When Hitman 3 recently changed its name to Hitman World of Assassination, I had no idea how meaningful the moment was. On the outside it looked like a simple thing: Hitman 3 would now be known by this name and include levels from Hitman 2 and 3 – the trilogy would all be in one place. But on the inside, at IO Interactive, much more was going on.
World of Assassination is the culmination of a plan that was 10 years in the making – a plan that survived enormous upheaval at the company. It survived a management buyout during which the entire future of Hitman was in doubt. But all the time the vision was there, a vision of what Hitman could be, and World of Assasination is it.
The story begins with the release of, and feedback to, Hitman Absolution in 2012. Remember, this was the first Hitman game in several years and expectations were high. But it wasn’t the return to form people hope for, and memories of Hitman Blood Money from 2006, a series high point, loomed large and distant. “Absolution isn’t its finest hour,” Tom Bramwell wrote in our Hitman Absolution review.
“That game was not well received within our audience,” Christian Elverdam tells me. He’s the chief creative officer and co-owner of IO Interactive. “Many Hitman fans said, ‘Well, that’s not a Hitman game.'” Or worse: “We had a fanbase who were like, ‘Can you even do Hitman any more?'”
To see this content please enable targeting cookies.
Elverdam gets it. The wilderness years that followed Hitman: Blood Money had really shaken IO’s fans. These years were dominated by Kane & Lynch, the studio’s loud new IP that was all guns-blazing ultra-violence and no subtlety. The first Kane & Lynch game, Dead Men, was okay, but the campaign was short and it ended up feeling, as reviewer Kristan Reed said at the time, like “a very big missed opportunity”. The follow-up in 2011, Kane & Lynch: Dog Days, was much worse. Both tanked commercially, and the family-friendly and very average action game Mini Ninjas, that IO put out in between, did nothing to help the studio’s fortunes.