"An open world game needs to feel alive," says Hitman devs

Hitman: Absolution's game director Tore Blystad and gameplay director Christian Eleverdam, have said that when it comes to an open world game, the atmosphere and non-playable characters need to "feel alive."

Speaking in an interview with the PS Blog, the duo said that according to the game situation, characters in Hitman will do different things.

"An open world game needs to feel alive, so that’s what we’ve gone for here," said Eleverdam. "The characters can do so many different things according to the situation. Along with the cinematic sequences, this has been the toughest thing for us to get right, hence us having to build our own brand new tool set and basically attack it from any angle.

"If you take out the guy that was supposed to turn on the lights in a room, it changes the situation completely. Every action, however small, has its own consequence."

"We have a rookie cop character who has been called out with his colleagues to a library which Agent 47 is stalking round," added Blystad. "This new guy is always getting told off by his sergeant, and you can actually distract him. He will go off and investigate before carrying on with his own little story. If you take a different path through the library, you can see his story unfold from a different perspective.

"This allows you to play with your morals – you can kill the rookie without a second thought, or isolate his sergeant and kill him instead, giving the new guy a bit of a break. We really wanted to include a lot of this kind of stuff. Imagine playing through this big, dark library without this and it’s just a normal stealth game. It loses a defining Hitman characteristic. Nothing else has that. Whichever way you play it, it should always be entertaining."

Eleverdam also went on to say that the team thinks of a situation first, before devising the characters to "populate it," because "variety is a good thing," as it make the player think differently.

You can read the full interview through the link.

Hitman: Absolution is out in 2012 for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.