turns out the bit about camera rooms towards the end of the video is incorrect, when spotted on a camera it will alert the nearest guard to come check it out, I think when filming all nearby guards were in their alerted state so they didn't come to me right away, so I mistook it for them not being alerted by the camera

On interesting NPC interactions, there's one in A House Built On Sand. Just take out Kong by poisoning his pipe and his bodyguard will go sob to the bar, just for the waitress to comfort him and both agreeing to go on a date.

Don't forget the fact that NPC quotes can become the most memorable part of a map

Hitman is both popular and underrated!
The mistake most people do is play each level once but the beauty of the game is to replay a bunch of times, to complete a mission in a unique way or getting a quicker time.

Here is something else. You cannot change outfits in front of anyone without them getting suspicious. This affects the mission in Haven Island when you are promoted by the target.

Agent 47 lines in my head:

“I have to use the bathroom”


“Names are for friends”

Correction, actually. Ghosts (or crowds, as they're officially dubbed) can actually report crimes. If a real NPC at the tail end of a crowd saw a suspicous action, the crowd would transmit the awareness like a synapse to any other unaware NPC in the vicinity. This is most easily demonstrated with NPC viewcones off, by dragging someone's body where a crowd can fully see it. Any npc in or around a crowd will instantly become aware of a you dragging the body.

I also love how NPCs arent just there to exist for the player's convenience. They also have actual personal lives and emotions. The player will first give a quick chuckle when hearing it for the first time, the next times they still chuckle a bit, but less. And at last the player remembers all the NPC lines and sometimes says it with them, to show that the player is familiar with the environment. Best example of this is the Bangkok chef who screams "ITS ONLY NUMBERS!" when confronted with the fact that he has to bring a birthday topper to Cross' birthday.  The emotion in it is very easy to notice, and he is actually annoyed instead of talking in lower pitch and higher tone.

As a member of the competitive Hitman community, I will say that we usually refer to your three categories as Guards, and then Real & Fake NPCs, with fake ones being the ones that can't ruin SA. You might hear something like, "Are all of you fake?" in a Hitman tournament match or smth like that. Great vid!

Honestly that's another part of a core design choice for the game. depth instead of size. the levels aren't huge or numerous but incredibly detailed including the npcs

You forgot to mention that ghosts can’t be knocked and they die instantly in one shot since they have extremely low health. Other than that, amazing video!

I also love how some characters show up on multiple locations or how they get referenced, makes it all feel connected. Jason Portman shows up in 3 different levels and is mentioned in another but there are many more

The way civilians spread panic among guards and themselves is so great. Compare that to Assassin's Creed, for example, in which civilians will run away if they see you kill someone, but the guards who see them running away never bother to investigate what they're running from

Honestly, the only tidbit of information you need to know about Hitman NPC to understand their depth and genius design is the story of the car bomb in my favourite map, Miami:

There is an NPC in an interrogation room at a security post who tells the guards interrogating him that he was payed by Robert Knox to put a car bomb on the race car of one of Sierra Knox's rivals. One room over there is an evidence locker where you find said car bomb. You can then disguise yourself as a pit crew member of Sierra's team (which you can learn by overhearing that they are short a mechanic and the team leader is frantically calling for a replacement) and place the car bomb on her car. Even better: If you then disguise yourself with the same outfit the dude in the interrogation room has (race marshall), you can give the remote detonator to Robert Knox (telling him the bomb is in the competitors car) and have him explode his own daughter.

NONE of this is part of a mission story, the achievment you get if you manage to do it has no description and Diana doesn't even hint at this possibility. The entire unique solution to the puzzle that every Hitman map is comes just from the interaction of NPCs without the input of the player (other than being near, to save your PC the unneccessary workload). It is endlessly rewarding to put these pieces of information together yourself, just because you thought "hm, that dude accused of bombing somebody was hired by Knox... I wonder if I could..."

And every map has DOZENS of these tiny little stories. Some don't even involve the targets - like e.g. the guard and the maid who are constantly flirting in the upper level of Dartmoor or the two patients who gossip about the fact that the bandaged patient in Hokkaido is Jason Portman, etc.

Great video! I think something a lot of people miss from a thematic perspective is that since Hitman deals with a fairly morbid subject, the NPC design is critical in ensuring there's a consistent sense of levity throughout missions. Their ambient barks and conversations, as well as their reactions to 47, are I think critical to the humor of the game.

There's a meta aspect to this too: someone might hear an NPC report to a guard that 47 is doing something suspicious, but the bark is really generic, like "There's this guy, doing stuff that they shouldn't!" On first blush it seems like a mechanical limitation—that the NPC doesn't have dialogue for specific interactions. But I think it's intentionally vague. They could easily add reaction dialogue for things like suspiciousness/trespassing; they do it under some conditions when they see a body or a murder. But it's funnier if the NPC sounds like they have no clue what's going on.

Some of this is really subtle. One of the barks for women sending another NPC to investigate a distraction is something like "Could you go see what that prop toss was?" "Prop toss" is effectively a stage direction, referring to an object as a "prop" as a technical term in film/theatre. The unexpected fourth-wall breaking is funny. And I think these sorts of dialogue are critical to maintaining a humorous atmosphere in a game that is otherwise about purposeful, deliberate murder.

I know you seem to only do Hitman stuff, but I think the Sniper Elite series also has fairly interesting AI. It's basically like they're all guards, but much more in depth with how they work. They can get stressed, if wounded they will limp to cover and find medical supplies, they will help out their buddies, and (though I'm not sure if this is just by chance or an actual coded plan) they will systematically try to encircle the player, intentionally waiting by exits for the area to block off escapes from combat, and will work together to suppress, flank, and grenade the player (or their last known location).

Also worth mentioning that certain NPCs can even kill your target for you, deliberately or accidentally, based on how you manipulate the world around you.

Your actions can also have profound repercussions for NPCs, there are multiple throughout the trilogy that will commit suicide as a result of your actions.

This is by far my favorite video from you. Love your content!

Can't wait to see what IO Interactive does with 007. They really are great at level design and making the game feel alive. I'm expecting 007 to increas their noteriety tremendously.

One of the things I love most about the npcs is that most of them are unique with their own lived lives so when you’re a kill everyone speedrunner it hurts every time they cry for mercy or call their families after a massacre although after a few thousand hours of killing later you will end up learning the guards, civilians, and fake npc routes if you focus on it and see how simple it can be which sucks but it doesn’t remove it as my favorite game of all time(not the greatest game just my favorite)