Headscratchers / Hitman: Absolution

Why just 10 million?

• Why would Blake Dexter ask for a mere $10 million for Victoria? I say "mere" because, well... did you see the size of his factory? The scale of products he has for sale? Between anti-theft systems, arms-dealing and genetic experimentation, Dexter Industries probably makes that much a month, maybe even more. And yet he goes toe-to-toe with a notoriously dangerous and vengeful cartel of assassins for a (comparative) pittance. Granted he doesn't seem like the most stable person in the world, but still...
  • One of the doctors in the know actually complains about this (Alexander, I think), saying that he's only in for the short term profit without the long term prospects. He can't see how much value Victoria could have to the human race, not just a practical Sanchez.
    • Dr Ashford (close!), who yes does say in his video log how she's a scientific marvel, but just knows how Dexter will "sell her off to the highest bidder" instead of investing in further study, because all he wants is quick money instead of long term profit.
  • A possible explanation: Blake Dexter didn't want to keep Victoria because he knew the ICA would send the private army it apparently has to come and take her by force; he couldn't hand her over for free (because that would make him look like a coward) but he has to ask for less than the Black Ops Military Action route would cost the ICA.
    • By this time, Dexter has already lost his son to the whole Victoria business. It's entirely possible he's really just sick of it.

Why doesn't 47 cover his face?

• OK, one of the things that really drove me batty in Absolution was that 47 never covered his face when he had the chance. Many enemies throughout the game had ski/medical/gas masks of some kind, and yet he never uses them. Why?!
  • Aye, I know what you mean. Other than a set of tinted ballistic goggles or whatever, he'll forgo a perfectly serviceable balaclava for no apparent reason. You can't really argue that 47 is germophobic, seeing as he's willing to put on an outfit worn by a guy he was taking a piss when 47 knocks him out. At the very least, he'll keep the headwear to cover that highly obvious barcode on the back of his head...
  • There are a few disguise that allow 47 to cover his face. If he, for example, takes out a killer with a hockey and a stocking mask on the Rosewood level he wears both. Funny enough the guards still seem to know that he’s none of them.

The Frame-Up Job

• In Absolution, when Blake Dexter first captures 47, what the hell is his plan? Is it entirely to throw him off Blake's trail while he flees a burning building and a murder scene? How exactly is that better than slitting his throat and disposing of the body?
  • This drove me crazy, too. The real kicker? He controls the hotel! Maybe not owns it, but his goons are on every level and his word there is law. It would have been easier and more efficient to have Sanchez stomp on 47's head (You don't even need to use your spiffy knife, Blakey! Just have Thugo Grande stomp him!) and smuggle his corpse out into an alley. And the whole "frame 47 for murder" idea? He's a hitman, dude. No, scratch that, as you said, he's The Hitman. He's already wanted for murders!
  • Canon-wise, he's not already wanted for murders, as no one really knows (or can prove) he exists (ie. the Shrouded in Myth thing he'd got going on). As for why Blake didn't just have his Dragon stomp 47 into mush though...yeaahh...he...liked 47's suit?
  • As has been shown later in the game, Dexter is extremely impulsive and not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer. He probably just thought it would be really fun.
    • Well, it's important to remember the Hitman is a contractor for the ICA. He may wrongly believe the ICA is sending him rather than the Hitman acting alone. As a result, he might just be trying to make such a cluster-fuck it becomes impossible to interfere with his business. Wrong but understandable.

Why are the police so determined?

• Why were the police so incredibly keen on getting 47 in "Run For Your Life"? Yes, the point is meant to be he's framed for the murder of that maid, and murder is bad, but from the Police's perspective all they saw to cast guilt on him was 47 in a room (that was on fire, filled with smoke) with the deceased maid in it. Yet they had half the Police force out immediately to try and catch him/gun him down. Blake framed him, but were there any hints that he pressured them (don't recall any)? It made for a great couple of levels, just felt odd.
  • Possibly a mix of post-9/11 paranoia and the opportunity to catch the mythical Hitman. As the scenes with Detective Faulkner show, the police are aware of his existence.
    • Easy enough answer. The hotel was full of people. Dexter doesn't just frame 47 for a woman's death, he potentially frames them for however many people people are killed during his act of arson. Also, depending on your playstyle, 47 may end up killing cops on the way out.]]
  • Also, the police really are that bad. Any cop like the ones in the game would quickly be kicked out. Most are shown to be on the take and involved in things like The Vixen Club, ignore the missing women and children involved, and are Jerkass in general. Faulkner's scenes are the best example of how police should be but he is driven by an obsession with stopping 47.

Penalties for murder

• Okay, admittedly I don't go for Silent Assassin unless I'm going for 100% Completion, but in Absolution why can't I ever eliminate a lone guard or two far out of earshot range of any witnesses without severe rating penalties if they see me? As long as I eliminate them before they can talk, it shouldn't matter. And sure, you can sneak up behind them and garrote them, or even pop their heads with no penalties except the loss of the silent assassin rank as long as they're facing the other direction, but if they see you for even just a split second, even if you end them before they can finish saying Oh, Crap!, the game just screams at you "NO! Bad player! That's not how you're supposed to do it!"
  • Because that's not how you're supposed to do it. A Silent Assassin is not seen and does not leave witnesses or corpses other than the one he came to create.
    • Also, the point system is probably how 47 rates HIMSELF.

Elimination of coins

• In Absolution, they eliminated the coins you can throw as a distraction. Fair enough, but why are you always limited to three or four throwable objects in the entire friggin' level? Need to distract a guard for a second? Sorry, can't just throw any old loose object. You'll have to backtrack and scour the whole level to find some wrench or liquor bottle the developers arbitrarily placed. Particularly jarring was when I figured out one of the few throwable items is a book, but when I had to escape a LIBRARY I couldn't find a throwable book anywhere!
  • Presumably you can do the whole thing without needing to throw more than one or two items.

47's Tailor

• Why is 47's tailor in Chicago? Shouldn't he be somewhere in Europe?
  • Perhaps that's not the only tailor he uses.
  • It's also probably pretty convenient to know a blind tailor when you're an international fugitive from justice with a taste for expensive suits.

Diana's mansion

• If Diana was trying to hide from the Agency, why did she buy a giant mansion in viewing distance of Chicago?
  • I got the impression Diana knew she couldn't hide from the Agency forever, so her plan was always to get Victoria into 47's hands. My guess is she still had some contacts in the Agency, and when she found out 47 was the one coming after her, she moved into the mansion to lure him there.
    • Also, she's a Baronet. She's accustomed to a certain lifestyle.

What happened to the Franchise?

• What happened to that other company Diana was working for at the end of Blood Money?
  • Wasn't she working for the reformed ICA at the end of Blood Money? If you mean the one she supposedly betrayed 47 for (the Franchise, I think), presumably it folded after 47 killed the boss and all their assassins.
  • This also begs the question, why did Diana leave the Agency in control of such an obviously incompetent and unprofessional person? Even if she resigned control of the Agency in the intervening time between games (for whatever reason she'd want to do such a thing), it was HER organization at that point. The least she could do was retain some sort of executive veto power. I have trouble believing that she was, say, unaware of how terrible a choice Travis is to lead the Agency and/or her considerable influence waned so quickly as to allow him to ascend to power.
    • The farthest up the chain that Diana ever got was "Tetra", which is one below "Head" (as far as we know), so she never owned ICA. Best guess is that their division of ICA went under and she gained ownership of that. However, the wider ICA was relatively stable until she drained ICA's accounts and revealed ICA's existence (before the events of Absolution). Also, Travis was not in charge of ICA, he was running one of it's branches and under ICA management's nose. The wider ICA had no clue what was going on and Travis' branch was working as a rogue element that was totally independent of the wider ICA.
    • Diana reformed the ICA but then betrayed it because of its experiments. I imagine that had a lot to do with how she was treated. New-Founding member or not.

47's Tailor part II

• It's glaringly obvious that Tom, 47's tailor, is blind. How did he know that it was 47 who walked through the door and not someone else?
  • His other senses are heightened. It's been known that this kind of compensation is Truth in Television.

Missing Saint

• In the official picture of the Saints (which can be seen in the "Objectives" section of the notebook), you can easily count eight of them in the picture, but you only see/kill seven of them in Absolution. What happened to the eighth Saint?
  • Boo is established to have been killed on a job in Spain prior to the events of the game.

The uselessness of disguises

• Why is it that enemies can always see through your disguise if you are masquerading as one of them? Why can't 47 just tell them "I'm new on the job." or some variation of that sentence?
  • The fact that this was "not" implemented in other games actually bothered me. A lot of times, the people would actually know the new guy ahead of time. The most obvious example would be the very first mission where the mansion has an extremely tight security team. Those guys would have been monitoring security closely enough that they would have been introduced to each other and told "If you see anyone dressed like us and he's not at this meeting, then he's an imposter." The flip side of this is in Blood Money, when you have to sneak into a guy's house who's under witness protection. Once you get the FBI suit, no one looks twice at you. "We're getting paid to be as paranoid as possible, and I've never seen you before. Oh, wait, you're wearing an FBI suit? Here, I'll hold the door open for you."
  • If the guards in the Hitman series would act like real guards the disguise system would be almost pointless. Not only would the guards know each other they also remember that the janitor/ cook/ butler/ local drug dealer isn’t a bald dude with a barcode tattoo. The developers focus is to create a fun, challenging game not a uber-realistic one that makes every player bit in his keyboard out of frustration. Of course, they can’t make it to easy. If 47 could just put one a guard uniform and walk past the next 20 guards by telling them “I’m the new guy.” every mission without a target (Run For Your Life, Rosewood, Skurky's Law…) would be a walk in the park.

Operation: Sledgehammer

• When the Agency is sweeping through the city in Operation Sledgehammer, where are the police? Right after 47 escapes the jail, the Agency shows up right outside the police building, and no cops are seen.
  • Ran for it. The sheriff is a crooked pervert chances are the rest aren't better.

Open Carry Laws

• Why do police in Hope try to arrest 47 immediately for having a weapon out? I can understand doing it inside a courthouse, however, open carry is permitted in South Dakota, and most cases of the police confronting an open carrier don't involve guns being drawn by the police to avoid escalating the situation.
  • The town is under the thumb of Dexter and his corrupt hicks. They might be on the lookout for any strangers wielding weapons.
  • 47 is that scary with a gun.
  • Likely because the game was developed by Europeans who are unfamiliar with American Gun Laws. Various art assets remind you that the game was not developed by an American studio when you see things like power strips with European power outlets on them and such that look out of place.

Diana's strange attack of conscience

• Diana Burnwood, who has arranged thousands of murders worldwide for an amoral assassination agency and helped train and manages the actions of a cold-blooded, emotionless killer, decides to destroy the very agency she rebuilt from the ground up because a girl is suffering?
  • Children Are Innocent, and the series as a whole tends to demonstrate that 47 is a Hitman with a Heart rather than emotionless or unfeeling (at least if the player goes the most professional, high-skilled route of avoiding innocent deaths). Plus, 47 goes along with Diana's plan ultimately — it's not a big stretch to think that she calculated that forced to choose between her and the I.C.A. 47 would pick her due to having worked together for so long (assuming it could be done in a way that wasn't reckless and exposed to unnecessary risk, which these two aren't).

What was the significance of that coin?

• In the intro, we see Diana holding a coin and looking at it like it's significant. Then 47 picks it up, and keeps it with him pretty much the entire game, occasionally looking at it with a camera pan and everything. Is that coin something from a previous game? Did I miss a document talking about how the coin was Diana's most prized possession?

The Return

• Why is Diana allowed back into the ICA at the end? Even if Travis was rogue and incompetent, Diana still leaked out the ICA to the public, almost ruining them. Did the higher-ups not know of her betrayal or did 47 insist on her coming back with him?
  • Yes, she exposes them but they hadn't forgotten that she's still a highly skilled agent and much to their dismay, they need her.

Where the hell are the cops during the orphanage massacre?

Despite Wade's henchmen worrying aloud about the cops arriving any second, when 47 leaves...there's not a single cop on site. Not even any approaching sirens.

To reiterate: an Orphanage gets shot up. Said Orphanage is in a populated urban area. The gunmen are using unsuppressed weapons. They're in there for who knows how long, but surely long enough for someone to call the cops. Even if this was a bad part of town, surely the fact that the gunfire was coming from an Orphanage would raise some alarm bells.

Seriously, they go all piss and vinegar with 47 in the last two missions. What changed?