Only 20% of players will finish Hitman: Absolution, reckons IO

The vast majority of those playing Hitman: Absolution won't stick with the game long enough to experience its final level, according to developer IO Interactive's expectations.

As discussed in an interview with Official PlayStation Magazine, that figure was divined using various internal metrics to track player behaviour.

"20 per cent of the players will see the last level of the game. It's horrible to know. It makes the people working on it really really sad," explained director Tore Blystad.

"We are using metrics a lot more now than we did, for good and for bad. The general player will probably never even finish the game, which is very sad. Or they might only play through it once, but the game is built for the people who want to go back through every single level and get all the stuff out of it. It's built to last, rather than be a one-off experience."

Elsewhere in the interview, Blystad discussed the challenge in encouraging players to explore every inch of the game to experience all the content that the studio has painstakingly put together.

"A battle we have is that we want to put all this stuff in, but we also know that because the game is up to the player there's a lot of people that will never ever see it. The only thing we can do is incentivise replayability in different ways.

"In the user tests we have they actually tell us that the replayability factor in itself, it's the situation or the humour that's the reason people actually go back through the levels.

"They want to see more, they want to find these things, which makes us very happy, because it takes a lot of time and effort to get these things in."

For more on the game, due out on 20th November, head on over to our recent Hitman: Absolution preview.