Babel fishing

The only barrier Agent 47 doesn’t have to worry about in Hitman is the language, a source of some irony for a series that is given to globetrotting. IO has toyed with having NPCs speak a range of tongues, but feels this would make life too difficult for players. “At one point we were thinking, let’s go full indigenous, let’s put in a language you might not understand,” Eskil Mohl comments. “Which would be really good for the fantasy, but so much of Hitman is about eavesdropping.” The new game does, at least, feature properly accented dialogue for each map. “We got hit hard for the dialogue in the 2016 game – it was strictly vanilla American, which in certain levels can feel a bit immersion-breaking.”