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Hitman's best levels were designed to be "Swiss Cheese", which will all make sense in context

Hitman takes inspiration from food.

hitman_episode_2_sapienza_dlc

Hitman has won a lot of praise over the course of its first season, with many longterm fans hailing a return to form for the sandbox series after Hitman: Absolution went off the rails a bit.

Most of its environments have been well received, but the Sapienza episode in particular is highly regarded. In a fascinating making-of feature on PC Gamer, Hitman creative director Christian Elverdam said one of the levels strengths is an emphasis on "Swiss Cheese design".

“We used this feeling that we built a volume filled with connections, and these connections mean that you will never get lost,” he said.

“You don’t have to backtrack necessarily, if you don’t want to.”

So the environment is riddled with tunnels in all directions, like a lump of Swiss cheese, see? Many if not all of Hitman's levels embrace this design approach to some degree, and it allowed IO Interactive to reuse the settings for bonus episodes, escalations and time-limited elusive targets - even though the team doesn't consider these possibilities when it builds the initial missions.

“Elusive Targets are not thought of as part of how we build the levels," Elverdam said, "Because the complexity of the sandbox really should dictate that if we build a swiss cheese from the get go, and on an organic level where you can move around, then there should be room for an Elusive Target.”

Elverdam said the team responsible for elusive targets uses Hitman player metrics, in the form of heatmaps, to see which areas of a sandbox are being under-used, and plans accordingly - hence the garden party in Paris, for example.

The full article cover a great deal more than just this one topic; hit the link above if you have any interest in how Hitman is built into such a replayable and endlessly fascinating pasttime.

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Hitman

PS4, Xbox One, PC

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Brenna Hillier avatar

Brenna Hillier

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Based in Australia and having come from a lengthy career in the Aussie games media, Brenna worked as VG247's remote Deputy Editor for several years, covering news and events from the other side of the planet to the rest of the team. After leaving VG247, Brenna retired from games media and crossed over to development, working as a writer on several video games.

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