The ICA at the end of Hitman 3 (Spoilers)

Hitman 3 (2021)
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So, my unpopular opinion, at least by the comments others made after the game was released:

Having 47 destroy the ICA at the end of the latest game was a stupid thing to do. The Agency had always been essentially the third character of the series; 47, Diana, and the ICA organization. They have been what allowed all of the Hitman missions to happen how they did.

I cant even believe that some people think that it’s better that 47 and Diana no longer have the ICA, that they should be “freelance” assassins. Folks, even in this weird Hitman world, you can’t just go freelance like that, not while keeping the high number of high-risk missions 47 got on a regular basis.

There has to be an organization, there has to be a network of communication, intelligence gatherers, informants, couriers, background checkers, etc… Diana is good, but she can’t do all of that on her own. 47 had equipment delivered, escape vehicles left ready for him, target dossiers with full intel provided. The idea of an operation consisting of only 47 and Diana is not only stupid and impractical, but we’d never get to see the really complex contracts like The Gilded Cage except once in a blue moon. Do you know what it looks like when 47 is reduced to performing lower-level hits without the ICA’s support network? Go play Absolution again, because that’s what it looks like.

And the reason for it was stupid, too. 47 choosing to make his own decisions? He was an independent contractor with the Agency! He could choose to decline any contract offered to him, he didn’t just go wherever they said and whenever they said! Hell, the Farewell confirms that Diana had actually been filtering the contracts offered to them all along to ensure they only ever killed guilty people. It was alway a choice for him.

And, he’d already been down this road before! He already left them before and made the choice to return to contract killing and doing things his way at the end of Silent Assassin! Then he went solo for a while after Blood Money, but came back into the fold. Then, Absolution happened, but he and Diana saved the ICA in Blood Money and exposed Travis’s bullshit in Absolution, so the Agency owes them the benefit of the doubt. They never controlled him, he was their golden boy, they bent over backwards for him to be comfortable with what he did, he brought them so much money.

The whole thing was just stupid, like when Resident Evil tried to ditch Umbrella, or if James Bond decided to stop working for MI6 and do his spy work on his own time. Stupid.

Fortunately, there’s a way around this, if IOI is smart enough to pursue it. Since there has to be some kind of agency that 47 and Diana are part of to make the whole operation work, and since they have to be making money off of it for this series to still be called Hitman and not Vigilante, then what needs to happen is that they bring back a reestablished ICA. They’ve come back twice before, it can happen again. Diana can use the money she made over the years in her job, plus whatever she siphoned off of Providence before shutting them down, and remake the Agency. She would not want all the power to herself, so she’d set up a new management board to oversee the company, with herself as the top administrator. The board could be composed of former clients, like the Highmoors, the woman who was a shareholder for Ether who didn’t like the virus idea, Locksley, the parents of the girl from the Meat King’s Party, the man who ordered the hit on the Swing King, etc.

And to top it off, they can still avoid the trap of the series just being a vigilante justice series by focusing on the concept of no one being untouchable. 47 and Diana both seem to dislike not just evil people, but the more broad and general idea of people getting away with things without consequences… whether those people are good or bad. So they could still accept contracts on people who are not necessarily bad guys, but who have pissed someone off and gotten away with it, even if what they did was ultimately a good thing. Rather than being crusaders for justice in the good/bad sense, they could simply consider themselves the agents of consequence, regardless of their targets’ moral alignments.

IOI, take note of all I’ve said here, and please fix this grave error going forward with the series. The ICA needs to come back if the series is to continue even vaguely like how it had been up to this point.

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Something else that bothers me with this is the fact that Diana confirmed the contract on Klaus Temper(autocorrected) . I know getting to Arkadij Jigorov by taking out Rutgert Van Leuven was probably the reason why Diana accepted the contract, but why was she willing to sacrifice an innocent man for it? I can think of 4 possibilities:

  • This mission never happened, turns out the real one was only Gunrunner’s paradise. Either that or IO retconned it.

  • Klaas Teller had done something really bad that has not been told in the mission.

  • The client will only accept the hit if Teller gets killed.

  • Diana was new and didn’t know any better so she accepted the contract.

I am probably the only person bothered by this, but with IO wanting to make 47 and Diana the good people who take out the bad guys this does not make a lot of sense. I need confirmation!

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The whole thing was about a shady deal going down; a politician caught in some act with a biker gang holding the evidence, and Teller accepted money to get involved in the whole thing, making him party to it. Plus, I assume that Diana had to accept that sometimes innocents would die as collateral damage and she just had to reconcile that. This is particularly true when taking into consideration what I said about her being more conserned about consequences, rather than who’s good and who’s bad, per se. He decided to get involved and try to steal the evidence from the bikers; how did he think that was going to turn out? His own damn fault. Not to mention that it is made clear that Teller was captured and being tortured by the gang, so she and 47 may have considered it a form of mercy as well. Although 47 was still in his phase of only caring about the money.

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it’s inevitable that they will find a way to bring it back. the ICA was destroyed in Blood Money by the Franchise and Diana exposed the ICA in Absolution before. each time, it’s been able to rebuild itself. it’s not if, but it’s how they will do it, imo.

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I certainly hope you are correct in this. Your logic is undeniable.

Although, I’ve never believed Diana exposed the ICA in Absolution. 47 says she exposed the agents, he doesn’t say she exposed the Agency. The loss of communications, flushing of all the accounts, and the loss of several agents to arrests or retaliation by targets was what crippled the ICA and forced it to reform; I highly doubt they were actually leaked to the world, except maybe as a slightly stronger rumor that the average Joe might have a greater chance of hearing about in conversation. End of an Era pretty much confirms that, as 47 actually does expose the company itself and not just the identities of the active agents.

Anyway, hoping strongly that your reasoning is one that IOI adheres to.

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One of the biggest thing in the trilogy, Paris’ “incident” which not only killed Novikov but a huge amount of civilians

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That’s only if you consider:

A) that the Showstopper light rig collapse is the canon way to kill Novikov, which I don’t consider it to be. Yeah, we saw it in 47’s mind in Untouchable, but we also saw a lot of other stuff that never happened, such as the Partners standing in front of the bank clock window and such. 47 was hallucinating a lot of things, and he could just as easily have been imagining what would have happened if he’d followed through on one of the ways he’d imagined taking Novikov out, but hadn’t.

Or -

B) we are supposed to ignore the casualties in actual gameplay and assume that in-universe, only Novikov died, since he was directly below the light rig and people around the stage probably started backing up as they saw it falling. I think it was just something the devs decided to throw in at the end without putting a lot of stock in it. The WoA trilogy has canon inconsistencies all over the place, even within itself, so I don’t go off of what it gives us at face value. 47 would not have dropped that thing on all those people, that’s not his style, and so he could not have done it unless IOI never meant for that method to have casualties and just never got around to fixing it.

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I think it’s canon, because we saw it in 47s “dream” sequence before Carpathian Mountains. That confirmed to me that the lightning kill was actually canon, but I assume it’s like you said secondly. Maybe there were some people who stood around injured, but not dead.

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Crowd NPCs aren’t people. They’re barely even food.

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Noted. I went back and forth on whether to do that, but thought that since this thread existed, this was the proper place.

Yeah, we saw it in 47’s dream, but that doesn’t mean it’s canon, it just means it’s a thought that entered 47’s mind while he’s in that fever state. Notice how that’s the only time that the games suggest that’s how it happened, while he’s hallucinating? Like I said, when he was on that mission, and he heard those guards talk about the light rig ready to fall, he could have envisioned how he could use that info to take out his target, and while he was in that dream state, his mind randomly went to that vision. Again, we saw a lot of things during that sequence that was just 47’s mind going crazy. It doesn’t really mean anything, all the things he saw.

Plus, consider for a moment: in the opening cinematic trailer after the Final Test in the first game, it shows 47 taking out some of his targets from past games, and everyone from the Hitman Wiki to the Tv Tropes website all began saying that what we saw in that trailer are the canonical ways 47 killed those targets. One of them was Fernando Delgado being strangled with the Fiber Wire, but the H2 mission involving the Delgados had intel that stated that the Blood Money Delgados died in accidents. So which is canon? Again, notice how these two instances are the only ones that ever imply that things went a certain way, and that they still contradict one another?

Even things shown in cutscenes, under the right circumstances, are open to interpretation when the actual gameplay or other existing information contradicts it. That’s the devs trying to fill in the story with nods to how things could have gone, while still giving an out for the players to have chosen their own way and allowing the story to incorporate it - contradictory info on what happened.

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It is mentioned in multiple occasions after Paris (eg. Marrakesh) that it did happen and that a lot of people did die, which ruined Sanguine’s reputation and is why Sato left and created his own brand, this accident is 100% canon to the story

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Where in Marrakesh can you find references to the light rig kill? I’ve never heard about this and it made me curious.

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I believe soldiers at the back of the school are talking about it

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I’ll have to check that out when I can to see what you’re referring to, but keep in mind that NPC chatter itself is not consistent, not necessarily canon. NPC talk in Bangkok has people saying it was Zaydan’s men who killed him and Strandberg, Diana talks about the events of Absolution as a “parallels universe,” and many NPCs comment on 47 having foul breath, which is not consistent with his clean-freak character, nor something a guy trying to stay incognito would allow. A great deal of NPC chatter is simply fun Easter eggs, not necessarily meant to be taken at face value, so even if said conversation did take place, it does not necessarily make it canon. I point to the examples in previous posts to assist my point.

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This is likely just something people would try and theorize, with no lead on an actual killer

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Several things here; First off, on TV Tropes, this was edited quite recently to simple confirmation that Manuel and Fernando definitively died in freak accidents, despite only the latter being mentioned, and dying in a “strange way”. Forgive my lack of rioplatenese spanish translating skills, but this is the quote to my ears:

“I heard that senior Fernando Delgado died a strange death. Years ago now. I wouldn’t have thought the wire/wine had anything to do with it, but…stranger things have certainly happened”.

Either she’s saying wire (referring to the wire in his Cello in place of 47’s fiber wire), or wine (which is a little odd, as I don’t recall any accidents that are wine-related in BM in that level). I don’t think Manuel is ever mentioned in the level, and if he is, it’s in ambiguous terms.

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Excellent analysis. Totally agree that ICA was like the series’ third character. Without the framework of the ICA, whatever future freelance gig 47 and Diana are going to do attempt will be very difficult. But if this is truly IOI’s last time with Hitman, then I feel that the aftermath of End of an Era is warranted; happens so much in media today–you need some sort of high-stakes “destroy it all” ending, but then have to live with the consequences of being robbed of any future riches in subsequent installments.

While I enjoyed End of an Era as a mission, and understood hacking the core was imperative to get the ICA off their backs, the thing that bugs me the most is that “whistleblowing the ICA”–a notion none of the characters had before–only came about because they happened to hack Hall’s computer after Berlin. That’s it. Not to mention, Carlisle’s case file proving to be a bust (of course) in order to precipitate the direction shift toward ICA. In a different reality, End of an Era would have been replaced with a mission stemming from the findings in the case file, and continuing the pursuit of Edwards.

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To be honest, if the entire ICA database had been leaked to the internet, the ENTIRE WORLD could have been in jeopardy. The ICA takes contracts from government organisations globally, no doubt hundreds of political assassinations and other high-profile, front page “accidents” are revealed to be the works of professional murderers. Everyone now knows every client, every victim, every agent (apart from Diana and 47), everything. This may have started WW3 and brought the world to its knees.

Nah, it’s probably fine. If exposing Providence to the world in Season 2 did nothing, this is probably the same.

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An interesting thought is how 47 could get things smuggled into Berlin, chongqing and Mendoza if the ICA and 47 was split apart after Dartmoor :thinking:

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47 doesn’t have any gear in the default Berlin entrance, which is the canon entry point.

As for Chongqing and Mendoza, he must have found some way of smuggling his gear across the border

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