When it comes to murder, Hitman games are a toybox of creative carnage that you can inflict on terrible people and actors like Sean Bean. But not all of the ways that characters can die are intentional; in Hitman 2’s Isle of Sgail level, there’s a particular wall that unintentionally kills anyone who comes into contact with it. Developer IO Interactive has dubbed this the Death Wall and has tried different means of addressing the issue before finally arriving at a creative–and mundane–solution: stacking up a bunch of boxes to block it off (via Nate Purkeypile on Twitter).
“Ironically enough, the death wall is located in the Morgue and would kill any NPC who was right up against it,” IO Interactive explained in the patch notes for Hitman: World of Assassination’s new update. “To remedy this, we added some extra collision along the wall–but that didn’t work. We could see that NPCs were able to step *just* outside of the navmesh bounds (basically the area that they are allowed to be) and although we tried a few other changes, the Death Wall kept on claiming victims.”
So how did IO Interactive repair the merciless wall? The solution was to place a bunch of boxes next to the wall, which keeps NPCs from falling victim to architectural assassination. Despite this fix, there is still a clear and present danger present here, and the Death Wall patiently waits to claim another life. This isn’t the first time that developers have had to think outside of the box when it comes to solving issues in games, with one classic example being The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind rebooting your Xbox during loading screens to avoid running into memory issues.