.
Hmm thinking about it another good idea would be like they do in films, where if you gather information of someone via the emans of say torture, you should exectue them after, if you dont they could (not always) go up to your target and tell them your after them, so the security gets up’d anway, i think that would be a good idea :P make it a lot more challenging
You’ve gone wrong.
Hmm, I left a comment here earlier but it seems to have never appeared.
Anyway, what I said was something like:
“Are you not a fan of Hitman then?
What you’re describing sounds a lot like the assassin missions on Saints Row 1 and 2 – and speaking as someone who couldn’t be bothered to finish them, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
Hitman 4 is in my top 5 games ever somewhere, so yes, I love them. Saints Row and GTA do stuff similar, but not properly – the hits don’t replicate being a ‘professional’. You should feel like Leon or someone out of Bourne when you do it.