Open World Multiplayer Stealth: The Hit Launches Kickstarter
A dynamic city-set Hitman game
There's so much more we could do with open, urban environments than simply layering the structure of crime movies on top of them. For starters, we could make our violent missions dynamic, utilising the vast crowds of the city. That's what The Hit intends to do. It sets you a contract - which could be another player or one of the city's procedural NPCs - and then you set out to find and kill your target. Also players will experience dreams.
We covered it previously, but its one-man indie developer has now launched the project on Kickstarter, the home of dreams.
Here's the trailer from a couple months back, now being used on the Kickstarter page:
It's a little like the game you would make if you were trying to turn Watch_Dogs multiplayer mode into an entire game:
The Hit is a multiplayer stealth-shooter, set in an open-world city. Kill your target as quickly and cleanly as possible, before other players get there first. Try to stay incognito, or photograph other players and take out hits on them.
As well as the game, developer Dan Stubbs aims to release a set of tools which will allow players to remix the city.
With a powerful set of tools, you'll be able to create your own 'mix' of the city, and personalise streets, buildings, interiors, signs, the various factions which operate within the city, as well as the rules the city operates by. Every image in the game, from the Agency logo to license-plates will be editable with a simple image-editor. You'll be able to make buildings, complete with interiors, with the auto-architect tool, and it'll be possible to make your own items and weapons with the object creator.
The depth and power of those tools is stretch goal-dependent, but part of the original was that players would be able to experience random remixes of the game by going to sleep and dreaming a random, alternate, player-made reality. Which sounds mad.
If you're an early taker, £5 will get you a digital download of the finished game (£8 normally), while £15 nets you both the game and the remix tools.
The Hit is one of those projects that seems frightfully ambitious for a single developer, but also the sort of frightfully ambitious project for which Kickstarter was designed. Tread carefully but take a look.