Only 20 percent of Hitman Absolution players "will see the last level"

IO Interactive has said only 20 percent of Hitman Absolution players will see it out to the last level.

Director Tore Blystad revealed the figure upon discussing the utilization of metrics in order to record player behavior.

"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."

Upon being asked what makes a good or a bad metric, he said he's "horrible" to know that 20% of players for their title will reach the last level. But why does the developer believe the completion rate will be that low? Some gamers just can't commit taking several hours completing a game.

"Knowing that 20% 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.

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

There is of course a desire to deliver the best content during the opening stages of the game, but it's not that simple.

"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. 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."

So, the only way to combat this is to getting the players to inject more time into Absolution.

"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."

Hitman Absolution is due for a worldwide launch on November 20, 2012.