Hitman 3

• 1. Introduction

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  Hitman 3 was announced on the 11th of June 2020 at the PlayStation 5 reveal event, under the tagline 'Death Awaits'. It is a stealth game from IO Interactive, the eighth main installment in the Hitman series and the third game in the World of Assassination trilogy. Its task was to finish a story that began with Hitman in 2016 and continued in 2018's Hitman 2. At the center is Agent 47, a genetically engineered assassin hunting the leaders of a secretive organization. A series built on contract killing now had to give its hero an ending. Can a game about planned murder carry a story worth finishing? What happens when a studio folds a whodunit into a sandbox built on player freedom? And why did the final level divide even the critics who loved everything before it?

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• 2. Rules of the Sandbox

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  Six levels make up the base game, and five of them are sprawling sandboxes. The exception is the Romanian mission in the Carpathian Mountains. Elsewhere, Agent 47 roams freely, looking for ways to reach each target. Before any mission begins, a planning phase lets him choose the weapons and items he carries in. Once a level has been finished, the player can also choose where 47 starts.

  Instinct vision is 47's special sense, and it highlights every item of interest in view. Disguises are the main route into restricted areas. 47 gets an outfit by incapacitating a non-player character or by finding one lying somewhere on the map. A guard's uniform lets him walk around carrying guns without a second glance. Enforcers are the exception, because they can see through any disguise. Crouching or running in the open still draws suspicion. Guards move through several alert states, and a witnessed crime leaves 47 compromised until he silences the witnesses or changes clothes.

  Mission stories are guided sets of instructions that reveal unconventional ways to kill. Eavesdropping on NPC conversations can open further options. The ICA briefcase smuggles illegal weapons into an area, and the lockpick opens locked rooms. The one new gadget in Hitman 3 is a camera that scans items and relays information to 47's handler. Experience points from challenges and repeat runs raise Mastery Levels, which bring gear with them. Killing non-targets, or being seen committing crimes by NPCs or security cameras, brings penalties. Staging a kill as an accident can significantly improve a mission ranking.

  Escalation contracts string several stages together, each harder than the last, with conditions such as wearing a particular disguise or using a specific weapon. Elusive Targets are time-limited missions that can be attempted only once, and they arrive as regular updates. Hitman 3 adds the Elusive Target Arcade, a permanent feature where players fell several Elusive Targets in a row at rising difficulty. A failure there means waiting 12 hours before another try. Contracts Mode lets players pick targets across every map in the trilogy, add complications such as a required kill method, and share the result. Owners of Hitman or Hitman 2 can import maps and progress, and those older maps adopt the new gameplay changes.

  Freelancer is a roguelike mode in which 47 works without the Agency against crime syndicates, and saving during a mission is not allowed. To finish it, the player must eliminate four Syndicate leaders. Each syndicate's lower members have to fall first, in separate contract missions. The contract, the kill conditions and the starting location are all randomly generated. When a leader is lured out, a Showdown mission opens, and the handler Diana describes four physical and three behavioral traits of the target. A suspect camera helps pick that leader out of the crowd. Merces, the mode's currency, come from completing missions, eliminating Couriers and opening safes, and they buy weapons and gear. Suppliers sell unique Freelancer weapons, and 47's safehouse hub gradually expands as Mastery Levels rise. Failure is costly. 47 loses all the equipment he brought and half his Merces, and syndicate members grow warier on later maps. Dying or failing a Showdown resets progress entirely. A two-player cooperative mode called Stone & Knight was announced in June 2025.

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• 3. Providence's Fall

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  Hitman 2 ends with the kidnapping of Arthur Edwards, the Providence intermediary known as the Constant. Agent 47, his handler Diana Burnwood and the rogue mercenary Lucas Grey carry it out after defecting from the International Contract Agency, or ICA. Edwards names the three Partners who control Providence: Carl Ingram, Marcus Stuyvesant and Alexa Carlisle. He then escapes and seizes the Partners' corporate assets for himself.

  Hitman 3 turns on revenge and on a secret. 47 and Grey want payback against Providence for turning them into assassins through childhood conditioning and genetic experimentation. Diana is driven by the death of her parents. She does not know that 47 killed them while under Providence's control. Working together, 47 and Grey eliminate Ingram and Stuyvesant in Dubai, then Carlisle at her ancestral manor in Dartmoor. Edwards takes over Providence and sends mercenaries to capture Grey. 47 disguises himself as one of them and tries a rescue. Grey kills himself so that 47's cover will not be blown.

  Olivia Hall, Grey's only other trusted ally, is a hacker, and 47 arranges to meet her in Berlin. The ICA is tailing them, and 47 kills several agents sent to eliminate him. He and Hall then decide to end the ICA for good by exposing its crimes. In Chongqing, 47 eliminates Hush and Imogen Royce, who oversee the ICA's data storage facility. That lets Hall steal and publish all of the ICA's operational data. She also deletes every record that mentions 47 and Diana. The ICA is dismantled, and 47's career as a professional assassin ends with it.

  Edwards, meanwhile, tries to recruit Diana as his successor. He reveals that 47 killed her parents, hoping she will turn on him. Diana seems to double-deal. She accepts the offer, then invites 47 to a Providence gathering in Mendoza. There he removes the only two people opposed to her succession, Tamara Vidal and Don Archibald Yates. Her plan is to dismantle the organization once she holds power. Afterward she poisons 47, which looks like revenge for her parents.

  A dream of Grey convinces 47 that Diana has not betrayed him. She has instead placed Edwards within his reach. 47 wakes up imprisoned on a Providence train crossing the Carpathian Mountains in Romania. Edwards is aboard, and he explains that he meant to wipe 47's memory with a serum and make him a Providence assassin again. He offers a choice: kill Edwards, or inject himself with the serum. Players can also inject Edwards instead. Either way, Edwards is dead or amnesiac by the mission's end, and 47 flees into the wild.

  Diana becomes the new Constant and purges Providence members from leadership positions at major global corporations, breaking the alliance's power structure. A year later, 47 reconnects with her. They return to their old roles of assassin and handler, now working freelance to keep the global elites in check.

  An alternate ending follows if 47 injects himself. He passes out and wakes in a padded room, where Edwards's voice greets him with the words: "Wake up. Wake up, my friend. It's the dawn of a new day, and you have things to do". The line echoes the opening of Hitman: Codename 47.

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• 4. Designing the Places

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  Game director Mattias Engström explained that the Mumbai and Miami missions in Hitman 2 had reached the limits of mission size and risked overwhelming players. For Hitman 3, he said, "it's better to be a little sharper and more focused, to create a more polished and coherent experience". The levels became more experimental as a result. Berlin changes the usual formula, and Dartmoor finally realizes an older idea the team had never managed to build.

  Chongqing shows the studio's love of contrast. Beneath its dark, rain-soaked streets lies a bright, hyper-modern research facility. Missions are set against one another too. Dubai is followed immediately by Dartmoor, a historic mansion. Each location began as a short list of keywords and phrases that defined its themes, and each was meant to feel lived-in.

  For the opening mission in Dubai, Engström handed the designers and artists phrases such as "an inviting beginning", "open and airy" and "on top of the world". The last became the mission's title. The level is set at the inauguration of the Sceptre, the world's tallest skyscraper. Partway through development, the team felt it was missing the "vertigo" and "verticality" keywords, because players did not sense how high up they were. The fix was to start the player outside the building and make them work their way in. Originally they stepped out of an elevator into an atrium. IO's art director and lead environment artist had also visited Dubai early on to gather reference material.

  Persistent shortcuts are paths that open from one direction only and then stay open in every later playthrough. The team designed them to "encourage exploration, reward curiosity, and incentivize replayability". Immersive sim games inspired features like keypads and other items that create puzzles. For the AI, predictability and consistency mattered most. The developers wanted experimenting to stay fun even if the AI sometimes seemed "stupid". Scripting it still took immense effort, with frequent meetings about target behavior and long testing to make sure the simulation would survive unconventional player actions.

  Dartmoor started from phrases like "a house filled with secrets", "ominous" and "vulnerable". The mansion was settled on early, and its gothic design draws on detective fiction such as Agatha Christie novels. A murder-mystery is linear by nature, which clashed with replayability and player freedom, so IO reworked mechanics and narrative paths. The team tried randomized culprits but could not build a narrative around them. The story stays fixed, yet players must replay the level several times to see the full picture. Gathering evidence lets them accuse different characters, with different outcomes. A detective disguise gives free access to most of the level, which is the opposite of the usual Hitman approach.

  The first version let players roam and talk freely, but they could not tell whom to question or which rooms mattered. The team then highlighted every person and object of interest. Playtesters merely followed each icon and triggered every prompt, and found it dull. The final mission guides players more subtly, through conversations between staff members and guards. Sound cues, such as a draft of wind through a room or ruffling paper, point toward clues. A secondary target, asking the player to eliminate the true culprit, was considered and then cut.

  Berlin was built around the keywords "loneliness" and "isolation". The forest in its opening was designed to feel cold and isolating, in contrast to the rave in the main part of the level. The main level designer lives in Berlin, so he scouted locations, took reference photos and recorded sounds. Composer Niels Bye Nielsen wrote the rave music himself instead of using outside tracks. The crowd NPCs adjust their dance moves as the music builds.

  Berlin is the one level where players are not assigned targets. It has none of the mission stories found elsewhere, and the player must identify the targets alone. The team first made Agent Montgomery the primary target and the other agents optional, then decided to leave the choice to the player. All 10 agents originally appeared in instinct mode, which proved overwhelming on a first playthrough. Berlin also introduced armed targets who fight back instead of running into lockdown. Earlier versions, with agents patrolling in pairs and drawing weapons the instant they spotted 47, were judged too punishing. Target identification and new ways of presenting information made Berlin the most expensive level to produce.

  Mendoza was IO's first attempt to depict Argentina in the Hitman franchise. The two original ideas were a tango location in Buenos Aires or a vineyard in South Africa. The studio combined them and chose Mendoza because it is an internationally known wine region. IO built a fictional location with authentic-looking terrain and vegetation, and showed the winemaking process. It also portrayed tango and the drinking of mate. Associate producer Pablo Prada, who is from Argentina, advised on many details. Professional dancers were hired for the tango animations and consulted about the music. Time, budget and the COVID-19 pandemic led the designers to reuse existing Spanish-dialect NPC dialogue recorded with Colombian and Mexican accents. The company spent its effort on securing appropriate voice talent for Chongqing instead.

  Ambrose Island arrived as a free update on the 26th of July 2022, and it is set during the events of Hitman 2. Live game director Kevin Goyon said the team wanted a "pirate fantasy" that felt dangerous while still being a place where 47 would belong. The island also let IO ask what became of Lucas Grey's militia after he left it. The answer was rival factions, with the militia and pirates on the brink of conflict. Unlike earlier outdoor maps built around towns, such as Santa Fortuna and Mumbai, Ambrose Island follows its rocky terrain and jungles. Those natural features split the map into zones and allowed more verticality than usual.

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• 5. Story and Voice

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  Mattias Engström described the Carpathian Mountains train as a "narratively driven set-piece that is setting up closure for the trilogy". The level drew controversy for its linear design. The train itself was meant as a metaphor for 47 spending his life "following a path determined by others". Stepping off it at the end symbolizes leaving his past as a contract killer behind.

  In Hitman 3 the developers wanted closure for 47, and they leaned on story. Hitman 2 had established the major players, and Hitman 3 gives each of them a character arc and a bigger role in the gameplay. Hand-crafted moments are designed around a first playthrough. Across all three games, 47 goes through self-discovery: he learns about his past, rebuilds relationships and finds that he can exercise free will. Berlin is treated as a key character moment. 47 declines one ally's advice to leave the compound and hunts the ICA agents instead, which is the first time he must make a choice.

  Mendoza is where the player first meets Diana face to face in the trilogy. The mission ends with 47 dancing a tango with her. IO limited outfit choices for that moment so the atmosphere would hold and the storytelling would not be undermined.

  The tone is "more mature, serious, darker" than Hitman 2, which was more lighthearted. Humor was handled with a more measured hand. It is still core to the design, but players are likelier to find it on later playthroughs than to meet it "front and center".

  Six writers worked on the game, with a producer managing the team. According to executive producer Forest Swartout Large, dialogue took a significant share of the overall development budget. The writers had to cover the linear story and also the emergent gameplay. The voice cast includes David Bateson as Agent 47, Jane Perry as Diana Burnwood, John Hopkins as Lucas Grey, Isaura Barbé-Brown as Olivia Hall and Phillip Rosch as Arthur Edwards.

  For 47's incidental lines, Bateson was told not to vary his accent to match the situation. He was directed to deliver each line in a "delightfully wooden" way and to play it seriously, however absurd it was. Bateson said he wanted to "give 47 almost a kind of Frankenstein's monster feel to him". Of the series' dark humor, he said it "has matured and evolved like a good cheese or a good wine", and he added that "people are dying horrific deaths" but that it is nice to have that humor.

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• 6. Engine and Headset

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  IO Interactive shrank Hitman 3, including the data for the first two games of the trilogy, to 60-70 GB. Hitman 2 alone had taken 150 GB. Engine improvements, data deduplication and lossless LZ4 compression did most of the work.

  In November 2020, IO announced a partnership with Intel to optimise performance on high-end CPUs with 8 or more cores. That allowed more crowds and destructible environments. The game also uses Variable Rate Shading, which improves rendering performance by changing the rate of shading across different parts of the frame. On the 24th of May 2022, a graphics update added ray traced reflections and ray traced shadows from the sun, while indoor shadows still use traditional shadow maps. Support for Nvidia's DLSS and AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution came with it.

  The idea for a virtual reality mode began in 2018, when a senior game designer brought his PlayStation VR headset into the office. Colleagues "couldn't stop playing" Firewall: Zero Hour on it, and that inspired the developers to attempt their own VR mode. The VR team had 10 to 12 people. They believed the level design suited VR even though it was never designed for it.

  The cover system was reworked so that players physically crouch out of sight instead of snapping into cover. Melee weapons got free-form movement in place of scripted animations. Many items that would have looked tiny or been hidden by the interface were redesigned with more detail, and the team used holographic sights for first-person aiming. Despite the intimacy of VR, none of the game's violence was toned down. In June 2024, IO Interactive and XR Games announced Hitman 3 VR: Reloaded, a standalone edition of the VR mode released exclusively for Meta Quest 3 that September.

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• 7. Storefront Troubles

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  Development ended after a year and a half, with a total budget of $20 million. IO Interactive self-published Hitman 3, its first game released that way since becoming an independent studio. It reached Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X and S natively. Nintendo Switch players got it through cloud streaming, and Stadia received it as Hitman: World of Assassination. A PlayStation VR mode shipped on the same day. Pre-orders earned the Trinity Pack, a set of items inspired by the two earlier games. The physical Deluxe Edition, released with Limited Run Games, came with a commemorative passport celebrating the franchise's 20th anniversary. IO had even considered an episodic release like 2016's Hitman, with the first location planned for August 2020.

  The Windows version came with a 12-month exclusivity deal with the Epic Games Store. IO said the partnership gave it the freedom to create the game exactly as imagined and to self-publish directly to players. Before launch, though, IO announced that PC players who owned Hitman or Hitman 2 on Steam could not access those locations in Hitman 3 without repurchasing them on the Epic Games Store. That backtracked on an earlier promise and drew criticism of the exclusivity deal. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney apologized and committed to working on a solution. IO guaranteed that nobody would need to repurchase the games, but admitted a delay of a few weeks. Players who bought within the first ten days received 2016's Hitman: Game of the Year Edition. The transfer system arrived a month later.

  The Hitman Trilogy collection was announced on the 13th of January 2022, and both it and Hitman 3 reached Steam on the 20th of January 2022. A wave of negative reviews followed from players who complained that the price matched the Epic launch a year earlier. The many versions on sale made the pricing confusing for some. IO admitted that the Steam launch "didn't go as planned". Anyone who had bought the game, or bought it through the 19th of February, got a free upgrade to the Deluxe Edition. Owners of the Deluxe Edition or the Hitman Trilogy received the Seven Deadly Sins DLC for free.

  That DLC was a seven-part series, released in the order Greed, Pride, Sloth, Lust, Gluttony, Envy and Wrath. The Greed pack arrived on the 30th of March 2021, the same day as the Hitman 3 Free Starter Pack. The starter pack grants permanent access to the ICA Facility training missions from 2016's Hitman, plus periodic free access to other locations. Each sin pack added an escalation, a new suit and a sin-themed item. Each also began a 'Season of Sin' lasting four to six weeks, with free contracts and Elusive Targets themed to match. The final pack, Wrath, came out on the 26th of October 2021, and its season ended on the 29th of November.

  Freelancer was first scheduled for 2022 and slipped to January 2023. Alongside it, IO rebranded Hitman 3 as Hitman: World of Assassination. Hitman Game of the Year Edition and the Hitman 2 Standard Access Pass were packaged into it, and the older games were pulled from storefronts. The Deluxe version includes the Hitman 2 Expansion Access Pass, which opens the New York Bank and Haven Island levels.

  In September 2022, Google announced that Stadia would shut down in January 2023. IO let Stadia players transfer their progress to other platforms from the 11th of January to the 17th of February 2023. Hitman: World of Assassination launched on Nintendo Switch 2 on the 5th of June 2025 as a launch title. Ports for iOS and iPadOS followed on the 27th of August 2025, and a macOS port on the 25th of February 2026.

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• 8. Critical Verdict

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  Metacritic summarized the reviews of Hitman 3 as "generally favorable". Some critics called it the best entry in the series, and others placed it among the greatest stealth games ever made. It was the best-reviewed game in the series, with praise aimed at its gameplay loop, creativity and level design.

  Nick Statt of The Verge called it cohesive and accessible. He wrote that IO had crafted ways to teach even bumbling players how to become 47 "in mind and body". Edwin Evans-Thirlwell of Eurogamer found it most rewarding when players studied the systems' patterns and planned novel approaches. He was disappointed that the world barely reacts once a target is dead. Luke Reily of IGN wrote that the game "rewards rational thinking over rushing". Russ Frushtick of Polygon said it paired "predictable assassin-y stuff with true nonsense", which produced "high comedy". Jeff Cork of Game Informer enjoyed the slow pacing but doubted it would win over anyone unimpressed by earlier games.

  The levels earned the loudest praise. Keith Stuart of The Guardian called the modern Hitman games hugely replayable and "a benchmark for generous sandbox game design". Reily ranked the maps among IO's best for their complex layouts and verticality. Phil Hornshaw of GameSpot said the game finds new challenges for veterans "purely through excellent design". Berlin won particular acclaim. Jeff Grubb of VentureBeat said it showed the "maturity of the Hitman formula", because players no longer needed mission stories to guide them. Dartmoor's optional murder-mystery drew comparisons to the film Knives Out. The Carpathian train, by contrast, was criticized as linear and out of place in a Hitman game.

  Reviews of the narrative were mixed. Statt liked the emphasis on story and thought it united the plot of Hitman Absolution with the freedom of Hitman: Blood Money. Alex Donaldson of VG247 judged the attempt at an "epic story" largely successful, and found the game less silly than its predecessors. Stuart found the story forgettable and formulaic, comparing it to "straight-to-Netflix spy thrillers". Cameron Kunzelman of Vice argued that after the failure of Absolution in 2012, the series was repeating a mistake by leaning on story.

  The PlayStation VR mode was praised for immersion, strong visuals for the headset and support for every map in the trilogy. Critics disliked its missing reflections and short draw distance, and its mixed controller and motion scheme drew split opinions. The 2022 PC VR version was heavily criticized for lacking full motion controls.

  Hitman 3 reached number one on the UK boxed charts, with launch sales 17% above Hitman 2. IO called it the biggest digital launch in the franchise. Within a week, sales had passed the development budget. By April 2021, CEO Hakan Abrak said the game had performed "300% better commercially" than Hitman 2. By November 2021 it had reached 50 million players, making it the most successful entry in the trilogy and the series. By December 2025, the trilogy had sold over 25 million units.

  Awards followed. The Golden Joystick Awards 2021 named it PC Game of the Year, and PC Gamer gave it Best Stealth. PC Gamer placed it 2nd on its 2021 list of the top 100 PC games and 5th on its 2022 list. The PlayStation VR mode earned a nomination for Best VR/AR Game at The Game Awards 2021. Eurogamer's Ian Higton named it the best PS VR game of 2021, and PlayStation Blog readers agreed. After its Steam release, it won VR Game of the Year at the 2022 Steam Awards.

  In a December 2025 interview with Variety, Hakan Abrak said IO would first share more about the new co-op mode for the trilogy. After that, the studio will begin revealing details of the next Hitman game.

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