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Trivia / Hitman: Absolution

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  • Celebrity Voice Actor: Several of the characters are played by various B-list Hollywood actors and actresses.
    • LaSandra Dixon, leader of the Saints is voiced by Vivica A. Fox.
    • Benjamin Travis is voiced by Powers Boothe.
    • Jade is voiced by Shannyn Sossamon.
    • Traci Lords voices Layla. Evidently, her voice work impressed IO enough that she returned in Hitman (2016) as Maya Parvati and Dexy Barat.
  • Colbert Bump: Apparently, Conan rates this game an aquamarine on a scale from dark red to green.
  • Creator Backlash: While IO haven't completely disowned the game, it's apparent from retrospective discussions about it that they believe the game could and should have been better than the controversial sequel that it was.
  • Executive Meddling: This is the reason why there was such a long gap between Blood Money and Absolution. Apparently, the developers started work on a new game for release in 2009 or 2010, but Eidos decided that the Kane & Lynch franchise (also developed by IO Interactive) was going to be the next big thing (spoiler: it wasn't) and ordered them to produce a sequel to that game instead. Square Enix, on the other hand, were far less enamored with Kane & Lynch and, upon buying out Eidos, they put that franchise out to pasture and let IO get back to its flagship series.
  • Follow the Leader:
    • It being an odd-numbered sequel, it's time for Hitman to revamp itself yet again, with characteristic subtlety. Now we're freezing time and gobbling up pain pills like Max Payne. Some of the Chicago levels should look familiar: Beat-up hotel, explosive foot chase, subway, nightclub, hospital. The final mission, involving a helipad and a timer, draws heavily from the original Max Payne.
    • Instinct Mode sounds suspiciously like "Detective Mode". It lets you see through walls, draws out NPC patrol routes, highlights items of interest, and reads peoples' thoughts. (Which the tutorial lady says is due to 47's rigorous "training".) Also, if you fail a boss fight, you also get a Non-Standard Game Over of 47's adversary lording it over you.
    • The graphics go through a grain overlay, which reminds one a bit of the GTA DLC The Lost and Damned. It gets more intense on some levels and especially when you're low on health.
    • Point shooting is similar to the "Dead Eye" mechanic in Red Dead Redemption
    • The plot is more or less identical to the latter-day Splinter Cell games (Sam shooting an associate to buy them time, before declaring war on the agency he works for).
  • Meaningful Release Date: Absolution was released in territories other than Japan on the 20th of November in 2012, during the 47th week of that year.
  • The Other Darrin:
  • Playing Against Type: Very apparent in the Japanese dub: Victoria is voiced by Ayana Taketatsu, a voice actress well-known for voicing sweet, cute girls like Azusa Nakano or Kirino Kousaka. Victoria is anything but sweet.
  • Pre-Order Bonus: Hitman: Sniper Challenge, a standalone game set some time before the events of "A Personal Contract", sees the player killing Richard Strong along with his 14 bodyguards at a SkyLounge in Chicago. Because Blake Dexter's company, Dexter Industries, purchased 34% of Stallion Armaments after the death of its CEO, it was implied that Dexter himself was the one who hired the ICA to kill Strong. This is confirmed in the Blake Dexter ICA File trailer. Whoops.
  • Schedule Slip: Hitman 5 (which would become Absolution) was first announced in 2007. Development apparently only got going in 2009, only to stall again — if not completely canned and subsequently restarted; reports vary. All because Eidos wanted more Kane & Lynch games. Instead of reprising his famous role, David Bateson was yanked into a recording booth to do a commercial for Kane and Lynch 1.
  • Screwed by the Lawyers: In 2018, Contracts mode is shut down, and is completely absent in the Hitman HD Enhanced Collection for legal reasons: IOI doesn't own the servers that ran the last-gen versions, and they don't have the resources to make it comply with Europe's General Data Protection Regulation. This means that half of the original game is simply not there, thus neutering the weapon and disguise Collection Sidequest, since you can't actually use them outside of Contracts mode like before.
  • Throw It In!: According to Word of God, Absolution's Instinct mechanic began life as a developer tool to determine pathfinding after the AI became so insanely complex they could no longer playtest properly. It was later added to the game proper, provoking much outcry, but it doesn't do much in higher difficulties other than helping you blend in.
  • What Could Have Been: The developers really played around with ideas for this game. There's even a free Iphone app, Absolution Full Disclosure, which provides info on the pre-release notes. Some examples:
    • Early ideas of the plot explored even more radical changes to 47 and had darker tones. One, dubbed "The Angry Man", had 47 hunting a group of men who had been involved in the killing of a teenager, with a tone heavily inspired by revenge films of the 1970's. Another, "The Homeless Hitman", had 47 crossing the Despair Event Horizon over killing Diana, causing him to leave the Agency and descend into homelessness and poverty. They ultimately decided against these ideas as they were deemed too dark and too story-driven for a Hitman game, though elements of both ideas would find their way into the final game.
    • David Bateson initially wasn't asked to return to voice 47, with William Mapother voicing the character in early demos. The developers eventually relented after backlash from the community.
    • Early drafts of the story had many symbolic elements and a strong theme of 47 "rising from the ashes". Another idea was lyrically-driven gameplay, where the soundtrack and the gameplay would be intertwined with each other with the lyrics paraphrasing the gameplay. While ambitious, this idea was discarded due to being too creatively demanding.
    • Cosmo Faulkner and Clive Skurky were meant to have greater roles in the story. An entire cut sub-plot revolved around Cosmo searching for 47 and questioning various characters throughout the story, many of which were recycled into various NPC's in the final game. One gameplay idea involved Cosmo walking 47, who was disguised as a coroner, through a murder scene of a young girl killed by Dexter. A level was planned to take place at Skurky's house, where 47 would find that he was at the courthouse waiting for his ex-wife's divorce papers.
    • LaSandra Dixon, the leader of the Saints, also had a larger role in the story. Behind the scenes material show that 47 was to directly confront her in a cutscene. In fact, a significant amount of material related to the Saints was cut from the game, possibly due to the backlash at their debut trailer.
    • According to Noclip's documentary, Absolution did not have any assassination targets in gameplay - all of 47's targets were killed in cutscenes with the gameplay consisting of reaching the targets. This was changed after the game was publicly revealed, and required significant design and story changes late into development.
    • An early subtitle for the game was Burning Hope.
    • Travis's mechanical hand is a remnant from an earlier version of the story. Originally, he was to be present while 47 escaped with Victoria and would have been shot in the hand by 47 during their escape, prompting him to replace it. This part of the story was cut, but the developers kept the mechanical hand out of Rule of Cool.
    • 47's tie was originally planned to serve as a substitute for his trademark Fiber Wire, and 47 could move while using environment objects to "blend in", but these were cut due to memory limits with then-current console hardware. 47 interrogating henchmen for information was another gameplay idea that was considered, but ultimately cut.
    • Level ideas that didn't make it included a raging forest fire, a hot dog factory, an airplane that would crash mid-way through the mission, and a ship in a storm.
    • Various ideas for mini-games were explored, such as 47 using a rocket launcher, Wade being a playable character, and a garden gnome smashing mini-game.
  • You Sound Familiar: In French, Blake Dexter has the same voice actor 47 had from Hitman 2: Silent Assassin to Hitman: Blood Money, Philippe Dumond (who was replaced by Jérémie Covillault as 47 in Absolution).

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