They should have saved The Fixer ET for a “Season of the Fixing”, where the main roadmap item was patching all the bugs.
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Error 404: Season not found.
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Be careful what you wish for. Remember when they “fixed” the broken Perfect Run Prestige objective in Freelancer by simply removing it from the game?
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Or when they “fixed” the Arrange a Meeting Prestige objective? Its still broken af.
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While I agree with the sentiment behind this comment, bear in mind, many of these fixes are actually quite minute, and not actually that large as fixes go. The most impactful bugfix is perhaps the ghost pickup fix for bombs (which caused the explosive phone and the goldbrick to have any NPC enter a pickup item state infinitely).
the swapping safehouse paintings
That’s not a big bug. A Bug bear, sure, but I wouldn’t consider this a big fix in any sense of the word.
the cake in Paris blocking an intel to unlock the freelancer safe
This was officially fixed the following patch.
and the auto hostile cave after killing Rico Delgado with the sub.
This bug was so inconsistent to test that it was actually fairly hard finding out what caused this. I wouldn’t even consider this a large-scale bug either. Some of us hadn’t ever encountered it in normal gameplay.
- That is not unusual. Any game that has lots of moving parts that is frequently updated is going to be broken at some point by a large-scale issue, or even gather long-lasting issues at some point. That’s the nature of the business. Some issues just don’t have enough information to provide a fix, while a fix for one thing, would break something else. Using CP2077 as a comparison is misleading, as that was brkewn because of crunch-time, and had waaaay more game-breaking issues (to the point of breaking on last-gen consoles) and was not in any finished state by any reasonable persons’ metric. We don’t need to exaggerate for comparison’s sake, it dilutes the argument. Hitman 3 is a finished product, and still feels like that. CP2077 released unfinished, and now has to shake that image.
- You probably would care if there was no content in May/ June. In fact, it’d probably help fuel arguments that IO is “out of ideas”.
The problem IO has is that what it’s currently doing isn’t satisfying for either party. The fans who want content are getting reskins and questionable item unlocks (one of which, the Durian, only contributes to the Emetic Meta’s issues), and the others side who want fixes have historically been left out in the cold. This patch has 11 fixes, which is so low that it’s farcical.
The company needs to find a balance between releasing bug fixes and releasing content to satisfy both camps as best they can. I wouldn’t be against more frequent patches (I.E, a patch every three weeks or so which just adds game fixes), but I will admit that may be more involved for the company to start doing. But that’s their problem to solve.
Also, to @CombatGlue in response to what @Blossomfox has shown us, we feel unheard because you and the rest of the PR team barely comment, or even contribute to discussion in any meaningful fashion. There has been no public acknowledgement of the softlock issue, and it’s been almost a week now. That is absurd.
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I think a lot of the issues we’ve had in the last year could have easily been avoided with just a little bit more testing before releasing a patch. It’s baffling to me how these things that are easy to spot through playing the game normally for more than just a few minutes make it into a live release. Stuff like the Flamingo on Miami not having a body (and many other NPCs in previous patches as well). The quality control for the patches really feels like we’re playing an Early Access game, and not a fully released one. I expect more from an old game like this.
When adding a couple of new low effort reskin items to the item list can fundamentally break an important part of a popular game mode, then something is fundamentally broken with their internal development, testing and release process.
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Alternatively they could let players opt into a preview or open/closed beta, I think a lot of people here would be willing to test out a new version of the game if it meant better quality overall. A lot of indie games have this kind of setup, and lets be honest IO interactive is pretty much an indie game studio right now.
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The only thing with doing that though - if they’re not already fixing bugs that have been reported within the last year (or beyond), why would they suddenly start fixing bugs reported to them in an advance build of the game? All it would do is speedup the process of them getting put into a backlog of issues that seemingly no one looks at.
Unless the bug has a high impact, the last few years have shown that IO don’t seem to care about it. The sole exception seems to be if someone reports a typo in the game somewhere. Somehow that gets top priority. 
Also, “fun” fact: The March 2024 patch had more fixes noted in the patch notes than the last four patches combined have had.
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And they still didn’t fix many ongoing issues that have been reported for years.
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That is a very good point, but I would hope that something as serious as soft-locking freelancer would be blocking enough to not push the release to all players.
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Hello XXXXX,
I’m Adrian from the HITMAN Support team.
Thank you for taking the time to reach out and bring this to our attention. I have now flagged this to our team so they have visibility on your report.
In the meantime, I hope you’re having an otherwise good time in the World of Assassination!
All the best,
Adrian
World of Assassination Player Support
is this a joke? meanwhile the ancestral pistol is still bugged
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Ancestral Pistol is bugged over here on Xbox, too…
(And invisible boxes also appeared on Hokkaido in the morgue after the last patch??)
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I think I did tag that one as a “big fix” in the mod description. Of course, that’s just my opinion :]
It probably wouldn’t be so bad if it hadn’t been in the game since Freelancer launched, and in the grand scheme of things is very easily fixed. I believe VH just gave the bedroom painting a new ID.
Now this one, 100% is a weird one. It happened nearly every time for me, but I think even the person who fixed it in the end (was that you?) had trouble getting it to happen at all. Super inconsistent, super weird!
It could just be my memory, but I don’t remember it being quite this egregious in the past. It feels like every patch introduces some new, very visible major bug these days. And this latest one, if you’re unlucky, fully prevents you from playing Freelancer at all.
Again, it could just be me forgetting… or maybe just my outlook on things in general these days 
Just to make 100% sure it’s clear, btw, I’m not the one making the fix. I won’t say who is unless they do first, because I don’t want to put them under a magnifying glass… or however it goes :p
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IO have definitely gotten sloppier over the past year with QA. Not just you.
And I don’t think I made the submarine fix. I did try and replicate the problem, multiple times, but couldn’t.
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Yeah, I checked and it looks like it was Cybore :]
(PR #110)
I know for sure that Ancestral Pistol and Splitter SMG bug is impacting Xbox players, but not sure yet if both are impacting PS5? I know Samir has acknowledged there is a fix coming, however, we don’t have the timeframe for it. I just hope we aren’t waiting weeks for it to be fixed? 
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tbf they should’ve gone all the way with the intentional typos if they wanted to make it sound like twitch chat
“who wud not die 4 this bootiful, purple baller, with sleek, black silence 2 make u the envy of any assassin?”
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It is done! PC players who use mods can update the Unofficial Community Patch through SMF. If you don’t have it yet, you can download it here
Thanks to Anthony Fuller for fixing this :]
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Works like a dream, was able to prestige again.
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