Hitman to be Released Episodically

You may have seen the news that pre-orders for HITMAN (2016) started getting cancelled a couple of days ago. At the time, Square Enix were promising that the game would still be released on 11th March and not to worry. Well, we now know exactly what happened and why they needed to cancel pre-orders. In fact, the game will start its release on the 11th March, but it will be released in a series of episodes rather than one single game. 

The release cycle begins with a Prologue Mission in Paris on 11th March, followed by the next location of Italy releasing in April and then Morocco releasing in May. From there HITMAN will deliver regular monthly content updates, including three additional locations; Thailand, the US and Japan until the season concludes in Japan later in 2016. Alongside this, there will also be weekly live events and additional planned content in between the monthly updates.

“We decided to take the full leap and publish HITMAN as a truly episodic game experience,” said Hannes Seifert, Head of Studio at Io-Interactive. “Part of that decision is for that little bit of extra time to ensure every location we release is at the quality level fitting for a HITMAN game. But the main driving reason is that this will allow us to create a living game that will expand and evolve over time and establish a foundation for the future – this is the first game in a storyline which will continue and expand with future Hitman games.”

It's not the first time that Square Enix have released a game episodically: they saw huge success in 2015 with their new IP Life Is Strange. This is the first time that a major IP such as Hitman has been given the episodic treatment. Only time will tell if this will pay off for Square, but if it means that we get to play as Agent 47 again on time, then we're all for it.