This month, Io Interactive announced something awesome for Hitman 3. It announced that the game would be bringing old Elusive Targets back from Hitman 3 locations for players to have a second chance at. What it tactfully avoided saying is that anyone who had already completed the Elusive Target wouldn’t be able to do it again. When you look back through all the social media posts, you can see the developer avoiding this and wording things in a way that avoids promising it, and it’s sickening. I honestly feel cheated by this, because Io Interactive knew what it was doing when it announced Elusive Targes revisited. It was a big push to get people back to the game, and now we’ve all been let down.
I’m not complaining that I don’t get a second chance at these targets. That’s fine, I’ve done them. However, I resent being promised the chance to go back in and earn some additional XP, maybe try out some new methods, when that’s just not the case. Io Interactive should have been extremely clear on this, making it obvious that players who had already completed an Elusive Target would not have a second chance at them. While it’s not outright lying, the developer still got our hopes up and dashed them to pieces.
This brings up a potential problem for the Elusive Target Arcade in Hitman 3 Year Two as well. If this is a technical limitation, does it mean that no player can replay an Elusive Target once they’ve been completed? If that’s the case, then the Elusive Target Arcade will be a joke. No one will bother if they can’t replay missions. This is what Hitman 3i is built on, replaying over and over, experimentation, and mastery. You can’t master something if you can’t replay it, and I’d argue to the hills and back that this is what Io Interactive has gone against. I keep feeling as though I’m overreacting, but I can see other players who feel the same way, and it’s such a sour way to end the year on what has been a fantastic first year for Hitman 3 overall.