Instinct does not auto regenerate in ’Hard’ difficulty in my experience, but you can gain a portion of your total instinct capacity if you subdue enemies and a bit more, if you hide the body in a dumpster storage. The percentages will seem lower the more you progress the story campaign. After progressing a certain point in the story, your instinct capacity will increase but your raw gain in instinct per action will remain the same, so it may seem that you’re gaining less instinct per action, but actually it seems lower in % in proportion to your total capacity. In short, don’t worry about it, just be smart with instinct usage. You also gain it by completing objectives. Say your total instinct ‘pool’ is 100. If your instinct is 0 from a certain point in the game after which you subdue or headshot an enemy, you gain 15 instinct. Then you hide the dead body and you gain another 20, totaling 35. If your total instinct pool increases to 150 as you progress more in the story, then subduing an enemy will still get you 15, which is not 15% anymore, but 10%, in proportion to 150 which seems like a less gain but actually, in raw value, it’s the same. So, don’t worry about it later on in the game. This reward system of earning instinct was immediately a mood lifter for me while playing the game in hard difficulty. But if your instinct meter is full, then you can’t gain more instinct via actions.

So, the tactical thing is to use the initial instinct pool to map out a big chunk of the area while subduing/kiIIing NPCs at a slow rate and hiding the bodies in secluded locations instead of dumping them in the trunks so that after you have used up your instinct pool to map out and get a feel of the area, you can clear the level by hiding those previously unhidden bodies to gain back the entire instinct capacity without wasting too much gains and thereby making efficient use of this previous, but limited ability.

Even though instinct is rapidly used up while hiding from the enemies wearing the same uniform/disguise like your new disguise, and also during rapid shooting, you can use instinct to view nearby throwable objects, enemy silhouettes even when your instinct pool is 0! But, the problem is, when you have any instinct left, it is used up when trying to detect simple environmental factors. It’s an imperfect implementation of the ability, but with wit, you’ll find more efficient uses of it.

Sometimes, disguises are worse than 47 being in his suit. Say you’re in the hotel lobby. Anyone is allowed to be there, but if you’re in a staff or police officer uniform with NPCs of that type around there, you’ll likely get detected.

You must make sure that no enemy detects you while you quickly hide in a trunk or hide a body in it. If you enter undetected, then you can safely peek outisde undetected even if the enemy is near the trunk.

An annoying thing is that there is no manual save, and checkpoint reset respawns all enemies in previous locations where you already kiIIed/subdued/hid the bodies. Maybe this is why they call it a ‘checkpoint reset’ instead of ‘checkpoint save’.

While this is a big bummer for points chasers, you don’t need to worry about subduing anyone and waste time. You can garrot enemies quicker, hide the body and your total penalty is 0 overall. There are minus points for killing, but a silent kill and hide body actions offsets that initial negative.

Garroting is more silent than subduing; subduing makes nearby enemies turn around towards the direction of the sound even if a bit far away. Don’t garrot if the enemy NPC is within 10 feet of another enemy; that’ll alert them. Garrot automatically picks-up the body for dragging it, saving time.

Unlike in most other third person or first person games, you can quick crouch in this game. The mechanic is labelled as “sneak” instead of crouch. If you want to ‘sneak’ quickly, just press the sprint button after you’re in the sneak position and you will move quicker in the crouched position. This makes more noise than only walking/sneaking. Seguing to this absurd mechanic in which enemies will be suspicious of your quick sneak sound if you’re wearing a disguise that is not allowed in that specific area but they won’t even care about any ‘suspicious sound’ if you’re wearing a disguise that is allowed in that area. This is a very exploitable ability to draw in enemies to a specific location spot. Walking normally does not create noise whatsoever, but sneaking at normal speed is slightly quicker without creating sound with or without disguise.

If you’re struggling to garrot or subdue enemies successully and accidentally end up fighting the enemy and ruining the entire ‘unspotted’ run, then I suggest pressing the right clickm button when you’re completely holstered or with fibre wire and then aiming the middle of your screen at the back neck of the enemy NPC to wait for the subdue/garrot prompts to appear and then press the button. The aim pushes the camera much closer, right above 47’s shoulder to target the NPC better.

More!

Always carry a throwable object in your items list with you. You can exploit the trick of distracting multiple enemies with multiple thrown objects well timed. Say you carry a brick with you then take cover behind an object which has a bottle on top which you can swap in place for your brick. If there are 2 or more bottles almost close to each other or other objects, even better. Say there are 3 enemy NPCs. You can throw an object nearest to one of the NPCs but still far away to for him to take some time to walk there, then immediately, pick up another throwable and throw it at another direction away from the other npc and then repeat with another throwable near another NPC but in a similar direction. Kinda like, throwing 3 objects towards the left, to make space for you to sneak in towards the right.

After throwing in a throwable object or making a suspicious sound, don’t stay anywhere near 40 feet of the sound, otherwise, you will get spotted or your unspotted point status will be cancelled even if enemies are not suspicious of you.

You can use sharp weapons to throw and kiII. And while that is somewhat silent, it leaves behind a pool of blood near the dead body. Even if you hide the dead body, any NPC that notices that pool of blood at the kiII spot will try to alert others. You can also use that to grab the attention of an NPC, distract him, draw him close to the pool of blood and garrot/subdue him if he is the only NPC nearby.

No throwable objects to distract enemies? Use your silent pistol to shoot at a precise point where you want the enemy NPC to walk to and pause; could be at a wall or an object. Don’t do this if the enemy NPC is within 20 feet from you.

Pressing the sprint button helps with more than just sniper hold breath shots. It also minimises the normal guns’ cross hair for more precise aiming. Say you take out your silver ballers and see that the cross hair has an aim gap. You can improve its precision if you press the hold breath button.

Before point shooting, always make sure you have more than 80% instinct pool filled. Might need more or less depending upon the number of enemy NPCs you want to take down.

Firing a shot at a specific location can mess with enemy NPCs’ heads  and then many of them nearby will soon rush to that location to investigate. This will make the enemy NPCs move from another location to your shot fired location, this might make them abandon a location where you may need to walk in and perform a task; maybe lockpick a door that was formerly guarded by some enemy NPCs, enter a restricted room otherwise, collect a guarded item or add in poison to the target’s food. Pick a location far away from your target location where you need to act. Picking an uncommon disguise can help you walk past the rushing NPCs.

Collecting the same kind of SMG, pistol of the enemy allows you to dual wield that same type of weapon till you replace it with a different weapon for the same slot, in which case both the weapons get dropped for that single weapon.

If you take out all non targets of a particular profession say, electrician from an area, then you can potentially roam that area with 0 risk of being detected/spotted in that disguise. But this can be labourous to do. For the long play free roam, pick a uniform of a type of NPC that there are few in numbers. However, be mindful of which areas you’re allowed to enter. For instance, an electrician will not be allowed to enter a private area that is only allowed for the body guards of the main target in a mission.

Point shooting by design is simple but not immediately straight forward to understand and execute. Remember to press hold the button you’ve designated for instinct; while its held, press the point shooting button as it appears as a prompt on the screen; then immediately 47 will come out of his cover, if you were in a cover, then you must immediately press the aim button, then you can place the cross hair on each enemy NPC’s head and press the shoot button. Don’t worry, this won’t immediately activate the point shooting, but merely selects targets for that. Pick targets starting with the most important to kiII to the least important, but do so quickly after pre planning before activating instinct. The press the point shooting button again to activate as shown on the screen prompt.

While the silver ballers are pistols, you can continuously fire them if you press hold the shoot button while you’re in dual wield mode. Press the silver baller button again to go into single weapon mode. Not as automatic as machine guns, but fairly rapid if you wanna play the game like that or during heavy fire power moments.

Someone catches you do something? See if you can calmly walk to any secluded corner. The NPC will follow you there. Fake surrender. As soon as he comes near you, Agent 47 with his great reflexes will disarm him and take the NPC hostage, then you can immediately knock him out. Your unpotted status will be taken off but you can still keep the run a quiet one without reloading plenty back.

So! These were some of the tips off the top of my head which I feel will definitely help any new player of this game! Don’t worry if all this seems a bit too overwhelming to take at the very instant because you can ease into all these points as you progress into the game more and more.