This entire thread is based on that exact assumption. When they released the news that the DLC was coming, it came with a press release/blog post covering some of the details. That post included two key pieces of information. First, the first month’s content would center around an escalation. Second, the cost of each piece of the DLC would be the same.
That immediately sent a lot of members of this community into a frenzy of conjecture that all 7 pieces of the DLC were just escalations because the prices was the same and they doubted that IOI would release an escalation and something more substantial for the same price. Once the roadmap came out for April and the first bit of May, people again went into negativity-land and spent that day commenting on how disappointed they were that A) the only real piece of DLC-related content in the roadmap was the paid escalation and B) there wasn’t much content in the roadmap for the month+.
The thread on the DLC announcement and the thread on the roadmap AND this thread are full of guesswork on what the DLC will contain but even more-so on what the future of Hitman content post-release will be. Many players who got the bonus missions of Hitman (2016) and then saw the perceived downgrade of Hitman 2’s special assignments saw the usage of escalations as the main Hitman 3 post-release content as proof that there were not going to be anything truly special in terms of extras.
There is a hierarchy of extra content in the World of Assassination games which I’ve covered elsewhere but in general:
New Maps are the best possible extra content. Examples: Haven, New York.
Bonus Missions (where existing maps are redone with new environments, time of day, mission stories, etc.) are next best. Examples: Landslide, House Built on Sand.
Good Escalations where substantial effort is put into creating a story-driven narrative, portions of the map are repurposed and redecorated, and there is continuity between levels come next. Example: Satu Mare.
Special Assignments where a new target is added to an existing map but little else is changed. These are essentially cancelled Elusive Targets. Examples: Bitter Pill, Embrace of the Serpent.
Bad Escalations where little effort is made at continuity between levels are the worst. Restrictions are simply built onto each level to make the mission harder but tend to feel repetitive. Examples: Pick any of the 5-level escalations, frankly.
When the DLC was announced and people started to play it and they realized that it is probably not a “good” escalation, and they started to guess that the price and the lack of any known content for the future pieces meant that nothing beyond escalations was coming, and they realized that the new 4-6 week schedule for the new roadmap format meant that the 7 Deadly Sins DLC will take us pretty much to the end of the year, they grew pretty sure that there was nothing else on the horizon for Hitman 3.
Statements by IOI seemed to confirm this with comments about not creating new levels but using the existing content from all three games. That cut any real potential of New Maps out in a single statement. The best possible extra content that left players with was Bonus Missions but the development effort of creating a Bonus Mission is too large for the 4.99 DLC price-tag. Since the only other available extra content is Good or Bad escalations or Special Assignments (and no one is particularly excited about Special Assignments), that leaves only escalations left as possible content for the rest of the DLC.
Since the players tend to skew more pessimistic, the community at large seems to be assuming Bad Escalations as the most likely content. You’re right that IOI could surprise us. They could release true bonus mission-style content or do something else entirely but most players doubt it. None of this is confirmation that Hitman 3 will or won’t get more substantial DLC content later on, but that’s the current thinking by (seemingly) most of the community.
