Hitman delayed until March 2016

Looks like Agent 47 won’t be home in time for the holidays this year. IO Interactive’s upcoming episodic contract killer was originally scheduled to pop a few skulls in style at the end of the year, December 8 to be specific.

Now, Agent 47 will be sneaking in a tad bit later on to platforms. March 2016 is when you’ll be seeing the ol’ bar-coded chromedome return, as IO Interactive announced on their official blog that more time was needed to work on the kind of Hitman experience that they want to deliver to fans:

It’s safe to say HITMAN is the biggest venture we’ve ever undertaken at Io-Interactive. Not just in terms of scope and ambition but also in terms of the size of the game world itself.

The playable area and density of our locations goes beyond anything we’ve built before. We’re striving to create a series of living, breathing worlds in those locations and we get pretty obsessed about every detail that you’ll experience.

On top of that, we’re going for a new release model where we put out a good chunk of the game when it begins and then release the remaining locations over time.

We want to make absolutely sure you all get the best possible experience when you join, so we’ve made the difficult decision to move the initial release date to March 2016.

These few extra months will mean we can add more to the launch content of the game, more than we had originally planned, and then follow with a tighter frequency of updates, which ultimately will create a better game for everyone. And in the end, that’s what we’re all looking for.

To give you a sense of the scale when it comes to our various locations, we’ve compared our Paris Showstopper mission to the largest level in Hitman: Absolution. As you can see, lots of challenges, plenty of space to set up death traps, and a huge supply of targets for Contracts mode.

Moving a launch date is never an easy decision, we know it’s frustrating to have to wait a bit longer for the game, but we truly believe it will mean we can deliver a better launch and overall experience.

We’ll share more details next week about the full release schedule and scope of HITMAN in general so keep a look out for that.

And here’s that infographic that IO Interactive was talking about, which shows off how the Paris Showstopper level is right around six times the size of the Streets of Hope level from Hitman: Absolution.

Hitman isn’t the only game coming out in the first quarter of 2016. In fact, Q1 is starting to get real tight with other game releases, as big budget titles are starting to space themselves further away from the end of year madness rush.

Hitman joins games such as Street Fighter V, The Witness, Battleborn, Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm 4, XCOM 2, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Uncharted 4 and Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst.

In other words, the usual Q1 drought of a new year is suddenly looking not so dry after all. THE THIRST IS REAL.

Last Updated: September 23, 2015