By then, IO had begun preproduction on a new Hitman title, which ended up being a hard course correction from Absolution. Less than seven months after Absolution’s release, Square Enix laid off nearly half of the studio’s staff and canceled all its non-Hitman projects. Sales were strong but fell short of the expectations from Square Enix, which was then the parent company of IO Interactive.
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Players also felt that the focus on a cinematic presentation for the game’s dull, fairly rote plot was misguided as Eurogamer’s review noted, the story was “for the first time in the series pretty much impossible to ignore.” (It didn’t help that Absolution was the first entry in the franchise since 2006’s Hitman: Blood Money, which many people still consider to be the best Hitman game.) But the game received criticism for taking the franchise in a more linear direction: Each level played out as a series of smaller sandboxes rather than the large environments of previous Hitman titles. Absolution introduced some key elements that became bedrock features of the later trilogy, such as 47’s Instinct vision. Hitman has been around for more than two decades now, and the nadir of the franchise was arguably the interim between the recent World of Assassination trilogy and its immediate predecessor, Hitman: Absolution, which launched in late 2012.
But it’s clear from talking to IO that the studio believes that putting some limitations on player freedom was the right call.Īgent 47 lies in wait in 2012’s Hitman: Absolution. That major decision had ripple effects throughout the development of Hitman 3, including the linear design of the game’s final mission, which has proved controversial. After lengthy deliberations, IO’s designers held firm: They cared too much about their ending for Agent 47’s story to allow that to happen. If you’ve trained players over the course of two games that they don’t need to pay attention to the story, it’s difficult to convince them that they shouldn’t also skip over it this time around. “And we realized when we were developing this story - the conclusion of the trilogy, closure - that we cared a lot about this story, and we wanted players to care.” “For the previous two games, we made it really easy for some players to not care about what was happening in the overarching story,” said Forest Swartout Large, executive producer of Hitman 3, in a video interview with Polygon last month.
In concluding the trilogy, though, Hitman developer IO Interactive not only wanted to lean more into the story - it wanted to delve into the character of Agent 47, the bald man with a barcode who had mostly been a cipher just following commands. These sandbox playgrounds afforded players all the freedom in the world to figure out assassination strategies, and to ignore the threadbare story that linked the levels together.
The real stars of the show were the locations: massive levels that felt like living, breathing environments. For the first two entries in the trilogy, 2016’s Hitman and 2018’s Hitman 2, series protagonist Agent 47 didn’t have top billing. Early in the production of Hitman 3, the developers of the game found themselves in a bind - a conundrum of their own making.