Dribbleondo's Hitman 3 Wishlist for Marchouette...er...I mean...Arti!

[Dribbleondo]

For clarity, this was edited on 07/12/2025 to reflect current issues, IO Staff changes, and grammar (not that much has changed).

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Hello there @IOI_Artjoms! Let me take this time to suggest what I consider the four most important things I would like to see in terms of future content and changes for Hitman III. From most to least important:

1. Offline Mode Revamp

This is something the game desperately needs. The offline functionality for Hitman: WOA is in a dire need of a functionality upgrade and facelift. It has not been touched since November 21st, 2016 effectively (where online unlocks transferred to the offline mode), and that was more than nine years ago now. That is almost an entire decade with no offline scoring, no online → offline mission progression, no sniper assassin missions, no escalations, no way to play the game offline in the same vein as in the online mode without using Peacock or other mods, and even that is PC only. More and more people and governments (the Stop Killing Games movement in particular) are looking into online-only games and their ramifications for players, so this needs nipping in the bud sooner rather than later I feel.

I really hope something can be done to rectify this, because frankly, mods should not be used as an alternative for something that the developers can do themselves, and probably should’ve done so five years ago.

2. Permanent Elusive Targets and Deprecating Limited Time Content

Since the start of Hitman 3, The game has actually done a fairly good job at keeping the limited timed content at bay (only the Holiday Hoarders mission was initially missing, and the Berlin Egg Hunt is the only limited time content I can recall). The Elusive Target Suits for Hitman 3’s locations are all gained via mastery, and that should be applied to the levels from 2016 and 2 as well.

The gimmick of Elusive Targets being only around for 15 days or so has gotten very stale, and the previous years’ Elusive Target Galore showed that pretty well. Sentiments from everyone I know ranged from “I don’t care anymore about ET’s” to “This is what we could have all year long!” It is a tired old mechanic, and even Elusive Target Arcade has gotten a better reception, and the recent DLC’s for The Disruptor and The Undying give you the mission, without restrictions in the first level and second levels respectively.

I get that a big part of being a Live Service game is having content that needs to attract attention, but FOMO like this is generally pretty bad to do nowadays, and is increasingly frowned upon. It’s not that uncommon for even Twitch-exclusive content to be released later on (See: Hogwarts Legacy), and having Year-based distinctions for ET’s doesn’t really help much. Players being locked out for 12 hours feels like punishment enough in my opinion (one of the few largely agreeable things about ETA when that first released, interestingly).

I have more thoughts in this video that I released a few months back (this also briefly covers others things I’ve mentioned here):

Make Elusive Targets Permanent. (ᵖˡᵉᵃˢᵉ)

3. Freelancer Improvements and Balance Adjustments

Freelancer is…not in a good state right now. Restarting a run as a newbie player feels too punishing as Freelancer Tools are taken away from your safehouse, regardless of if you use them on missions, the Merces Economy is out of whack and does not scale with player skill too well, the Freelancer Mastery track is unnecessarily grindy past Level 55, and Hardcore mode is too punishing and off-putting, with such a nasty difficulty spike. I believe many of these issues need addressing, and while Roguelikes are meant to be hard and punish the player for failing, this whole mode has demotivated me and several others specifically because of the above problems.

I don’t play Freelancer to play Freelancer anymore, I use the safehouse in Freelancer to check modded suits.

I go into more depth in this video:

Hitman 3 - The Four Flaws of Freelancer

4. Cross-Saving and Cross-platform progression and Leaderboards

One of the most baffling decisions I’ve ever seen with this game is that it uses EOS (Epic Online Services), but doesn’t actually leverage much of the functionality the service offers.

Cross-platform saving isn’t too common I’ll be fair, but cross-progression between stores and consoles is absolutely possible, especially considering IO have set up an IOI account system for this specific purpose, but, unless you’re on Microsoft’s ecosystem, you cannot use it. It reeks of platform favouritism, something which was also true of when Stadia shutdown and saves were able to be transferred to any store, which was previously deemed impossible when it came to Epic → Steam functionality. It’s a maddening double-standard that needs to be addressed.

Leaderboards not being cross-platform also confuses me, as Art of Rally (a significantly smaller indie game, mind you) is very capable of doing this, and, near as I can tell, works across Mobile devices, Windows, MacOS and Linux (and both Steam and Epic times are shown), and it doesn’t need to be Always online to do it either, the games’ own servers handle the interoperability. It is weird, and honestly ludicrous, that this game made by a much bigger studio does not have this functionality.

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So, these are my requests and items from my own personal wishlist. I may update this in the future if I want to clarify something or if I find a better way to explain something. Thank you for reading this, Arti. Let’s make this game the best it can be!

Regards -
Dribbleondo.

[jan342]

The topics above would surely be welcome improvements to the game. But in my opinion, there is one even more important issue, that desperately needs attention:
Serious bugs in the game.

Before the devs start to implement new functionality, I think it is paramount, that the already existing game elements work as intended, which unfortunately is not always the case.

In that regard I’m not necessarily thinking about all the smaller issues, that we’ve reported to IOI directly or collected here in the forum. I’m thinking specifically about the more serious bugs that the game has.

Off the top of my head, this includes:

• Missing briefing videos for the Paris map
• “Arrange a meeting” prestige objective in Freelancer not working reliably
• Some Xbox players not being able to pick up the fuse cell in the Freelancer safehouse

[Heisenberg]

And in connection with these bugs, certain actions taken on certain levels not functioning as they should, such as two different methods of taking out Sierra in Miami that previously registered as SA no longer doing so, and the conversation with Farah on Ambrose Island no longer triggering.

[Dribbleondo]

I didn’t really include bugfixes here primarily because I find it much easier to argue cases for features the game should have, rather than bugs that should be fixed. Bugfixing is a pretty standard affair for all games, and should be a priority regardless of what new features they implement.

@jan342

Missing briefing videos for the Paris map

That is likely going to be fixed next patch, if not earlier. There’s a reason Glacier Community Patch doesn’t have a fix for it yet and that’s simply because there’s not much point. Same logic for the turning into .

[Marchouette]

Thanks for pointing me to bugs here as well! I’ll do my best to check the most pressing issues reported to see if the development team is aware of them and if I can share anything about it.

[Charlie_Farmer]

One of the things I’ll always ask for is a updated Contracts mode.

*Marking items to retrieve or specifically use in the mission

*Forcing players to achire to complications that are exclusive to escalations or Elusive Target Arcade such as no agility, hidden targets (same as an ET, not shown in Instinct) or even required starting locations

*Adding custom Intel pieces to NPCs we mark (not sure how you’d make that work with Story mission target’s marked as they still have there mission intel)

*Making the mission briefings have more characters, 500 (or even less on Switch) is not enough most of the time

*Having the ability to make contracts on every single map. This includes Seven Deadly Sins, ETs, Sarajevo Six, Story missions, The Vector, The Sniper Assassin maps, you get the picture (obviously a permanent ET system would be good to have in place already in the game or everyone would just make the ET’s in contract mode!)

*Having the ability to mark targets with a sniper from long range. Really small one here but man when making a contract I always forget to make someone across the map and it’s a pain to travel all the way to them, just to mark the NPC and go back to where i was!

After playing around with contract mode for nearly 5 yeare now, I’ve found out how limited the mode actually is, it’s great don’t get me wrong but it would be brilliant to finally be free and more open in it as a final year of support update.

Many people want an update to contracts mode and it’s one that i can’t imagine would take a super duper long time to complete given how most of the features here are already in the game just sitting there in other modes.

[IOI_Artjoms]

Now THAT is a perfect “first coffee” article. Like a good newspaper. Thank you for taking the time and passion writing this! And did you make the section header images yourself? @Dribbleondo

I will fetch my cup and read it. Thanks.

[BlossomFox]

They did make the art! @Dribbleondo is a very talented artist, modder, and video maker and makes their own webcomic as well! Phantasy Annie - Archive,

[Dribbleondo]

Thank you for taking the time and passion writing this!

I’m glad you enjoyed reading it!

And did you make the section header images yourself?

I did indeed! I have a particular scratchy painter-ey style =P I also made the videos too, which are also worth the watch to get some more context.