For some reason the free unlock for Hitman 1 GOTY isn’t showing up on Xbox for many folks. Triggering the install from the web works though. Here’s the link for anyone who needs it.
I finished my first playthrough of the maps, and overall I’m really happy with them. I’ll avoid anything that could be considered a major spoiler, but only one of the six was disappointing and felt like something leftover from Absolution, though I suppose it works in the overall context of the story. There’s one or two that offer quite a novel twist, that were brilliant on my first time through, but I don’t know how they’ll hold up on future playthrough when you know the potential outcomes. There’s a couple of levels are as good as anything I’ve ever experienced in Hitman (some of the setups for the hits are simply devilish!).
Be warned that unlike the previous games, some of the stories and objectives are untracked, so don’t freak out when there’s fewer stories to follow this time around. IO apparently wanted to make some of the possibilities feel more organic, which helps mix things up. Love the new Dark Souls-style persistent shortcuts you can unlock. It allows you to expedite your murderous plans without having to suffer through a repetitive areas to reach the main stage for the hit.
A huge shame the DLC won’t offer any new maps, as IO are the best level designers in the business. :(
Where did they confirm they won’t make any new maps? I didn’t know they had already announced their DLC plans.
As an aside, I did the carry over process and it worked fine. “Almost” perfect… three items were missing, but that seems to be the case for most players and they’re working on it.
In a Eurogamer feature from a few weeks back:
There’ll also be post-launch support, though unlike previous games this won’t be new areas and rather a repurposing of those being offered up in Hitman 3.
Well IOI got back from their weekend of rest and decided to fix the sever problem that was preventing thousands of players from playing their game. I have just now been able to get online for the first time.
Hmm, repurposing? I hope they’re going to be total reconversions like the H1 “Bonus Maps”, not a new target vaguely thrown in the same level like H2’s “Special Assignments”.
Alright, so I’ve played a bit now and I’d give Hitman III a score of 4 out of 5 “Huh, must be rats or something”.
I think they’ve really nailed their formula, almost to laser-like precision. The H3 levels are some of the best in the entire trilogy which they started five years ago. I think they really nailed the right size for levels: complexity is good, but more isn’t necessarily better. No more “4 targets plus some extra stuff for you to do.” The new maps mostly top out at two targets plus an extra objective and I think they all gain from it in terms of focus. It goes without saying that some of the kills are delightfully creative and original.
Then again, while it is great content, H3 has probably the least amount of content in the trilogy. H1 had 7 maps, plus 3 bonus versions. H2 had, eh… 7,5 maps, plus introduced multiplayer Ghost Mode, plus 3 Sniper Maps, single and multiplayer. H3 cuts all multiplayer and has, let’s say 5,5 maps. It has VR on PS which is apparently excellent, but I don’t really care about that. On the other hand, if you’re playing the trilogy now as one package the math doesn’t really matter. Plus, we don’t know what kind of post-release content is around the corner.
What I really don’t like is that they dropped the ball on giving the players a cool arsenal to carry over from mission to mission. It’s a gamer nerd dream of mine of having your stuff carry from game to game in a series. Imagine if you could have one big remixed old-school Mega Man where you carry boss weapons from another game? Meta Man!
So technically the dream has come true now. Sort of. As I said elsewhere, most of the unlocks from H1 and H2 are kind of pointless. The open-ended nature of the levels puts limits on what you can give the player, but even then the whole thing is disappointing. H3 is even worse in that regard… almost all the new items are reskins. They didn’t bring back the “hideout” feature most other games had where you could look at your wall of weapons. It would just make sense here where you have half a decade’s worth of guns and suits built up. They added a bolt-action rifle BUT there isn’t even an animation for operating the bolt between shots. WTF? Some new items don’t even have their perks displayed correctly despite being reskins. Now that’s just pathetic. But hey, the dream came true, right?
If it sounds like I’m being harsh on the game while giving it a good score, there’s a good reason for that. For one, I can see the quality on display despite the nerd quibbles. Plus, I have to give full points to Hitman for one thing: it’s a game that’s about what it’s about, i.e. stealth. Social stealth, which is Hitman’s own subgenre. In fact, it’s probably the last game of its kind. Unlike, say, another game about assassins that’s now a collectathon with town building, ship sailing, RPG loot, brawling…
So all in all, I really respect that they made three pure stealth games, a relatively niche genre, integrated them in a single executable, and all despite going through the company restructuring and COVID. Kudos.
H2 launched with 5.5 maps and one sniper map. The other 2 regular maps and 2 more sniper maps were DLC content.
And now that I’ve gotten into the game, I finally completed my SA playthrough of the Dubai mission, including unlocking the whole map. (It took me two sweeps through the tower to find the damn security camera recorder.) It’s really nice to be back in IOI’s little pocket worlds. I forget how well populated the levels are, with all sorts of things going on and great little details to make them believable.
Yeah, they really did try to shake up how the levels work in each mission here. It’s really well thought out. Dartmoor, Berlin, and Chongqing have all been great so far. And really visually lively.
IOI reiterates that they’re looking to do different things with old locations instead of new locations.
“We are definitely going to be doing some DLC, but we haven’t defined what that is,” Large explained. "I think for now we are not looking at new maps like the bank and the island.
“We’re more looking at using existing locations and reimagining them, twisting them. And this time around, we can use the whole trilogy. We can look back at Hitman 2016 maps, Hitman 2 maps - we have all the locations.”
Disappointing.
A little, but if they can do more stuff like The Icon, which totally changed the Sapienza level and made it into something completely different by changing the time of day and introducing a whole mess of new props, I’m all for it.
So I already had Hitman 1 and 2 but not all of the content. A few days ago I load it up and see that I’m missing for DLC. It would cost me $50 to fill out my collection. I then took a look at Epic, and saw I could get all of everything for $20 on top of Hitman 3.
Now I have it all! Only dabbled in H1 before so starting from scratch.
Anyone having issues with getting disconnected? Everytime I complete the first Prologue guided mission, it immediately disconnects on completion and doesn’t save progress. This is frustrating.
That was happening to people last week a bunch. Check the Hitman discord and reddit to see if it’s recurring or if there’s a solution. I’ve been disconnected during a level once since they rolled out the PS4 fix a week ago, and I haven’t had the disconnect-on-level-completion problem at all.
I’ve gotten disconnection notices dozens of times, but I just press “Retry” or whatever and it works.
Yeah, I get constant disconnects as well. Incredibly annoying, since the online-only is such a transparent and inconvenient anti-piracy measure. But I haven’t lost any progress. I just have to wait for the reconnection.
-Tom
What are elusive targets? And I know what escalations are, but what are deluxe escalations?
-Tom
They’re limited time targets in a mission, usually active for a couple of weeks. Once you start a mission with an elusive target, you can’t save the game and if you fail the mission, that’s it, you can’t replay it. You get one chance. It forces you to be very cautious, scout the area, figure out approaches that work.
It means they’re part of the deluxe edition, not available for us standard edition plebes. I think they have more interesting content than standard escalations (which are my favorite part of the game.) One of the new ones apparently has you dispatch every member of the Carlisle family in Dartmoor in some interesting way. Things like that.