“The money has been wired to your account.”
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Are we still doing this? I had somewhat thought, or perhaps hoped, that the era of Epic throwing bags of money at developers to get them to not release their games on Steam had started to wind down. Surely Epic needs all the money they’ve got for their lawsuits with Apple and Google, the very same lawsuit in which Epic claims to be attempting to further the cause of customer choice, enabling players to decide for themselves where they want to buy their games from. Perhaps this is another area where the rules don’t really apply to Epic, just to anyone they oppose.
That’s right Hitman 3 has gone Epic store exclusive, where you’ll be able to play this game on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Stadia. But not on Steam, because Epic has paid developer and publisher IO Interactive to delay the Steam release by 12 months.
In a statement discussing this decision, IO Interactive studio head Hakan Abrak said the following:
“Self-publishing Hitman 3 is a big step for IO Interactive in achieving our highly ambitious goals as an independent studio. Furthermore, this partnership with Epic has given us the freedom to create the game exactly as we imagined, for our fans and for our community uncompromised. For our long-term fans that have supported us on the World of Assassination journey, we’re happy to have mastery and location carryover from their existing progress into Hitman 3 on Epic Games Store.”
Mastery and location respectively refer to in-game progress and content you own from the previous two games. The suggestion here is that there are plans for some kind of cross-platform save transferring going on, at least from the Steam versions of Hitman [2016] and Hitman 2.
Epic are also going to be giving Hitman [2016] away as a freebie next week, and how this trilogy of titles work is that each new release includes updated versions of the entire previous game, where you get to play the original levels in the newer engine, with enhanced graphics and other improvements. Presumably, this will continue with the third game, but it could get messy depending on exactly how the transfer of purchases and saves is handled. It’s not clear what mechanism will be in place for carrying over other purchases or DLC.
This is perhaps going to be particularly disappointing for long time fans of the series, who have supported the series consistently over the years, even when the quality has faltered somewhat with the poorly received Hitman Absolution. The previous two games have been fantastic, and there’s a lot of people who were looking forward to adding the third entry to their Steam account, for a seamless continuation of their progress and existing purchases.
There’s still a lingering question of what will happen with the elusive targets schedule. These are time-limited in-game events, where for a limited time, players can get access to unique missions and characters in a given time window. Once they’re gone, they’re gone for good. Will players waiting for a Steam release simply miss out on the first 12 months of elusive targets, or will these get repeated down the line?
In addition to this news, IO Interactive has perhaps attempted to sweeten the pill with a trailer for one of the new levels. It’s a classic murder mystery premise, set in rural England, with Agent 47 infiltrating as a detective hired to figure out who done it. Rather than solving a murder, we suspect he’s going to end up committing a few of his own.
