HITMAN 3 – Year 2: The Road Ahead
It’s been a hot minute since we started HITMAN 3 – Year 2 and we’ve just reached the 3-month mark. A great time for us to give a deeper update on what’s coming up in the rest of the year.
If you’ve just joined the World of Assassination, or need a recap on what Year 2 is all about, you can catch up on the plans we shared earlier this year (link to Y2 reveal blog post). Today, we want to give an update on these exciting updates and when you can expect them to arrive in the game.
Freelancer
Let’s start with the most relevant piece of news first. We’re moving the release date to make the mode all it can be. Here’s more detail.
We see HITMAN 3: Freelancer as the next evolution of Hitman and an entirely new way to engage with the world and characters that we’ve built into the World of Assassination over the last 7 years. We’ve concluded the main campaign with HITMAN 3, but the world has so much more to offer and we didn’t feel as though we’d quite achieved everything we wanted to with Agent 47 in this trilogy.
In short, this mode is quite expansive and involving. It’s built for players that want to dive deeper into what a Hitman game can be and for that reason, we’ve decided to give it more time.
The truth is that it’s a luxurious decision for us to make. HITMAN 3 has been a success and with that, we’re able to give our team that extra time to tighten the bolts and make sure that the mode is as close to our ambitions as possible. We want it to land well and be a platform for Hitman players to enjoy this game world for a long period of time.
In fact, we’ve had several rounds of internal testing, and we’ve even shared playable builds with some of our trusted and core community members to give feedback and share insights after lengthy playtests. This was all done on their own machines and in their own homes to truly replicate what it will be like when we launch the mode.
The feedback from the playtests was largely positive and the mode is in very good shape. As we’ve said, we’re taking some extra time to tighten the mode up and improve several elements that we think will greatly improve the gameplay experience. Whilst we work on those improvements, we’re also preparing to dive deeper into the mode and share more of what you can expect.
With all of that in mind, we’re now aiming to release the Freelancer game mode to HITMAN 3 in the second half of 2022. We think it will be worth the wait.
Spring Content
With the change to the release of the Freelancer game mode from Spring to second half of 2022, we’ve needed to adjust some of our plans for the next few months. It’s a relatively complex and fluid situation where we’ve been moving things around behind the scenes, but we’ve landed in a good place.
In our original plans, we had a patch scheduled for April that would have included fresh new content for that month and throughout May. Now, we’ll be introducing that content with our next patch, planned for May 24th.
As you can see above, the biggest change will be a few more rounds of Featured Contracts than we normally release over the course of a month – although we are brewing on some exciting ideas for how to make the most of them… When we hit May 24th, it’ll be business as usual with ET Arcade unlocks and HITMAN 3 ET’s back on the menu.
We hope that sharing more insights and going more ‘in-depth’ about the choices that we’ve made along the way will keep you informed about what’s to come in HITMAN 3. We waited longer than anticipated to share these plans with you to make sure that we could share them concretely and accurately. Thank you for your patience.
Further Ahead
It's not just Freelancer that’s got a new release date. We’re actually bringing forward the release date of the ‘Rocky’ map that we first revealed in January. We’ve now got that scheduled in for a July 2022 release.
This new map will have an intriguing narrative for Hitman fans, as it takes place before the events of HITMAN 3 and fills in a few gaps from the World of Assassination storyline. We’re excited to share more details in the run-up to release, and we’re even more excited to show you another look at the location in all it’s glory right now.
This is Ambrose Island.
What’s next?
As we said above, the next milestone for HITMAN 3 will be the game patch that is scheduled to arrive on May 24th. As always, we’ll have detailed patch notes of what has been changed and improved.
We’ve tried to boil down the complexities and moving parts of our game into a comprehensible post, but you’ll be forgiven for wanting to scroll back up and makes sense of exactly what’s happening and when. To make it a bit easier for you, here’s what HITMAN 3 Year 2 looks like from here on out:
Today: May Roadmap
May 24: Patch 3.110 arrives with PC RayTracing
July: Ambrose Island map (aka Codename Rocky)
Second half of 2022: Freelancer game mode coming to HITMAN 3.