– Hans Seifert, head of Hitman developer Io Interactive
Last month, Io Interactive announced that the latest game in the long-running Hitman franchise will be episodic — or as studio head Hans Seifert put it in a new interview with Ars Technica, a “platform,” rather than a game.
It’s a rare example of a true triple-A game going episodic, Seifert make a compelling argument for the move in that new Q&A:
“A lot of people have said: ‘Why don’t you wait to ship the game?’ My answer to that is that we are shipping the game at the end of the season. So, if you’re a traditional player, you can buy it on a disc at the end of 2016, if that’s what you want. No one is stopping you doing that, but why should the people that want to come on the journey with us have to wait for all that time to pass?”
He also thinks it’s something we’ll see more of in the future. “I sincerely think that it would be good for many games to do something similar, and many will follow in future. But I’m also convinced that it’s not for every game.”
In fact, he’s not wrong; another big-name game from the publisher that owns his studio, Square Enix, is set to go episodic. Final Fantasy VII Remake will also be released in chunks.
“If we were to try to fit everything from the original into one remake instalment, we would have to cut various parts and create a condensed version of Final Fantasy VII. We knew none of you would have wanted that,” producer Yoshinori Kitase wrote in a blog post in December.”If we were to try to fit everything from the original into one remake instalment, we would have to cut various parts and create a condensed version of Final Fantasy VII. We knew none of you would have wanted that.”