Hitman 3

Like its predecessors, Hitman 3 is a stealth game played from a third-person perspective and players once again assume control of assassin Agent 47. In the game, 47 travels to various locations and carries out contracted assassinations, continuing the story of the last two games. The base game features six new locations: Dubai, Dartmoor, Berlin, Chongqing, Mendoza, and Carpathian Mountains, Romania.[7][8] Owners of Hitman or Hitman 2 are able to import maps, levels, and their progress into Hitman 3.[4]

The new locations in Hitman 3 include persistent shortcuts, a new gameplay feature to the series. Each stage includes several initially locked doors which can only be unlocked from one side; once unlocked, these doors stay open in all future playthroughs, allowing initially closed-off locations to be reached more quickly.[9] Hitman 3 added a new camera item available by default which can be used to take photos and is also used for gameplay purposes such as opening doors on certain maps.[10] Another new feature in the game is numerical keypads, where players have to find four-digit codes and then enter them manually to open doors and safes.[11]

The game features PlayStation VR compatibility on the PlayStation 4 version, with support for PlayStation 5 via backwards compatibility,[12] Support for VR on PC was later added on 20 January 2022. The VR functionality also retroactively applies to levels imported from the previous two entries.[13] Unlike Hitman 2, there are no multiplayer modes, with Sniper Assassin being purely single player, and Ghost Mode being removed entirely.[14]

Hitman 3 features Contracts Mode, where a player can select up to five targets across all the maps in the series, add rules and complications like specific kill methods and share their contracts with other players. "Featured Contracts" are regularly added, which may be a selection of community contracts on a certain theme (such as during the Seasons of Sin[15]) or contracts made by specific gaming publications or YouTube channels like Kinda Funny[16] or Eurogamer.[17] The game also features side missions created by the developers known as "Escalations" which are multi-stage contracts that get progressively harder as the player completes each stage.

On January 20, 2022, IO Interactive added a new game mode to Hitman 3 called 'Elusive Target Arcade'. This allows users to play 'Arcade Contracts,’ with each contract consisting of a series of previous Elusive Targets that must be eliminated in order. Each contract has a complication, which may require the player to change their strategies. Players can earn rewards for completing contracts but if the player fails a contract, they must wait 12 hours before attempting it again.[18]

During the events of Hitman 2, professional assassin Agent 47 and his handler, Diana Burnwood, defected from the International Contract Agency (ICA) and joined forces with rogue mercenary Lucas Grey to destroy Providence: an alliance of corporate executives and industrialists collectively wielding political, military, and economic influence. While 47 and Grey seek revenge on Providence for turning them both into assassins, Diana is motivated by the death of her parents, unaware that 47 carried out the killings. The trio kidnapped Arthur Edwards, Providence's intermediary known as the Constant, who identified the three Partners controlling Providence: Carl Ingram, Marcus Stuyvesant, and Alexa Carlisle. Edwards, however, later escaped captivity and seized the Partners' corporate assets for himself.

Working together, 47 and Grey eliminate Ingram and Stuyvesant in Dubai during the inauguration of the Scepter, the world's tallest skyscraper, and Carlisle at her ancestral manor in Dartmoor, England. Following the Partners' deaths, Edwards assumes control of Providence and deploys mercenaries who capture Grey and Diana. Grey commits suicide to ensure 47 is not captured.

47 arranges to meet hacker Olivia Hall, Grey's only other trusted ally, in Berlin. Discovering that the ICA is tailing them, 47 kills several ICA agents sent to eliminate him, before he and Hall decide to conclusively stop the ICA by exposing its crimes to the public. 47 eliminates Hush and Imogen Royce, the overseers of the ICA data storage facility in Chongqing, China, allowing Hall to steal and publish all of the ICA's operational data while deleting all records of himself and Diana. The ICA is irrevocably compromised and dismantled, ending 47's career as a professional assassin.

Meanwhile, Edwards attempts to convert Diana to succeeding him as Constant and seeks her betrayal of 47 by finally revealing his killing of her parents. Diana seemingly double-deals both sides, accepting Edwards's offer while inviting 47 to a gathering of Providence members in Mendoza, Argentina, where he is instructed to eliminate the only people opposed to Diana's succession—Tamara Vidal and Don Archibald Yates—so that she can dismantle the organization upon assuming control. While he follows her instructions, 47's longtime trust in Diana is finally shaken when she incapacitates him with poison in revenge for the murder of her parents.

In a dream, a vision of Grey persuades 47 that Diana has not betrayed him, but rather helped to put Edwards within his reach. 47 wakes up imprisoned on a train travelling through the Carpathian Mountains, with Edwards also on board. Though Edwards intends to make 47 into an assassin for Providence once more by wiping his memory with a serum injection, 47 breaks free, either kills Edwards or injects him with the serum, and flees into the wild. Meanwhile, Diana assumes power as Constant and enacts a purge of Providence's members from leadership positions at major global corporations, dismantling Providence's power structure. A year later, 47 reunites with Diana, and the pair return to their former roles as assassin and handler, respectively, as a means of keeping the global elites in check.

In an alternate ending, if 47 injects himself with the serum while confronting Edwards, he passes out, and later awakens in a padded room, greeted by Edwards' voice telling him, "Wake up. Wake up, my friend. It's the dawn of a new day, and you have things to do"—akin to the opening of Hitman: Codename 47.

The game was announced on 11 June 2020 at the PlayStation 5 reveal event.[19] The first location of the game, Dubai, was revealed on the same day.[20] Developers stated that the game would be "a lot more mature, serious and darker" than previous installments in the trilogy. It was also confirmed that fully animated cutscenes like in the first Hitman would be returning after Hitman 2 used still images for its cutscenes.[21] The Stadia version titled Hitman: World of Assassination was announced on 14 July 2020, which also acts as a hub to play Hitman and Hitman 2 on the platform.[22][1] This version was the debut of Stadia's 'State Share' feature which lets players to share 'game states' allowing others to play the same contract with the same items and starting location as them even if they haven't unlocked them yet.[23] On 28 October 2020 during a Nintendo Direct the game was announced to be coming to Nintendo Switch via cloud streaming technology.[24][25] This marks the first time a Hitman game has been released for a Nintendo platform in almost 18 years; the last game to be released was a port of Hitman 2: Silent Assassin for the GameCube in 2003. A VR mode releasing exclusively for PlayStation VR was announced during a PlayStation State of Play livestream on 6 August 2020.[26][27]

The second location, Dartmoor, was revealed on 26 August 2020 with IO Interactive also confirming they had signed a 12-month exclusivity period for the PC version with the Epic Games Store, explaining "as an independent studio, our partnership with Epic has given us the freedom to create HITMAN 3 exactly as we imagined and self-publish the game to our players directly".[28][29] The Chongqing location was revealed on 24 November 2020[30] and the final 3 locations were revealed on 11 January 2021.[31] The opening cinematic was revealed on 15 December 2020.[32]

The Mendoza location was IO Interactive's first attempt to depict Argentina in the Hitman franchise. The company went to great lengths to create a fictional location with authentic-looking terrain and vegetation, to show the winemaking process, and to accurately portray aspects of Argentine culture like the tango and the drinking of mate.[33] The one major compromise was the decision to reuse existing non-player character (NPC) dialogue which had been recorded with Colombian and Mexican accents, rather than recording new NPC dialogue with authentic Argentine accents. According to IO Interactive, this was because of time and budgetary constraints and the additional complication of the COVID-19 pandemic. The company chose to focus on securing appropriate voice talent for the Chongqing location.[33]

IO Interactive decided to make heavy use of lossless LZ4 compression to reduce the file size of Hitman 3. Due to engine improvements it was now possible to run nearly everything in the game through this compression algorithm. With Hitman 3, the way the content from the older titles is imported was also changed, which results in less duplicate data compared to Hitman where each episode needed all the code and assets to work standalone. The end result is a file size for Hitman 3 of only around 60-70 GB including all of the maps and content from both Hitman 2 and Hitman. By comparison, the full size of Hitman 2 with all the maps from Hitman is nearly 150 GB.[34]

IO Interactive announced in November 2020 that they had teamed up with Intel to optimise Hitman 3 performance on high-end CPUs with 8+ cores, which results in more crowds and environment destructibility. They also announced they were introducing Variable Rate Shading, a technique for improving rendering performance, into the game.[35][36]

On 15 January 2021, IO Interactive announced that unlike console players, PC players would have to pay for an access pass to unlock Hitman 2 locations in Hitman 3,[37] even after announcing in August 2020 that players would unlock them in Hitman 3 at no additional cost.[38] Tim Sweeney, Epic Games' CEO, later responded to the announcement with: "Sorry, the team is looking into this with IO. It's never Epic's intent to create a situation where someone who owns a game on Steam would have to buy it again on Epic Games Store to get the full benefits of it."[39] Two days later, IO Interactive said they were working on a solution to allow Steam players to import locations to the Epic Games Store. They guaranteed that players will not need to repurchase the games;[40] however, they admitted there would be a delay and players could not import Hitman 2 locations into Hitman 3 for a few weeks.[41] The location transfer system was implemented a month later on 18 February 2021.[42]

On 27 August 2020, digital-only pre-orders for the game launched for PlayStation, PC and Xbox players. A 'Trinity Pack' featuring 9 items (3 suits, 3 pistols and 3 briefcases all with Red, White and Black variants) was available as a pre-order bonus. It was also announced that a Deluxe Edition of the game would be released, which includes Deluxe Escalations, in-game items and suits as well as digital soundtracks for the trilogy and a digital book featuring information about targets and locations from the trilogy.[43] On 8 September 2020, pre-orders for Stadia went live.[44] On 15 October 2020, it was announced that physical copies of an exclusive variant of the Deluxe Edition containing all the digital content and an exclusive physical passport would be released by Limited Run Games.[45] On 30 October 2020, standard retail physical copies for both editions of the game were announced through traditional brick and mortar retail stores.[46]

The game released on 20 January 2021, with IO Interactive self-publishing the game. It was released for Windows via Epic Games Store, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch (via cloud gaming) and streaming service Stadia (under the title Hitman: World of Assassination).[47][48] The physical version was distributed by Square Enix in Europe, Middle East, Africa and Australasia.[49]

After launch the game was plagued with server-based issues, with users unable to transfer over their progress from Hitman 2, users unable to use their Access Pass levels, and users unable to access the servers at all, leaving them unable to make progress in the game.[50][51]

A week after Hitman 3's release, IO's studio head Hakan Abrak stated they had made back their development costs for the game, and "that puts us in a really good place and allows us to confidently move forward with our ambitious plans for future projects.",[52] the first being a James Bond game.

Hitman 3 received "generally favorable" reviews, according to review aggregator Metacritic.[73][74][75][76]

IGN gave the game a 9/10, writing "Rich, rewarding, and highly replayable, Hitman 3 is a superb instalment of IO's idiosyncratic but much-loved stealth series." GamesRadar+ gave the game 4.5/5 stars, praising the "fun and imaginative murders, beautiful levels to explore, [and] incredible world-building" and calling it a "slick and entertaining conclusion to the trilogy". GameSpot wrote: "What's good about Hitman—its level design and the creativity, experimentation, and exploration that affords—is great in Hitman 3." PC Gamer highlighted the level design writing "[the] impeccable design is what makes Hitman 3 not just a great stealth game, but a near endlessly replayable one".[85]

The game's level design received critical praise. The Dartmoor map was particularly praised for the optional murder mystery elements, drawing comparisons to the movie Knives Out.[86][87][88][89] GameSpot named Berlin as a "standout level that encapsulates everything that's fantastic about the recent trilogy into a layered and lethal sandbox of creative carnage".[90] The Mendoza level was celebrated for its realistic depiction of Argentina.[33][91] The final level set on a train in the Carpathian Mountains however received criticism for its linearity and for feeling out of place for a Hitman level.[92][93][94]

The ability to import content from Hitman and Hitman 2 in order to have the maps of all three games in one was praised however it was noted that the process for doing so was "convoluted".[95][96]

The removal of Ghost Mode and the co-operative Sniper Assassin mode from Hitman 2 was criticised by some reviewers,[97] with GameSpot describing how it meant "the game itself is scaled down somewhat as an overall package".[89]

The VR mode received mixed reviews. The PlayStation VR version was praised for its immersion, impressive visuals for a PSVR title and for supporting all the maps in the trilogy. It was however criticised for the visual downgrades required to make it run on PSVR compared to the regular game such as a lack of reflections and low draw distance. The control scheme utilising a combination of DualShock 4 controller and motion controls also received mixed reviews.[98][99][100] The PC VR version released in 2022 was heavily criticised for not offering full motion controls or improving upon the flaws of the PlayStation version.[101][102]

After previously stating that there would be no more DLC added for the game, a year later, IOI announced Hitman 3: Year 2. This will include various DLC targets, more game modes and maps.

In various interviews conducted with IO Interactive, they have confirmed that despite Hitman 3 being the final game in the World of Assassination trilogy, it will not be the last game in the franchise.[132][133] Christian Elverdam, IO Interactive's chief creative officer, has said that walking away from the Hitman franchise for the time being and closing the door on this chapter of Agent 47's story feels fitting.[134] IO Interactive have also confirmed they are likely going to do a new take on the gaming formula when they return to the Hitman series in the future.[135]

• Official website