IO Interactive’s latest official blog post has given a tentative release date of January 26, 2023, for Hitman 3‘s long-awaited roguelite Freelancer mode. Featuring an evolving campaign mode, persistent progression systems, and a fully customizable safe house for 47 to reside in, Freelancer represents a sort of evolution of the core Hitman gameplay loop, and the developer has been hard at work bringing it to fruition.
Specifically, the Freelancer game mode for Hitman 3 got its initial announcement early in 2022, when it was slated to come out in Spring. This endeavor, however, has seemingly been more complex than IO Interactive had first envisioned and the mode has received numerous pushbacks ever since. Up until now, IO Interactive hadn’t offered a concrete release window for Freelancer, but it seems things are finally moving along on that front.
Hitman 3‘s new Freelancer game mode should be launching on January 26, 2023, though IO Interactive did note that this isn’t set in stone just yet. This latest piece of news is, according to the developer, just the start of a series of blog posts that will continue coming out until Freelancer is made available, with its goal being to inform players of the project’s ongoing status. To kick things off, IOI said that Freelancer will be getting its own closed technical test that select Steam players will be invited to participate in for testing purposes.
While Hitman 3 Freelancer’s last release delay may have been a disappointment to the player base, IO Interactive did mention that the scope of the project has expanded since. Namely, Freelancer was originally slated to only feature a select number of the game’s numerous sandboxes, but it’s now going to release with full support for each one of the three Hitman games’ respective levels.
Curiously, some players seem to have already gotten their hands on select cosmetics that may get locked behind future Hitman content. Namely, the recent Hitman 3 leak of Freelancer mode suits showed off a number of unique outfits for Agent 47, many of which are direct throwbacks to some of the oldest games in the franchise. All in all, Freelancer mode is certainly shaping up to be an interesting release, and IOI promised to have more information for interested players on October 27.
Freelancer Mode should be particularly exciting to players that dislike Hitman 3‘s Escalation contracts. This new randomly generated campaign should provide even more replayability than the game already offers and a new endgame-tier activity for players to participate in. The specifics are still hazy, of course, but IOI claims that it’s “finally on the Road to Freelancer,” which means things should be shaping up for release at long last.
Hitman 3 is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: Hitman 3
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