Hitman 3

GAME DETAILS

Hitman 3

Experiment and have fun in the ultimate playground as Agent 47 to become the master assassin. Travel around the globe to exotic locations and eliminate your targets with everything from a katana or a sniper rifle to an exploding golf ball or some expired spaghetti sauce.

The HITMAN – Game of The Year Edition includes:

– All missions & locations from the award-winning first season of HITMAN
– “Patient Zero” Bonus campaign
– 3 new Themed Escalation Contracts
– 3 new Outfits
– 3 new Weapons

MATURE CONTENT DESCRIPTION

The developers describe the content like this:

This Game may contain content not appropriate for all ages, or may not be appropriate for viewing at work: Frequent Violence or Gore, General Mature Content

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 an epilogue set in the Carpathian Mountains, Romania. Owners of Hitman or Hitman 2 are able to import maps, levels and their progress into Hitman 3.

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.

The game features PlayStation VR compatibility on the PlayStation 4 version, with support for PlayStation 5 via backwards compatibility. The VR functionality also retroactively applies to levels imported from the previous two entries.^[8] Unlike Hitman 2, there are no multiplayer modes, with Sniper Assassin being purely single player, and Ghost Mode being removed entirely. However, Hitman 3 kept Contracts Mode, where a player can select up to five targets across the 24 maps in the series with rules and complications, this mode gives the player extra possibilities after the main missions.

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: an alliance of corporate executives and industrialists collectively wielding vast global political, military, and economic influence. While 47 and Grey seek revenge on Providence for creating and exploiting them both as cloned assassins from birth, Diana is motivated by Providence’s assassination of her parents, unaware that 47 carried out the killing under Providence’s control. The trio captured Arthur Edwards, Providence’s intermediary referred to as the Constant, who identified the three Partners leading Providence: Carl Ingram, Marcus Stuyvesant, and Alexa Carlisle. Edwards later escaped, however, and promptly seized the Partners’ corporate assets for himself.

Working together, 47 and Grey eliminate Ingram and Stuyvesant in Dubai during the inauguration of the Scepter (a fictitious representation of the Burj Khalifa), and follow Carlisle to her ancestral manor in Dartmoor to assassinate her. Following the Partners’ deaths, Edwards assumes full 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 staves off the pursuit by infiltrating a nearby nightclub run by an outlaw motorcycle club, and eliminating several plainclothes ICA agents. Unable to locate Edwards and still on the run, 47 and Hall decide to conclusively stop the ICA by exposing it to the public. 47 eliminates 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 47 and Diana. The ICA is irrevocably compromised and forced to shut down, 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 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 and confronts him with the murder of her parents.

In a nightmare, 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 nearby forest. Meanwhile, Diana assumes power as Constant and forces Providence’s members to resign their leadership positions at major global corporations, destroying Providence’s power structure. One 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 power of global elites in check.

The game was announced on 11 June 2020 at the PlayStation 5 reveal event. Developers have said that the game will be “a lot more mature, serious and darker” than previous installments in the trilogy. IO Interactive self-published the game when it released on 20 January 2021 for Windows via Epic Games Store, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and streaming service Stadia. The physical version was distributed by Square Enix in Europe, Middle East, Africa and Australasia. Notably, it was also made available on Nintendo Switch in the form of a cloud based game. This marks the first time a Hitman game was 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.

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.^[15] 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.

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, even after announcing in August 2020 that players would unlock them in Hitman 3 at no additional cost. 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.” 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; however, they admitted there would be a delay and players could not import Hitman 2 locations into Hitman 3 for a few weeks.^[20] The location transfer system was implemented a month later on February 18, 2021