A few months back, the folks over IO Interactive caused quite a stir with a trailer for the upcoming Hitman: Absolution and not quite in the way they were expecting. That is to say that it was in a bad way.

Ah yes, the infamous “Attack the Saints” trailer. I remember it well. Then again, seeing a bald headed man in a suit engage in an incredibly violent blood-bath against a group of scantily clad nuns in latex catsuits is certainly bound to leave an impression.

For a lot of veiwers, that impression was of course a negative one, as most gamers didn’t quite take too kindly to seeing 47 systematically slay this group of sexualised assassins and were needless to say offended.

IO has since apologized and director Tore Blystad has admitted at Gamescom that the development team is currently adding some creative tweaks to the game in order to provide some context to the to prove that they are formidable antagonists with relevance to the plot, rather than just eye candy.

"We're working within the game - within that level - to build these characters up before you meet them. That way you know what you're getting and you aren't put off by them."

He also admitted the team now regrets the trailer and would have approached things differently if they could go back and do it all again.

"We've been trying to find out, y'know, how could we not see this happening? If we knew it would get such a negative reaction we would have done it in a different way."

Blystad concluded by saying fans should be satisfied with the end result.

He didn’t go into any details about what these changes will be but I’m going to wager a guess and say they’ll be mostly script changes to further integrate the nuns into the plotline and maybe explain why they’ve dawned the latex. Although, IO already did that with this trailer and I think it kinda defeated its own purpose.

I’m not quite sure the developers fully grasped why so many people complained about this whole thing. Maybe they should’ve just let people forget about it rather than trying to fix it, as this effort might not be helping their case very much.

Oh well, maybe the critics are wrong and these characters truly are well developed and necessary for the plot. We’ll just have to wait until the game launches in November to find out.