As of late, we indelibly affiliate IO Interactive with the Hitman sequence, however again when the studio was younger we… effectively, we related it with the Hitman sequence. It has been making Hitman for some time, beginning with its first recreation, Hitman: Codename 47, all the way in which again in 2000.
However after releasing Hitman 2: Silent Murderer two years later, IO zigged the place you thought it might zag: it launched Freedom Fighters, a squad-based third-person shooter set in a Soviet-occupied USA. Its declare to fame was its reasonably glorious battle system, the place the general battle was made up of all types of smaller skirmishes between totally different squads and troopers, and that made the entire thing really feel very alive certainly.
Article continues beneath
“Making a fast-paced, very informal console recreation with fully totally different controls, motion schemes and AI for the characters… There was quite a lot of stress to ship one thing that the sport didn’t actually seem like.”
A 12 months in, and IO principally had quite a lot of barren ranges. “There was no motion. There have been quite a lot of empty ranges, however the gameplay wasn’t there in any respect.” To allay its fears, EA determined that IO must throw collectively one thing that might function proof, primarily, that the studio truly knew what it was doing.
Prahm ginned up one thing to point out the fits out of free music and gameplay footage and, miraculously, that was sufficient for EA. When IO truly had a working, playable prototype to point out them a number of months later, EA was much more shocked.
“I keep in mind that they had very low expectations,” recollects Prahm, which maybe ended up serving to IO, “as a result of we had introduced one thing that they hadn’t anticipated to see.” EA gave the group the inexperienced mild and even conscripted Prahm onto what he calls an “improvised press tour”. The remaining is historical past: IO received cracking on its now-more-solid imaginative and prescient for what Freedom Fighters could be, and it turned out to be—for my cash—the most effective non-Hitman recreation the studio ever made.
