Not to mention the obvious: that’s not the real game.
I get what you’re trying to say here, and hell I did this with The Drop for Offline Elusives, but them being poorly made is a separate issue to not making them permanent content. If the missions are poorly made (and i’m gonna be honest here, about maybe a third of them are poorly made or outright boring), then IO should rework them to make them more interesting for players. I applied this logic in my Sarajevo Six review (TS6 are also extradited Elusive Targets) because The Mercenary is so unfun that I never want to play it. It has every worst aspect of The Bookkeeper and The Mallory Misfortune, which is a really odd design that I was hoping IO would at least tone down for their re-release.
Making ET’s permanent and making them more replayable are mutually exclusive ideas, they can co-exist without one interfering with the other – if anything, changing the latter makes the former more justified.
Subtle.
There are very few Elusive Targets I outright dislike; The Revolutionary, the Fixer, The Bad Boy, The Food Critic, The Ex-Dictator and The Warlord are the only ones that would need serious reworks to make them good, all for different reasons.
Like I said above, them being badly made does not justify removing content that clearly had effort put into it, even if that effort was misguided.
I can definitely sympathise with people who want the old 2016 escalations back, but my counter has usually been the logic above; rework them, then re-add them because they don’t play well and are too experimental for their own good. They came from a time when 2016 didn’t quite know what escalations wanted to be. They need to be reworked for modern audience expectations.
Even in H2, the escalations actually moved closer to mini-game modes later in its life (that’s also why 7DS and the Berlin Egg Hunt are structured the way they are).
As for the Special Assignments, they were not good because they felt like half-baked ideas rushed out to meet content demand, something that most Elusive Targets don’t have the same problem with, as those were made either well in advance or with more resources because Square Enix let them.
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Speaking of ‘The Drop’, I really want this one to either be re-activated, or to come back on a permanent basis. I played it while I was suffering with the flu, so I didn’t have my whole head in it. I eliminated him, but I wish I took more time to observe the changes and altercations to the level, given the Club had been fully redesigned to reflect the story timeline post Hitman III.
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If The Undying Pack gets a good reception and sells well, it’s probably pretty likely they do something similar with The Drop later on this year.
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Might not have to, if they learned from the past (The Undying/The Wildcard). You’d think ioi would restructure their deals moving forward to not get timed out of their own content. To clarify: the Undying is paid DLC to presumably cover the cost of renewing their deal with Sean Bean.
Curious how successful that partnership was for that guy (Dimitri)!?
Seemed to work out for ioi (and us) because everyone seemed to like not only the target, but the reworked level/environment too.
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Now that would be cool. I’m just thinking of all the cool Safehouse decorations we could get themed around The Drop Elusive Target. To be fair though, I would have thought all the plans for Year 4 content will be pretty much all planned out now?
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It’s probably just got a question mark over it as a maybe. If the Undying DLC doesn’t at least make back whatever IO has had to spend, then The Drop DLC would probably get canned. Assuming its even on the cards at all.
Is it even necessary to bring back The Drop as DLC? With Bean is understandable because his contract was probably exclusive for Hitman 2, so IO needed to renew it or make a new one altogether to bring him back for Hitman 3. But with Vegas it’s the same game, the deal is already made, so I don’t see how it would be hard money wise for IO to bring him back.
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Unless the deal, for some reason, was only for that initial run and then the Galore run. Doubt IOI would be that short-sighted, but stupider things have happened.
The Drop wasn’t part of the ET Galore reactivations like every other Year 3 ET. Could be that the deal was just for a single run, could be that they figured since he was very recently available for a whole month they didn’t need to bother reactivating him then.
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Probably likely that IO suggested a clause for limited use of the contract at the time because IO didn’t even have the money to pay Sumo Digital to work on maps for H2, so it could have been a way to lower Sean Bean’s fee for using his likeness, which is a tidbit we recently got in an interview.
Obviously now, IO’s situation is vastly different to back then - so they had cash to throw at Sean to get it back.
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Way later.
In what I think is an indictment to how much we actually read the roadmap article, a game update was actually confirmed for this season in it.
If without a date, and not on the roadmap itself.
(in all fairness the article is neither linked nor copy-pasted on this topic)
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Reading!? Shit is for nerds, yo!
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I know you’re joking, but still, if that were really an issue, 47 would know fuck-all about his targets. So since he reads them, 47 must be a nerd, and he’s the most badass nerd in history, so what’s wrong with being a nerd?
Actually, technically, according to Don McMillan, to be a nerd, you have to be smart, socially awkward, and obsessed. 47 isn’t obsessed, he’s just smart and socially awkward, so he’s actually a dork. And geeks are smart and obsessed, but not socially awkward, so technically, nerds, dorks, and geeks all read.
If you’re just socially awkward and obsessed, you’re a stalker.
I’m hoping we get some long overdue bug fixes for Freelancer as part of this upcoming update 
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We can expect this update before the beginning of the Season of Undying. This update will probably introduce the new contents like the Undying DLC, new ET, and the planned challenges.
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How do you attribute a 90% confidence to that? We have a total of one example of an elusive target that is going to be paid downloadable content. Every other elusive target that has ever existed has been either re-released periodically for free or been simply unavailable since its initial/only release. Given that Hitman 3 is still an actively supported game, I see no reason why anyone would assume that The Drop will cost extra.
Even the one current example of paid content that started as an elusive target was run multiple times within the lifespan of its parent game (Hitman 2). I wouldn’t even consider The Drop to be a candidate for paid content until Hitman 3 actually reaches end-of-life.
Even if it wasn’t in there, a game update would still be semi-confirmed since most of the stuff coming this roadmap isn’t in the game and so it has to get there somehow.
Using that information, we can narrow the date down to it arriving no later than March 22nd.
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I’m still really excited for The Undying Pack (the Premium content).
Does IOI have a price in mind yet? If not, will the announcement be the day of release?
My expectation is that we will find out the price when it goes live in the stores.
combatglue still hasn’t responded to questions around some wording used in the roadmap blogpost that were asked in this thread within hours of the roadmap releasing close to a month ago, so clearly communication isn’t top of the agenda. 
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