The roadmap is either going to be exciting or it’s going to to “meh”. Here’s my prediction:
April 8: ET
April 14: Perma BEH
April 21: Featured Contracts
April 29: ET
The only thing that could potentially be exciting is if they drop a patch on April 29th that will add Freelancer, but I wouldn’t expect it to arrive any sooner than that. There also won’t be any Arcade Contracts in April because there are none left in the game waiting to be activated since they’re all live and I doubt they would release a patch just to add something to the Arcade given the cost involved to deploy patches.
There’s a bit more to patch in than just adding more Arcade missions/items, there’s also fixing the broken inventory bug and making the Arcade objectives optional (plus other potential things like adding a way to unlock the items and suit locked behind the Undying in Hitman 2, putting Lucas Grey in the boat in Isle of Sgail, and after six months finally fixing I Find This Amoosing and giving the Odium Suit the sunglasses it’s supposed to have).
That being said I still doubt a patch is coming this month. If there is one then Freelancer probably won’t come out till June given how much they’re spreading out patches, if there isn’t one this month then I’d say a patch with Freelancer is possible for May.
There are still plenty of Elusive Target missions IOI could add as Elusive Target Arcade missions, specifically from Hitman (2016).
A good amount of them were mentioned in the recent Elusive Target poll, like The Badboy from Sapienza, or The Pharmacist from Paris.
Jimmy Chen, The Stowaway from Isle of Sgàil has only been used once in Elusive Target Arcade (from what I remember), and The Censor/The Serial Killer from Whittleton Creek hasn’t been used in ETA at all.
I never said they wouldn’t add more, I said they can’t release more until they’ve released a patch to add the relevant Arcade Contract data into the game. There is no more dormant data left in the game that they can simply activate via the servers, which is what they did back in March. That data was added in the January 2022 patch.
Simply put: until they release a patch, the ET Arcade is on pause.
That’s not what @thrison meant. He’s saying there’s no more ETA contracts in the game files, ready to go. In order to add more, there would need to be a patch from ioi.
Same reason we got that Striker V3, ioi didn’t want to use a patch for a single gun. So when they realized everybody already has the HWK 21 Covert (the original unlock) they had to pick a weapon that was already in the game files.
That’s also why they still haven’t updated the unlock picture for the Striker V3 (it still shows the HWK 21Covert).
As nothing is announced in-game (like “target arrives 7 days”), I don’t think an ET will be planned this week. Generally, ET are announced at least 7 days before the starting date.
That could be a minor hint towards a patch for the april roadmap. I mean the last roadmaps are pretty empty already. Leaving the ETA contracts also off would make them look even emptier.
They don’t have to though. The only local “data” for ETA, are the ET bricks which are all already in the game, as well as the contract images (which they can very easily serve from the servers, as all the contracts target images, ET images, etc, are server from online). The contract jsons which include the objectives and tell the game what to do, are also served from online.
