IO Interactive shared their own first official gameplay with commentary trailer for Hitman. The trailer clearly takes from the leak earlier, but changes things up a bit, just enough to make that leak irrelevant.
Before every level, you can choose what weapons and equipment you bring in, and in the course of gameplay will pick up other items, based on what you do and where you go.
These are the biggest levels in the franchise yet, with a breathing leaving world. The AI dynamically reacts to you, but more importantly, their conversations yield clues to possible actions. You have the freedom to pass people by, but you may want to stop and listen. The crowd system also returns. Each side character is completely unique, giving you extra targets in Contracts mode.
You can open most doors and enter most rooms, but unlike a GTA, Hitman’s levels are not completely free to navigate. To get around guards, you will have to seek out secret paths, and inevitably use disguises. Even then, some disguises have limited access, and special guards will always see through you. Thankfully, there are no real dead ends in the level design.
Hitman wouldn’t be Hitman without multiple ways to kill people, and you have freedom of approach in taking an individual out, as well as multiple ways to take large crowds using the environment. You can also just mess around to make characters react to you.
You can stash weapons in certain areas, opening up options for approach. You can even do things like hide weapons in food, so that you can smuggle it to certain areas and not have it on your person when you go there.
Instinct returns, but is completely optional. If you do use it, you get highlights on items you can interact with, but you can also choose to turn it off and improvise.
Overall, Hitman is the same logical and focused assassination action game it has always been. The different gameplay systems serve to make the assassination loop tighter, and reward medium term planning.
Hitman will be released worldwide on December 8 2015 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. If you are curious about that early alpha leak, you can check out what I found for you here. I also skimmed some details from the trailer, but you can get all the info in the trailer above.
