 Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE. Covering E3 2018, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're actually in the Warner Brothers games booth. It's humongous booth. We're kind of in the inner sanctum here at E3 in the LA Convention Center. A lot of stuff going on with Warner Brothers games. A lot of really cool combinations of brands and games and movies, but this is a very special one. Hitman 2, we're all excited to be here. Learn more about it. You have Jacob Mickelson. He's actually the game director for Iowa Interactive. Jacob, great to see you. Yeah, thank you. So let's just get to the basics. First off, when is Hitman 2 coming out? What do people need to know? We'll get that out of there. We'll get into it. Hitman 2 is out November 13. And if you pre-order now, you have a special pre-order bonus where you get access to a new game mode called Sniper Assassin, which is a sniper-only mission. And then for the first time in Hitman history, we also have a co-op mode where you can snipe alongside a friend into the mission and create all sorts of havoc. It's still deeply funded in the roots of the game, kind of DNA, where it's all about getting away with the sniping without anyone kind of noticing that you're there. So it has a very, very strong puzzle element to it. So it's about kind of peeling off the layers of an onion without anyone noticing you're there. So you talked a little bit before you turned on the cameras about kind of the freedom that a player gets not like in a traditional game, where they can choose a lot of different options. How they're going to do the mission. So how do you guys come up with that? How is that all kind of determined? And how do you actually then still keep the game true to the mission? Well, the thing is that, as you say, it's very much, we call it a hyper-detailed sandbox, right? So when you play a Hitman mission, we don't give you a linear path through the level that you follow. We give you an open sandbox where you kind of have to figure out how do you want to approach this mission? And in case of the mission we're showing here at E3, it's a race event in Miami. And your target is one of the race drivers, actually. That's half of the mission. And she's roaming around the track. So the whole thing in the demo today is, okay, so how do you get close to Sharer's car? And then in order to do that, then you need to obtain disguises, which is a key element in the Hitman franchise that you can disguise as the characters you meet in the scene. So you can knock them out and take their uniforms on and then infiltrate the areas. Some guards are more suspicious of you than others, so you kind of have to mingle your way through the level. So it's very much up to you if you want to sneak in and try not to do the disguise stuff or you can go with the disguise stuff and then kind of make your way. And then the game kind of adapts in a way because we have to kind of foresee all these different permutations of play. So there's a lot of things you can do in the game in terms of which way you take and how you get there. So I'm just curious from a game development point of view in terms of like building in difficulty. Because you want to have enough difficulties that it's a challenge and people feel satisfaction in rising to the challenge. But clearly you can make it so they just got wiped out every time, right? You can make it in a possible game. So how do you find that balance? How do you tune that balance? What are some of the things you think about when you're trying to get into a degree of difficulty? Well, that's a really, this whole, how difficult should it be? That's a really, it's a very hard question to answer in a Hitman game because of the many ways that the players can do it, right? So we kind of, we have an initial idea about why we want to kind of challenge the players and why we want to give them a bit more kind of leash where they can just kind of roam around. But once you get a new disguise, then it's a different scenario and we have to account for that in our design. So we do a lot of iterations on this. Okay, so if I went to the right and went this way in through the level where there was no resistance, I didn't have to do anything. I could just walk in straight in the main door. Then we have to go back to the drawing board and then jiggle around the characters, maybe add some new ones, remove some, and you know, change the amount of guards. So the player will have challenges no matter how they kind of approach it. But in the end, the crazy thing is no matter how hard we make it or how challenging that we make it, they will always find crazy ways of bypassing the systems and bending the rules of the game so much. And that's what makes Hitman great is that you can do all of these things. Okay, can I do this? Yes, and you go and try it. And maybe it worked out. Maybe I didn't, it was not a good idea in the end, but it's very much up to you as the player to figure out how you want to be creative on this. So we're doing this series as part of the Western Digital Data Makes Possible. And data is such a big part of what you guys do. And really as gaming has moved off of the pure console into the connected world, gives you an opportunity as a developer to see really how are people interacting with the game? How are they making decisions? So how do you guys look at the analytics? You must be doing more and more and more analytics on all these various movements and potential options that they have. We have systems in place to kind of figure out where people get spotted, so we can actually see that. The tricky part about metrics is that, during development, there's actually not that many people playing the game besides ourselves, right? So we rely heavily on user testing where we subdue people to kind of, we place people in front of the game in very early stages to see if our core ideas are working. And then based on that, we then look at video footage interviews and all that stuff to kind of, that feedbacks into the design loop of the process. And has you basically mapped every potential option or using AI and stuff like you just used the example, some guys too smart, we really need to have more guards for this guy. I mean, is there AI and intelligence in the game that you can make little fine tune adjustments along the path as people actually play the game? Cause you're going to have a whole lot more data by December 1st, right? Precisely, the amount of data we get is pretty wild in the end. But the core of the game, the characters are kind of AI driven, right? They have their own kind of plans that they want to do. And the way it works is that we then kind of build the stories on top of this core AI. So the designers, they have freedom to create custom moments. But at some point when things go kind of in the fence for the players, you get spotted, you know, someone sees through your disguise, then the AI takes over. And I dare to say that we have some of the most complex AI systems in the industry. We go to great lengths to kind of have them be very living and kind of communicating a lot. So, you know, if one guy finds a body, then there's one situation, if he has a friend, then they begin to talk about what they've experienced. And they work together to kind of figure out what is actually going on. So there's a very high level of AI running behind the scenes in the Hitman game. And do you do that at the level of the characters? So it's really how a character responds to different stimuli versus just kind of a generic overlay for the whole game? Well, it's a mix. Some of them, you know, there are different kinds of characters, guards, civilians, and they have different behaviors based on what happens. But each character is more or less his himself. And then he's not kind of hive mind controlled. It is kind of a lot of agents that are running around in the world, trying to figure out what this player is up to, creating havoc behind the scenes. So it's kind of, it's a lot of fun to kind of work with it because it's also so unpredictable. And then all of a sudden, something happened that you didn't expect. Right, because you can't possibly scenario every potential outcome, right? No, exactly. We have some control, but it's systemically based, right? So the way we normally say it's like, we encourage the characters to do things. And then they might do it, right? For instance, you and I having an interview right now that requires that you're standing in your spot and I'm standing in my spot. If I were to create that scene in the game, then there is a certain chance that one of us is lying in a dumpster somewhere and never shows up for the interview. And then the next question is, okay, so what do you do? Right, right. So we have to kind of construct the game in a way so that you won't break down and stop here. I don't know if you remember in season one of Westworld, have you seen that? I have seen season one. I haven't caught up on season two yet, but yeah, season one. I haven't stopped in season two yet, but in season one, there's this scene where there's a bonfire scene that breaks down where all the characters just stop and then it turns out that the guy who went for firewood has been killed. So he never returned with the firewood and thereby the entire bonfire scene just runs to hold. That is Hitman game development in a nutshell. That's like, then we have a buck when that thing happens and that can happen in our, when we're during development, we do that stuff. It's gotta be so cool to discover how people actually work their way through the game. Absolutely. Because the other thing I think that you guys always have to balance is, you know, you have a narrative, you want to have a narrative, you have a story, you have characters in a lick and feel. At the same time, you have individual operators, the players that are kind of bringing their own kind of point of view to the game. So how do you balance? When does one take priority or the other? How do you keep it on that narrative flow? It's been one of these, it's like returning challenges of making a Hitman game. And with the previous game, we kind of narrowed in on, okay, so how do we do this? So we have a main story that is told outside the levels which the levels don't directly affect. So the overall main arc and storyline is kind of set, but what happens in the levels kind of stays in the levels, so to speak. So in season one, we actually managed to go through the main story with some characters left alive, which is good because now in the second Hitman 2, we're going to get closer to them and the story evolves kind of around 1847 and we get a glimpse into its past, which is a bit of some things we haven't told yet. That's going to be very exciting to see that as well. Well, Jacob, thanks for spending a few minutes and good luck with the launch. Congrats on the new product. Yeah, thank you very much. All right, best tongue to you. He's Jacob, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're in the Warner Brothers Games booth at E3. I'm Lincoln Midget Center. Thanks for watching.