Most won't finish Hitman: Absolution, says director

By a large margin, those who pick up IO Interactive's new stealth game Hitman: Absolution will not finish it, predicts game director Tore Blystad. Speaking to the Official PlayStation Magazine UK, the developer said his studio is saddened to predict that only 20 percent of players will finish the game.

“20 per cent of the players will see the last level of the game," he said. "It’s horrible to know. It makes the people working on it really really sad.”

Why will players not finish the game? Blystad explained that gamers will grow fatigued of the experience, and that the phenomenon is not limited to Hitman: Absolution.

“I guess people can’t commit to taking all those hours to finish one product; they get tired of it," he said. "It’s not just for this game, it’s for any game.”

Blystad further explained that despite expecting a small percentage of players to finish Hitman: Absolution, IO Interactive remains committed to keeping the game's level order intact.

“It’s very difficult when something is constructed to fit into a larger story to move things too much around. I think in some of the previous Hitman games that that might have been the case--that some levels were moved earlier, because they were more catchy or interesting," he said. "For us, it hasn’t really been that easy, because the story is really tying all the levels together, so they’re still coming in the same order, more or less, that they were designed.”

Hitman: Absolution is due out for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC on November 20. It is the first entry in the series since 2006's Hitman: Blood Money, which saw Agent 47 bring silent death to locales ranging from mid-Mardis Gras New Orleans to the White House.