With Season of Sloth, Hitman 3 finally got a new challenge. The challenge is pretty rubbish, but the reward isn’t. For completing 40 Featured Contracts you get something called the Ducky Gun, which is a Duck variant of Agent 47’s silenced pistols. It’s brilliant, and we all love it, but that doesn’t negate from the bad challenge. Io Interactive implemented the challenge this season because there were only 40 Featured Contracts in the game from this season. Otherwise, there’d be no point. Clearly, the developer knows that the game is lacking in this area, and I wonder why it doesn’t just leave the rest of the content alone and purely focus on adding more challenges.
Challenges are the real reason that players stick around in Hitman 3. Sure, the new content is great, but with challenges, we can play missions over and over again to complete random events that are in every location. Creating new challenges based on items and NPCs wouldn’t be hard to come up with. It’s already in the game. All Io Interactive has to do is program the challenge and see what players do with it. I can almost certainly guarantee that they’ll complete them.
The thing about challenges is that they’re more enjoyable than following a few Contracts that have been made by other payers. Some players are extremely gifted, able to create some truly mind-bending Contracts that take a lot of work to get through in silent assassin, sniper assassin, or any rank to be honest. Io Interactive has started to pull back on the new playable content, so I suggest that it looks at what players want and focuses its efforts there. The Seasons of Sin are fun, but adding more depth to Hitman 3 would be so much better.
A series of challenges focusing on random NPCs, items, and combinations of the two could award a single fabulous suit. That’s all players want. We’re greedy for more cosmetics, but we’re also very happy to earn them through the maddest means possible in the game. My hope is that by the end of the Seasons of Sin collection, Io Interactive has wisened up to the fact that it can keep players engaged by adding new challenges every month, giving us a hitman game that is finally truly fulfilling.
