too bad, if you break these rules, space is no more
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Can we please not derail the thread more than this?
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Sounds like Freelancer was made for core, not casual Hitman players. IOI want to please their Hitman fanbase with a polished product for the final Trilogy, that allows a platform for core players to continue to play Hitman in a never-ending fashion. It is a good sign that there was a huge update of bug fixes and that IOI Freelancer was delayed, because it means that IOI really care to end the Hitman Trilogy with a budget to tie up all the loose ends.
IOI knows that the core number of players online is small going into the third year of Hitman 3. They aren’t making much money anymore with it. It has a small budget that has to match the overall interest, but it doesn’t mean that IOI doesn’t love Hitman or want to please the existing Hitman fanbase.
IOI have tight deadlines to meet for Project 007, and other new IP, and so Hitman is low, low priority now and is not something that IOI will focus on in the future.
There is likely Hitman DNA all over Project 007. I am certain that Project 007 will be the Avenger’s / Spiderman / Name-Your-Iconic-Hollywood iconic franchise version of Hitman, that will have the Hollywood splash that Agent 47 never received.
Firaxis jumped on Marvel’s Midnight Suns for their next XCom game. Square Enix dumped a lot of franchises to concentrate on Marvel tie ins. Isomniac Games rejuvenated Spiderman. It is the thing to do now for video game companies to join up with Hollywood.
Eon Productions and Danjaq LLC (which run MGM) owned by the Wilson/Broccoli family signed a licensing agreement with IOI, with expectations of a video game platform that will reinvigorate the Bond franchise for future movies and audience engagement.
There will be a multi-million dollar marketing campaign for the launch of Project 007, with expectation and risk carried by Eon Productions and Danjaq LLC as well as IOI. IOI cannot fail Project 007 or it could be the end of IOI.
So are we at all surprised that IOI haven’t thought deeply about Hitman 3 going into a Year 3?
No.
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Hopefully, this also means that they are preparing for the game to be playable even without the servers being active, because a huge amount of the game will be lost when live service inevitably ends. Hopefully, in the future, Hitman games won’t have the requirement of being online to properly play. Hopefully, that was SE’s boneheaded decision.
I’m sorry, dude, I know what you were going for and what you meant, but that just does not sound right, at all, especially considering the habits of the 007 character. 
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If Ghost Mode revived - yes.
If no - I don’t care
Oh, well, more bugfixes expected as well
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They are not going to revive ghost mode. It’s dead and buried.
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People also said that permanent Elusive Targets will remain only in the dream, but then we got an Arcade…
We still don’t actually have permanent ETs with Arcade mode, because they’ve all be altered in some way and are only accessed in clusters.
Be that as it may, the two are not comparable, because there weren’t enough people playing Ghost mode to warrant the bill to keep it going, unlike ETA, which is part of the game that doesn’t require anything special to keep it going and so doesn’t cost anything extra.
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Well, by that logic, you’ll get a ghost mode that is only single player and the “ghost” is just an AI.
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Yeah, and that mode is discussed in this very thread.
But still
Ghost Mode was such a unique PVP that needed more love and care from IOI, I still don’t get why IOI never went F2P with at least 1 map, F2P always gets new people to play.
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What does “F2P” mean?
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Free to Play
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I think it was more that the mode felt flawed in its execution and the lack of ability to interact with the other player. It more incentivized knocking out everyone remotely near the target loudly before killing them, instead of any kind of stealth mechanics. It was t really about stealth or combat, but rather “who can get across the map fastest”.
Also the few ghost items there were didn’t heighten the competition in any way really, it still felt like you couldn’t really interact with the other player in any way. That and it lacked both the freedom and fluidity of contracts and the unique problem solving of escalations.
I have a few different ideas for PVP modes that I think would be cool modes in the future:
A kind of “NPC hunt”, where the player has to blend in and act like an NPC to avoid getting killed by The other player while completing various side objectives (think like Spy party). The objectives could be anything ranging from hacking laptops, cracking open safes, to destroying certain objectives, to even killing people and hiding their bodies. Riskier objectives would give more progression, and maybe at the end you get the parts to build a sniper rifle or access to where the other player is and kill your opponent? Hell, we already have sniper assassin maps, this is effectively that just against another player.
Or it could be a game like “the ship”, where it’s a multiplayer experience where players have to kill other players, but they don’t know who is coming to kill them. The players can’t get caught killing each other from various NPC’s and cameras, but those areas provide much more safety for hunted players. Players would have to move around the map to do certain things normally (in the ship this was fulfilled by basic needs: food, water, bathroom, entertainment, etc. and it could work much in the same way) the things needed to be done could be jobs like cleaning floors, fixing faulty electronics, working at computers, serving food and drinks, or other things. This could effectively be amazing with an integration of the disguise system. Is the person serving you your food your assassin who wants to kill you, or are they just a person doing their job/tasks for the round?
Perhaps a kind of PVP mode where you couldn’t directly kill or see each other with weapons or explosives, but instead had to set up clever accidents and traps. This would require a more fluid system of setting up accidents than we have currently (perhaps one that makes puddles and allows us to place gas canisters and tripwires around more). There’s a game called “It steals” with a mode / enemy that works like this called “the phantom”. Maybe you couldn’t directly see each other, but you knew the other player would have to go to a certain area(s) to kill NPC’s or do other objectives that you could then ambush them there. Or maybe it could be like “The Hidden” (source game).
There was way more to it than that, just look at the tournament matches of some great players: it’s quite tactical.
The ghost mine definitely made an impact when placed strategically, forcing the other player to either go the long way around, or die and lose his stuff.
The biggest problem was the following cycle:
Dont want to spend limited resources on updates/patches/fixes for the mode-> less interest from players → Dont want to spend limited resources on updates/patches/fixes for the mode-> less interest from players-> etc.
(you can pick wherever the cycle started).
That was the downfall. No patches/fixed/updates for the mode & no new maps, caused players to lose interest, and IO on the other side felt it wasnt worth it.
The mode itself was great fun however, and had a ton of potential.
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I’ve posted this before, specifically for Xbox:
Maybe people on other systems saw it differently, but on Xbox those changes killed the activity level. No patches/fixed/updates for the mode & no new maps didn’t help, agreed, but that isn’t what caused the initial downfall of Ghost Mode.
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The greatest kill I have ever had in this game as a whole, not just ghost mode, and the fact it happend in Ghost Mode makes it better.
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I’m not qualified to speak to the mode with any level of detail really, but if it had been free, it probably would have gotten a lot more popularity, I’ll agree.
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I miss ghost mode fun back in the day but i would love a full coop mode with 47 and 17
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I completely disagree with all those things you listed, and with your conclusion in the end.
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