One of Square Enix’s biggest announcements at E3 this week was a new Hitman game. At the company’s press conference, Io Interactive revealed that they would be supporting the game past its release this Winter.
Most assumed they meant with paid DLC, but it turns out that the company intends to provide several free updates, and ”no DLC or microtransactions”. Sounds like Io is taking a leaf out of CD Projekt’s book.
”It is fully complete at launch but it is not finished,” said studio head Hannes Seifert in an interview with Videogamer. ”What we do is we start the journey on December 8 and what we put out there is going to be a big game. But over the course of 2016 we’ll add more locations, more missions and we’ll have things like targets that only appear for, say, 2 days. That’s something you can only do in the live world.”
If true, that’s a big step away from the traditional AAA release model. The base game will contain a big chunk of content, and then players can expect to see more locations, shorter one-shot challenges and other bits and pieces released weekly. It all sounds great, but it should be noted that Io hasn’t quite sorted out the finer details just yet.
”We haven’t really decided yet what will come out at what point in time but I can promise you that it will be a very big release on day one,” continued Seifert. ”There will be hours and hours of gameplay. You will travel the world to different locations. We start with Fashionable Paris that you’ve seen and you’ll go to the bustling market of Marrakesh and the Italian coastline and way beyond that. What we can tell people is that we will have content coming every week. There will be an event every week and people can actually engage right away.”
I’ll remain cautious until we get official confirmation as to how all this will be handled, but it certainly sounds promising. The idea of time-limited assassination contracts fits perfectly with the Hitman series.
Hitman is set for release on PC and consoles this December 8.
