IO Interactive have confirmed that three locations and six campaign missions will be available in Hitman when the game launches digitally on March 11, 2016.
You’ll be getting sunburn on your baldy head inFrance, Morocco and Italy, taking on missions in each area and creating or playing user-generated assassination scenarios in the returning Contracts mode.
Each following month will bring with it new locations and assassination contracts, starting with Thailand in April, the USA in May and Japan in June.
If you buy the game at $59.99 at launch, all this content will be added free. If you want to make sure it’s actually good before committing loads of money to six missions, you can buy the $34.99 ‘Hitman Intro Pack’ which offers access to all March 2016 content – this will be available to pre-order digitally from November 2015. If you later decide you want the following three months’ content, you can grab that for an additional $29.99.
A physical release will follow once all the content has been released.
This is turning out to be more complex than pulling off a perfect hit. I’m not sure if I’m a fan of this model yet. It kind of feels like splitting a game into two parts and punsihing cautious people by charging them more. I also worry that the other big publishers will be watching it very carefully and planning to put their twists on it.
Hopefully it’s nothing to worry about because Hitman does look damn good. How do you feel about the payment model? Let us know in the comments.