Polish studio CI Games announced Sniper Ghost Warrior: Contracts is the next installment in the first-person sniping series. The last outing was Sniper Ghost Warrior 3, which came out back in spring of 2017 to a mixed collage of complaints and praise due to poor performance and optimization issues plaguing the home console and PC release. Well, CI Games wants to rectify that by focusing on a more contained landscape and providing players with a streamlined campaign that takes place through contracts, much like the Hitman series.
Unlike Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 where you picked up missions in an open-world environment, this time around the campaign will unfold through a series of tailor-made contract missions through a streamlined single-player campaign mode. You’ll earn rewards and make money in order to buy new equipment or upgrade your gear, very similar to Hitman. Each mission will also come with additional side-quests as well. Details on the campaign’s story were not unveiled, but they did mention that the open-world design was being ditched.
CI Games CEO, Marek Tymiński, explained in the press release…
“We were too ambitious in terms of the scope of Sniper Ghost Warrior 3, but we’ve learned from our missteps. Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts will be more focused on emergent gameplay with an open-ended mission design that the team feels strong about, but it will not be set in an open world. It is going to be a more tactical, more condensed experience and the game will offer plenty of replayability, both on the single player campaign and on the multiplayer modes.”
So no more open world? Interesting.
The environments being contained within “tactical”, “condensed” sandboxes means that you can likely expect playscapes similar to how IO Interactive has the Hitman games setup, where the maps are large enough to allow players to experiment with different styles of play, but it’s not necessarily a wholly open-world game.
Tymiński also mentions that the team will be using a lot of carryover technology from Sniper Ghost Warrior 3, and will be building on top of it instead of starting from scratch. So expect the same kind of weapon handling and mechanics, just in a more refined and optimized play environment.
They also mention in the press release that the maps will still be densely populated, but will also offer optional objectives to complete along with open-ended missions that encourage emergent gameplay resolution. Once again, it sounds a lot like how IO Interactive has the Hitman games setup, which also encourage players to experiment and solve the contracts to the best of their own abilities.
The game will also have a multiplayer mode, but details on the multiplayer haven’t been revealed yet.
Additionally, the team has been working on optimizing the game engine. They’ve overhauled the under-the-hood mechanics so that they’ve been able to squeeze more stable frames per second out of all three major platforms. They’ve also reduced loading times when loading the different areas of Siberia.
Sniper Ghost Warrior: Contracts is still a long ways off from release and won’t be available until 2019.
