HITMAN - May Patch Preview

Known internally as Patch 3.1.5.0, this update will bring more than 80 bug fixes, tweaks and improvements – with a focus on addressing many points of fan frustration for our new rogue-like mode Freelancer. We’ve also implemented a new location for Contracts Mode, with the ICA Facility’s Freeform Training mission now supported for the first time, giving players more options to be creative.

Before we release the full patch notes next week, we want to give you a look ahead at what’s coming up, including a new Prestige feature for Freelancer. Let’s start with that.

We’re adding a new ‘Prestige’ feature to Freelancer that will give you more reasons to play and earn elusive Safehouse trophies for your collection.

The ‘Prestige Laptop’ will be added to the Safehouse and will allow you to increase through five Prestige Levels. You can advance your Prestige Level after you’ve collected all the weapons that can be stored in the Safehouse. At that point, three things will happen:

• The base Merces payout and XP gain for completing missions will increase
• Adds a Prestige trophy to your Safehouse for each Prestige Level (5 in total)
• All items in your inventory, all Freelancer gear, all weapons on the weapon walls and all Merces will be reset to 0, as if you were starting fresh. Your safehouse customisations will not be affected.

Prestige in Freelancer is all about risk/reward. Once you’ve unlocked everything, you can start fresh with a higher base payout and XP bonus, earn the trophies for your Safehouse and show off your Prestige Level.

Contracts Mode let’s you play missions, mark your own targets and challenge your friends and the whole community to perform the contract the same way that you did.

On May 11th, we’re expanding Contracts Mode to now include the ICA Facility location. More specifically it’s the Freeform Training mission that takes place on the yacht. Many of you will have spent hours and hours here in the HITMAN 1 beta back in 2016 and we’re excited to see what contracts you create here. Look out for some of them in the Featured Contracts section soon!

With the May 11th patch, we’re rolling out a handful of new unlocks that will keep your inventories fresh.

The Black Bruiser Suit

The "HITMAN" Challenge tasks you with completing any Freelancer campaign on Hardcore Mode. We think you’ll agree it’ll be worth it. Plus, if you’ve already managed to do that, the suit will be yours instantly when you launch the game after the patch. Get started now and claim it on May 11.

Exploding Pen

As the old phrase goes: ‘explosions speak louder than words’. That’s never been more true with the Exploding Pen you can unlock by heading back into the Patient Zero campaign and eliminating Craig Black under some specific and fitting circumstances. This item was previously an Elusive Target exclusive unlock in HITMAN 2, but we’re making it available to all World of Assassination players through this new challenge.

At the time of writing, there are 87 individual fixes, tweaks and improvements ready to roll out in this patch. A lot of focus has been on player frustration around the Freelancer mode since launch, but there are also some more general fixes for the game in general that will keep things tight, but also have an impact on Freelancer indirectly.

We wanted to highlight just a few of them to give you an idea of what’s to come ahead of the full patch notes next week. Take a look!

Freelancer HUD Options

Under Options>Gameplay, we’ve added four new options for ‘Freelancer’ which allows players to customise specific HUD elements for this game mode.

The following HUD elements can either be toggled ON (default) or OFF:
Lookout Proximity Indicator, Assassin Proximity Indicator, Alerted Territory Indicator, Merces Indicator.

Item Unlock Identification (Freelancer)

We’ve added a small objective marker to the gun wall to help players find and identify a newly unlocked item.

Spycam Toggle (Freelancer)

We’ve added an option to “Hide UI” when using the Spycam. This was in response to player feedback that the UI elements can make it difficult to identify the finer details of a character with the elements permanently visible. For example, seeing whether a suspect was wearing earrings.

Perfect Shooter Tweak (Freelancer)

We’ve made a change to the ‘Perfect Shooter’ objective (Do not miss a shot, you will fail if any shot misses a person), that will make an exception for security cameras or recorders. The objective text has also been updated. In short, you can now shoot security cameras and recorders and still earn the Perfect Shooter objective.

SA Recorder (Freelancer)

We’ve updated the Prestige Objective description for SA/NF and SA/SO to mention “Destroy Surveillance Recorder” if the player gets recorded. Previously, this wasn’t mentioned and the objectives would be failed on mission completion if the player was recorded but didn’t destroy the recorder.

SA Reward (Freelancer)

We’ve adjusted the Payout objectives and Prestige objectives to make Silent Assassin / SA Suit Only (SASO) and Silent Assasin / No Firearms (SANF) objectives more rewarding.

Puddle Paradise

We’ve done a huge sweep across many, many (many), puddles and water so that they can be used to electrocute NPCs more reliably. This was triggered by a change we made to how the game registers pacified NPCs that are placed on an electrified puddle.

Along the way, we found inconsistencies with puddles or areas of water that look like they should be electrocute-able but weren’t. Now, there should be fewer cases where this issue occurs.

Neon Outfit

We’ve toned down the excessive lights of the Neon Outfit to be more consistent across all locations and areas, dark and bright. This should remove the absolutely overblown blinding effect in some dark areas.

Speedrunner’s Delight

Back in the January Patch Notes, we made a mention of the so-called ‘Muffin Trick’ being inadvertently patched out of the game. As it was an unintended change, we’ve remedied that so that it will function as it once did.

Carpathian Laboratory

We’ve removed the disguise restriction on the Laboratory Starting Location in Carpathian Mountains. This will allow players that have reached Mastery Level 2 to play the mission with any unlocked disguise, but will still enforce the default (and narratively thematic) disguise for first-time players.

Patient Fox

We’ve also removed the forced disguise restriction on the Club Entrance Starting location in Berlin for the main campaign. Same goes for the default starting location of the Patient Zero mission in Hokkaido.