Hitman developer IO Interactive has announced that Hitman 2’s November Update on 11/19 will be the “final major patch” as it turns its sights toward the next game in the series.
“After 13 months of full-time support and content for HITMAN 2 – at no additional cost (besides what we added through the Expansion Pass),” a roadmap blogpost explained, “we’re now at a place where we are looking increasingly to the future.” The post continues by saying that “more and more” of the team working on Hitman 2 is moving on to develop its sequel, which it says is already “well underway.”
While not yet officially called Hitman 3, IO said in an interview with NoClip earlier this year that “Hitman is a trilogy,” and that work on the third game had already begun. Hitman 2 has also been winding down in recent months, getting its last new map, Haven Island, in September of this year, while December will bring “the remaining new content drops for the game.”
And though it may be reaching the end of its content updates, the roadmap explains that November will still have “more live content in a single month” than any other before it. That content includes 10 Featured Contracts, eight Escalation Contracts, six Challenge Packs, five item unlocks, two suit unlocks, and a Legacy Elusive Target.
Hitman 2 won’t be an entirely silent assassin in 2020 either, as more Featured Contracts and “Community-curated Contracts” will be added alongside the return of previous Elusive Targets.
As for exactly how close Hitman 3 is, it’s hard to say. To speculate, Hitman came out in March of 2016, while Hitman 2 arrived in November of 2018 – if you were to assume a similar two-and-a-half year gap you’d be looking at a release in early 2021, but it could be IO will need more time or potentially want to speed things up to align with PlayStation 5 and Xbox Scarlett’s arrivals at the end of 2020. Tom Marks is IGN's Deputy Reviews Editor and resident pie maker. You can follow him on Twitter.
