Hitman 3 (stylized as HITMAN III) is a stealth game released in 2021 by IO Interactive. It's the follow-up to the 2018 video game Hitman 2, the eighth main instalment in the Hitman series, and the third and final instalment in the World of Assassination trilogy. The single-player storyline follows genetically-engineered assassin Agent 47 and his allies as they hunt down the leaders of the secretive organisation Providence, which controls the world's affairs and was partially responsible for 47's creation and upbringing, and concludes the plot arc begun in Hitman.
The game is presented in third-person, with an emphasis on interactive elements in 47's environment. The game, like the previous entries in the series, has six levels, five of which are large open-ended sandbox levels. Agent 47 is free to roam each map in search of assassination targets. In order to unlock new items, the player must complete challenges within each mission.
On January 20, 2021, Hitman 3 was released worldwide for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Stadia (under the title Hitman: World of Assassination)[1] and Nintendo Switch (via cloud gaming)[2]. [3][4] The game received positive reviews from critics, with some calling it the best entry in the series and one of the greatest stealth games of all time. [5][6] It was praised for its level design and atmosphere, stealth mechanics, and 47's abilities in particular. Hitman 3 was the franchise's most commercially successful game. At the 2021 Golden Joystick Awards, it won several awards, including "PC Game of the Year."
Gameplay
Hitman 3 is a stealth game played from a third-person perspective, and players take control of assassin Agent 47 once again. In the game, 47 travels to various locations and executes contracted assassinations, carrying on the story from the previous two games. Six new locations have been added to the base game: Dubai, Dartmoor, Berlin, Chongqing, Mendoza, and the Carpathian Mountains in Romania. [7] [8] Owners of Hitman or Hitman 2 can import their maps, levels, and progress into Hitman 3. [4]
Persistent shortcuts, a new gameplay feature to the Hitman series, are included in the new locations in Hitman 3. Each stage contains a number of initially locked doors that can only be unlocked from one side; once unlocked, these doors remain open in all subsequent playthroughs, allowing previously closed-off locations to be reached more quickly. [9] Hitman 3 introduced a new camera item that can be used to take photos as well as for gameplay purposes such as opening doors on certain maps. [10] Another new addition to the game is numerical keypads, where players must find four-digit codes and manually enter them to open doors and safes. [11]
The game includes PlayStation VR compatibility on the PlayStation 4 version, as well as backwards compatibility with the PlayStation 5. VR support for PC was later added on January 20, 2022. The VR functionality also applies to levels imported from the previous two entries retroactively. [13] Unlike Hitman 2, there are no multiplayer modes in Sniper Assassin, and Ghost Mode has been removed entirely. [14]
Contracts Mode in Hitman 3 allows players to choose up to five targets from all of the series' maps, add rules and complications such as specific kill methods, and share their contracts with other players. "Featured Contracts" are added on a regular basis, and can be a selection of community contracts on a specific 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 includes developer-created side missions known as "Escalations," which are multi-stage contracts that become progressively more difficult as the player completes each stage.
On January 20, 2022, IO Interactive released a new game mode called 'Elusive Target Arcade' for Hitman 3. Users can now play 'Arcade Contracts,' with each contract consisting of a series of previous Elusive Targets that must be eliminated in order. Each contract contains a complication that may necessitate a change in strategy on the part of the player. Players can earn rewards for completing contracts, but if a contract is failed, the player must wait 12 hours before attempting it again. [18]
Plot
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: a group of corporate executives and industrialists with political, military, and economic clout. While 47 and Grey seek vengeance on Providence for turning them both into assassins, Diana is motivated by the death of her parents, oblivious to the fact that 47 carried out the murders. The trio kidnapped Arthur Edwards, Providence's intermediary known as the Constant, who revealed the names of the three Partners who control Providence: Carl Ingram, Marcus Stuyvesant, and Alexa Carlisle. Edwards, on the other hand, escaped and seized the Partners' corporate assets for himself.
47 and Grey team up to take out 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 deaths of the Partners, Edwards seizes control of Providence and dispatches mercenaries to capture Grey and Diana. Grey commits suicide in order to prevent 47 from being apprehended.
47 makes plans to meet Grey's only other trusted ally, hacker Olivia Hall, in Berlin. When 47 discovers that the ICA is following them, he kills several ICA agents sent to kill him before he and Hall decide to put an end to the ICA by exposing its crimes to the public. Hush and Imogen Royce, the overseers of the ICA data storage facility in Chongqing, China, are killed in 47, allowing Hall to steal and publish all of the ICA's operational data while erasing all records of himself and Diana. The ICA is irreversibly compromised and dismantled, effectively putting an end to 47's career as a professional assassin.
Meanwhile, Edwards tries to persuade Diana to take over as Constant and seeks her betrayal of 47 by finally revealing his murder of her parents. Diana appears to play both sides, accepting Edwards' offer while also 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 organisation once she takes control. While following her orders, 47's long-held faith in Diana is finally shaken when she poisons him in retaliation for the murder of her parents.
In a dream, a vision of Grey convinces 47 that Diana has not betrayed him, but rather assisted in bringing Edwards within his grasp. 47 awakens imprisoned on a train travelling through the Carpathian Mountains, along with Edwards. Though Edwards intends to resurrect 47 as an assassin for Providence by wiping his memory with a serum injection, 47 escapes, either kills Edwards or injects him with the serum, and flees into the wilderness. Meanwhile, Diana assumes power as Constant and purges Providence members from positions of power in major global corporations, dismantling Providence's power structure. A year later, 47 reunites with Diana, and the two resume their former roles as assassin and handler, respectively, to keep the global elites in check.
If 47 injects himself with the serum while confronting Edwards, he passes out and later awakens in a padded room, greeted by Edwards' voice saying, "Get up. My friend, get up. It's the start of a new day, and you've got things to do "—similar to the beginning of Hitman: Codename 47.
Development
The game was revealed on June 11, 2020, at the PlayStation 5 reveal event. [19] On the same day, the game's first location, Dubai, was revealed. [20] According to the developers, the game will be "much more mature, serious, and darker" than the previous instalments in the trilogy. It was also confirmed that fully animated cutscenes, similar to those seen in the original Hitman, would return after Hitman 2 used still images for its cutscenes. [21] On 14 July 2020, the Stadia version titled Hitman: World of Assassination was announced, which also serves as a hub to play Hitman and Hitman 2 on the platform. [22] [1] Formalized paraphrase This version introduced Stadia's 'State Share' feature, which allows 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] During a Nintendo Direct on October 28, 2020, the game was announced to be coming to the Nintendo Switch via cloud streaming technology. [24] [25] This is the first Hitman game to be released for a Nintendo platform in nearly 18 years; the previous game was a port of Hitman 2: Silent Assassin for the GameCube in 2003. During a PlayStation State of Play livestream on August 6, 2020, a VR mode releasing exclusively for PlayStation VR was announced. [26] [27]
Dartmoor, the second location, was revealed on August 26, 2020, with IO Interactive also confirming a 12-month exclusivity period for the PC version with the Epic Games Store, explaining that "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 November 24, 2020[30], and the remaining three locations were revealed on January 11, 2021. [31] The first cinematic was released on December 15, 2020. [32]
IO Interactive's first attempt to depict Argentina in the Hitman franchise was the Mendoza location. The company went to great lengths to create a fictitious location with authentic-looking terrain and vegetation, to show the winemaking process, and to accurately depict aspects of Argentine culture such as the tango and mate drinking. [33] The decision to reuse existing non-player character (NPC) dialogue recorded with Colombian and Mexican accents rather than record new NPC dialogue with authentic Argentine accents was a major compromise. According to IO Interactive, this was due to time and financial constraints, as well as the added complication of the COVID-19 pandemic. The company decided to concentrate on finding suitable voice talent for the Chongqing location. [33] IO Interactive's first attempt to depict Argentina in the Hitman franchise was the Mendoza location. The company went to great lengths to create a fictitious location with authentic-looking terrain and vegetation, to show the winemaking process, and to accurately depict aspects of Argentine culture such as the tango and mate drinking. [33] The decision to reuse existing non-player character (NPC) dialogue recorded with Colombian and Mexican accents rather than record new NPC dialogue with authentic Argentine accents was a major compromise. According to IO Interactive, this was due to time and financial constraints, as well as the added complication of the COVID-19 pandemic. The company decided to concentrate on finding suitable voice talent for the Chongqing location. [33]
To reduce the file size of Hitman 3, IO Interactive decided to heavily use lossless LZ4 compression. Because of engine improvements, nearly everything in the game could now be run through this compression algorithm. With Hitman 3, the way content from previous titles is imported has also changed, resulting in less duplicate data when compared to Hitman, where each episode required all of the code and assets to work independently. As a result, Hitman 3 has a file size of around 60-70 GB, which includes all of the maps and content from both Hitman 2 and Hitman. In comparison, the full size of Hitman 2 with all of the Hitman maps is nearly 150 GB. [34]
IO Interactive announced on 15 January 2021 that, unlike console players, PC players would have to pay for an access pass to unlock Hitman 2 locations in Hitman 3,[37] despite announcing in August 2020 that players would unlock them in Hitman 3 for free. [38] Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney later responded to the announcement with: "Sorry for the inconvenience; the team is investigating this with IO. It is never Epic's intention to create a situation in which someone who owns a game on Steam must purchase it again on Epic Games Store in order to reap the full benefits of it." [39] Two days later, IO Interactive announced that they were working on a solution that would allow Steam users to import locations to the Epic Games Store. They promised that players would not have to repurchase the games;[40] however, they admitted that there would be a delay and that players would be unable to import Hitman 2 locations into Hitman 3 for a few weeks. [41] The location transfer system went live a month later, on February 18, 2021. [42]
Release
On August 27, 2020, digital-only pre-orders for the game were made available to PlayStation, PC, and Xbox players. As a pre-order bonus, a 'Trinity Pack' of 9 items (3 suits, 3 pistols, and 3 briefcases in Red, White, and Black variants) was available. It was also announced that the game would be released in a Deluxe Edition, which would include Deluxe Escalations, in-game items and suits, as well as digital soundtracks for the trilogy and a digital book with information about targets and locations from the trilogy. [43] Stadia pre-orders will be available on September 8, 2020. [44] Limited Run Games announced on October 15, 2020, that physical copies of an exclusive variant of the Deluxe Edition containing all digital content and an exclusive physical passport would be released. [45] Standard retail physical copies for both editions of the game were announced on October 30, 2020, through traditional brick and mortar retail stores. [46]
The game was self-published by IO Interactive and was released on January 20, 2021. It was released for Windows, 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] Square Enix distributed the physical version in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Australasia. [49]
Following its release, the game was plagued by server-based issues, with users unable to transfer over their Hitman 2 progress, unable to use their Access Pass levels, and unable to access the servers at all, leaving them unable to progress in the game. [50] [51]
A week after the release of Hitman 3, IO's studio head Hakan Abrak stated that they had recouped their development costs for the game, which "puts us in a really good place and allows us to confidently move forward with our ambitious plans for future projects," the first of which would be a James Bond game.
Year 2 update
IO Interactive announced the Year 2 update for Hitman 3 on November 22, 2021, which includes ray tracing for PC, PCVR support, and a permanent new game mode called 'Elusive Target Arcade.' [65] [66] IO Interactive fully revealed the Year 2 update and announced the Hitman Trilogy, a collection of the three games in the World of Assassination trilogy, on January 13, 2022. Both Hitman 3 and Hitman Trilogy have been confirmed for release on Steam and Xbox Game Pass/PC Game Pass on January 20, 2022. The full Year 2 update reveal included additional information about the Elusive Target Arcade as well as the announcement of a new 'Freelancer' game mode, which will be available in Spring 2022 and will include a customisable safehouse, mission hub, and various items and NPCs. A new map codenamed 'Rocky' has been advertised and is scheduled to be released later in 2022. [67][68]
Hitman Trilogy was released on January 20, 2022, and included Hitman 3 as well as access passes for importing levels from the first two games into Hitman 3. The game was also made available on the Microsoft Store for Windows 10 and Windows 11, with full cross-progression support with the Xbox version. [18] On the same day, the Elusive Target Arcade was released.
Hitman 3 was also released on Steam on January 20th, with PCVR support the following day. Anyone who purchased the game on Steam within the first 30 days received the Trinity pack pre-order bonus for free. [18] When the Steam version was released, it was met with a wave of negative reviews, with players complaining that the price was the same as when the game was released on the Epic Games Store a year earlier. [69] There were also complaints that the pricing system was difficult to understand due to the numerous different versions of the game available. [70] In response, IO Interactive stated in a statement that the "HITMAN 3 launch on Steam did not go as planned" and offered a free upgrade to the Deluxe Edition of the game to all players who had already purchased the game or who purchased it through February 19th. Instead, players who already owned or purchased the Deluxe Edition or Hitman Trilogy would receive the Seven Deadly Sins DLC for free. [71]
Reception
Rack Nerve rated the game 9/10, writing, "Rich, rewarding, and highly replayable, Hitman 3 is a superb instalment of IO's eccentric but much-loved stealth series." The game received 4.5/5 stars from GamesRadar+, who praised the "fun and imaginative murders, beautiful levels to explore, [and] incredible world-building" and called it a "slick and entertaining conclusion to the trilogy." "What's good about Hitman—its level design and the creativity, experimentation, and exploration it allows—is great in Hitman 3," GameSpot wrote. The level design was praised by PC Gamer, who stated that "[the] impeccable design is what makes Hitman 3 not just a great stealth game, but a near endlessly replayable one." [85]
The level design in the game was praised by critics. The optional murder mystery elements on the Dartmoor map were particularly praised, drawing comparisons to the film Knives Out. [86] [87][88] [89] Berlin was described by GameSpot as a "standout level that encapsulates everything fantastic about the recent trilogy into a layered and lethal sandbox of creative carnage." [90] The Mendoza level was praised for its accurate depiction of Argentina. [33] [91] However, the final level, set on a train in the Carpathian Mountains, was panned 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 maps from all three games in one was praised, but the process was described as "complicated." [95] [96]
Some reviewers[97] criticized the removal of Ghost Mode and the cooperative Sniper Assassin mode from Hitman 2, stating that it meant "the game itself is scaled down somewhat as an overall package." [89]
The VR mode was met with mixed reactions. The PlayStation VR version was lauded for its immersion, impressive visuals for a PSVR title, and support for all of the trilogy's maps. It was criticized, however, for the visual downgrades required to run on PSVR versus the regular game, such as a lack of reflections and a low draw distance. The control scheme, which combines a DualShock 4 controller and motion controls, received mixed reviews as well. [98] [99] [100] The PC VR version, which was released in 2022, was heavily criticized for lacking full motion controls and failing to improve on the flaws of the PlayStation version. [101] [102]
Sales
On January 24, 2021, it was reported that Hitman 3 had taken the number one spot in the UK game boxed charts, with launch sales up 17 percent over Hitman 2. [103] [104]
IO Interactive CEO Hakan Abrak stated in April 2021 that Hitman 3 had performed "300% better commercially" than its predecessor Hitman 2.
On November 22, 2021, it was revealed that Hitman 3 was the franchise's most successful game, with the entire World of Assassination trilogy reaching 50 million players.
Awards and accolades
Hitman 3 was named "PC Game of the Year" at the Golden Joystick Awards 2021[107], as well as "Best Stealth" by PC Gamer. [85] Several publications, including Push Square, named it one of the best video games of the year. Electronic Gaming Monthly, [108] [109] Ars Technica, [110] Time, [111] The Guardian [112] IGN, [113] Techradar, [114] GamesRadar, and [115] The Washington Post [116] Kotaku, [117] GameSpot, and [118] Polygon. [119]
The game was nominated for "Best VR/AR Game" at The Game Awards 2021 for its PlayStation VR mode[120], and readers of PlayStation Blog voted it the best PS VR game of 2021.
At the NME Awards 2022, IO Interactive was nominated for "Best Game Development Studio."
A Sound Effect podcast episode titled "How Hitman 3's powerful sound was made with the audio team at IO Interactive" featuring Hitman 3 developers has been nominated for "Best Game Audio Presentation Podcast or Broadcast" at the upcoming 2022 Game Audio Network Guild Awards.
| Year | Award | Category | Result | Ref |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Golden Joystick Awards | Most Wanted Game | Nominated | [124] |
| 2021 | Golden Joystick Awards | PC Game of the Year | Won | [107][125] |
| Best Visual Design | Nominated | |||
| Ultimate Game of the Year | Nominated | |||
| The Game Awards 2021 | Best VR/AR Game | Nominated | [120] | |
| 2022 | 18th British Academy Games Awards | Technical Achievement | Nominated | [126] |
| NME Awards 2022 | Game of the Year | Nominated | [122] | |
| NAVGTR Awards | Outstanding Control Design, 3D | Nominated | [127] | |
| Outstanding Game, Franchise Adventure | Won | |||
| Outstanding Sound Mixing in Virtual Reality | Nominated | |||
| Outstanding Use of Sound, Franchise | Nominated | |||
| 22nd Game Developers Choice Awards | Best Technology | Nominated | [128] | |
| Spilprisen 2022 | Game of the Year | Won | [129][130] | |
| Best Visuals | Won | |||
| Best Audio | Nominated | |||
| Best Game Design | Won | |||
| Best Narrative | Nominated | |||
| Nordic Game Awards 2022 | Nordic Game of the Year | Pending | [131] | |
| Best Game Design | Pending | |||
| Best Technology | Pending | |||
| Best Audio | Pending |
Future
IO Interactive has confirmed in multiple interviews 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 stated that for the time being, stepping away from the Hitman franchise and closing the door on this chapter of Agent 47's story feels appropriate. [134] IO Interactive has also confirmed that when they return to the Hitman series in the future, they will most likely do a new take on the gaming formula. [135]
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