Last weekend, I finished up Fallen Aces, a solid contender for the most original shooter of the year. The throwback FPS with visuals inspired by the Golden Age of Comic Books has quickly ascended my GOTY list. Its only problem is that there isn't enough of it yet.
Hitman's Episodic Model Wasn't That Different From Fallen Aces' Early Access
It's still in early access on Steam so, at the time I’m writing this, you can only play the first of three episodes. That episode contains five polished missions that look and play more or less how they will in the final game. I never ran into placeholder assets, or those "Under Construction" signs that let you know the area you want to enter isn't included in the early access build. For an immersive sim, that kind of stuff can kill the vibe. You want to be able to learn the game's systems, dream up a plan, then execute it. When you run into dead ends, it can kill the fantasy that you are the one who ends goons and leaves them dead.
Fallen Aces has absolutely none of that early access roughness, which makes it feel more like you're getting one finished part of a game instead of a rough draft. Because of this, Fallen Aces has me thinking back to Hitman (2016), the first of IO's World of Assassination trilogy, which used an episodic release model — in vogue at the time thanks to Telltale’s games and Life is Strange — to dole out levels over the course of a year.
That model was a perfect fit for Hitman because it taught players how they should approach the game — over and over and over. When I play Dishonored 2, it's easy to steamroll through levels, taking the path of least resistance (which usually involves meeting quite a bit of armed resistance), reach the end, move on, and never return. When the next level is right there, waiting, it's easy to forgo continuing to explore one you've already ‘finished’.
You Can't Know An Immersive Sim Level After Just One Playthrough
That's a shame, because immersive sims are built to emphasize replayability. Each Dishonored level has as many secrets to uncover as there are punctured corpses littering the ground after your first bloody tear through it, but it's hard to incentivize players to return to see all there is to see.
Hitman figured out how. By releasing the first game episodically, IO taught fans how to play the series going forward. Because one episode was all you had, you could return to it repeatedly before the next arrived, finding more and more secrets as you played. The episodic release wasn't all that was working to accomplish that goal; IO included challenging objectives to attempt, too. Some were basic series staples — like completing the level without being seen — but some pushed you to explore until you had figured out how to get your target to stand in the perfect place to hit them with a cannonball from across the map.
Fallen Aces' early access model is approximating the experience of waiting for new Hitman to release. Developers Trey Powell and Jason Bond have offered more levels right off the bat — five as opposed to one plus a tutorial — but the idea is the same. I've already sung the praises of standout second mission Water Under the Bridge, but some of the others (like final level Moth to a Flame) are equally sprawling, and filled with secrets. Because the full game won't be out for a while, I have a great excuse to jump back in and go find them. I don't doubt the game will reward the effort.
