Freelancer is great as an extra, but I don’t want it to ever replace the single-player story mode.
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I could see him remaining at the safehouse even with a new ICA up and running. Or even getting a few different safehouses around the world. Could give us a reason to finally visit Australia or Sub-Saharan Africa.
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To me, Freelancer is obviously a great addition to the Hitman gameplay loop. It feels central to the assassin-fantasy, getting paid and building an arsenal, and it’s something IO have played with in the old games, but never fully committed to.
So, I would hope and believe that for the next full game, they will take these lessons with them, and do some sort of compromise between the two where they implement key features from Freelancer into the story mode, in a way that makes sense.
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Really, all they’d have to do to achieve that is have the safehouse and award system Freelancer has, while skipping the whole killing off low-level syndicate members and just going straight for the Leaders due to having an agency network to do the research for us like the other games. Maybe now and then the identity of the target is unknown as happened a few times in WoA and Blood Money, but mostly we go straight for the high-profile targets, earn our money, buy our gear and fix up our environments to our liking. That would be the ideal setup.
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I… agree with you.
There’s a first time for everything.
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I don’t think that was ever the intention of IOI for the mode to be fair. By the time next game arrives, we’ll definitely be heading onto another awesome single player story with 47 again. As for Freelancer, that will definitely tie us over until the next big AAA Hitman game arrives, especially if IOI continue to add cosmetics/unlocks for the Safehouse etc. Freelancer is also a way to show us players where 47 ended up post Hitman III epilogue, before inevitably starts hunting high profile cases again.
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i would be genuinely shocked if that was even under consideration by io.
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You never know. They did make the rather dumb decision of destroying the ICA. Without it, or an organization like it, what does 47 have other than exactly the work he’s doing in Freelancer, other than another personal adventure a la Absolution?
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i don’t think they’re comparable in terms of the difference they make. one is a narrative decision that doesn’t really change much; the other fundamentally alters the mechanical formula of the series.
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47’s going to find a new „Totally Not ICA” to work for.
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But that mechanical formula was introduced due to the fundamental change to how the story was presented. The ICA was always the answer to everything insofar as why 47 was killing anybody, and the one time it wasn’t was Absolution, a very different game. Setting aside the whole decorating the safehouse thing, the reason 47 has to build up his arsenal is because he lost access to a lot of stuff with ICA’s downfall, and the reason the player has to be so picky and choosy about their items and mission order, and the whole identifying the suspects thing, is because there’s no ICA to just tell him who the target is. Bringing an agency in to handle the workload would eliminate the need for half of what Freelancer is all about. If IOI don’t want to remove the aspect of us doing these things to figure it all out for ourselves, there’s little change they might make away from the Freelancer model in the next game.
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i feel pretty confident in saying that, in most games, the mechanics tend to precede the narrative. the former is devised first, the latter is added later as an in-game justification.
for example, when designing a mission, i believe ive read somewhere that they start with “where would be a cool place for a hitman mission” and work from there. the narrative justification comes later. like, when coming up with the berlin mission, i doubt they were thinking about the most narratively appropriate location for the story to go, rather “let’s do a cool nightclub mission with loads of enemy agents!”
i just don’t see anything indicating they’re going to shake things up that dramatically for the next game. might they add a prep phase or summink? sure, but they’re not going to fundamentally alter the mechanical formula and handcrafted level design that has brought them their biggest success to date, and i don’t think there is any solid basis for thinking they will.
if freelancer set the world on fire, you might have a reason to believe that, but otherwise, nah.
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Well, hope you’re right on that. Freelancer is a nice tourist stop, but it’s not the destination I’d want.
bookmark it. i just don’t see them dropping handcrafted main missions and targets. that’s (probably) half the fun of working on a hitman title.
if they consider freelancer a success, it might end up a recurring mode in future games, like contracts or escalations. that’d be cool.
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Listen, you can’t just start a sentence with 100 words like that. 
A mode like Freelancer was requested for a long time, so this mode is more a fan service than the next narrative way of playing Hitman. 
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I’ll take that, then.
I don’t either to be fair, although this was an interesting article which is from Feb 2021.
Screenrant interviewed Mattias Engström regarding Hitman III and asked if the gaming formula would evolve when they returned to the franchise, to which he replied they will likely do a new take on it when they return to the franchise. Not sure what that means in reality? But you could say that has applied to all the evolving Hitman games as they’ve progressed. I know the WOA trilogy has been broadly the same, but things evolved from Blood Money to Absolution and then to HITMAN (2016).
Here’s the quote anyway from Feb 2021.
https://screenrant.com/hitman-3-mattias-engstrom-developer-interview/
I know you’re working on Project 007 and Hitman is done for the time being, but do you think that whenever you decide to return the gameplay formula for Hitman will evolve?
I think we will do a new take on it. I have no idea when, but it’s probably in going to be a new Hitman game that moves away from the World of Assassination trilogy in some ways. We don’t know when, we don’t know how, we wanted a bit of closure in Hitman 3 and a moment of hope. You can kind of see that maybe we could pick it up again from there and just do a completely new thing from there with a new espionage thing or whatever. But we could also say, ‘Yeah, it’s done.’ We could just do a complete reboot and start over again. Anything is possible. We don’t know yet but it’s in our DNA and Hitman is not going away.
I know Mattias said IOI could literally pick up the story from where HItman III concluded in the next game, so you could also say this is now an outdated article as we’ve had Freelancer that is post Hitman III, but wanted to share in case anyone missed it.
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Outside of the usual AI evolution (ie, why prison level is currently impossible), and better release / inventory management (ie, not having to take into account everyone having all the poisons they want and not into the level) there is one place I could see the formula be changed : self contained level as foundation.
Currently the game is based around the idea of having self contained level you can replay, but with no consequences between level. Freelancer toys with it, but in a pretty binary way (alerted or not).
So I could see a formula like codename 47 where you have a series of levels with an overarching objective. Some even without main assassination, just preparations. Again, Freelancer toys with it (and do I wish we could purchase, find phones in the takedown levels, have heist takedown, or potential bonus missions from the right trigger).
Hitman 3 sometimes feels like the current formula was at an end. It was well refined enough to be as smooth as possible, but there are moment when it felt like the devs wanted to do a bit more but were restrained by the obligation of the level being self sufficient / contained / with a main target. With all the obligations, and restrictions, to the level design coming with it.
I thought this way since Hitman 3 release, and I think Freelancer is a bit of an indicator, letter of intention.
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