PC Gamer
As reported by IGN, Hitman Absolution game director Tore Blystad has apologised for the controversy caused by the Attack of the Saints trailer, which featured Agent 47 brutally killing a group of assassins dressed – as Tom put it at the time – as BDSM nuns.
“We’re sorry that we offended people” Blystad told journalists at E3. “That was truly not the intention of the trailer.”
“We’ve been reading as much as we could of the articles and responses” Blystad continued. “We were surprised that it turned into such a huge topic. Something similar happened with our Sniper Challenge pre-order bonus. We just wanted to make something cool, it wasn’t the intention to stir up anything.”
Blystad then went on to explain that the nuns are enemies from the game – assassins from The Agency – and that the trailer was designed to show off a scenario that players will encounter in Hitman: Absolution.
“It’s a level from the game called Attack of the Saints, and this trailer I guess you could say represents one possible outcome. As you know with Hitman games, you can go about it any way you want.”
Aside from the hard-to-watch spectacle of a group of hypersexualised women being killed in slow motion, many commenters also pointed out that ultraviolence on this scale isn’t something that has ever been associated with the Agent 47 character. Blystad said that this is symptomatic of the broader problem of presenting an open-ended game in trailer-friendly form. …