IO Interactive and Square Enix made the controversial decision to have the 2016 Hitman title go completely episodic, with the Intro Pack being released a few weeks ago and each chapter being released separately. The developer’s creative director, Christian Elverdam, stated that the team new it would stir up fans.
In an interview with EDGE Magazine, Elverdam related, ”“We were expecting people to be skeptical up front. There’s this old quote: ‘Everyone loves progress, but no one really likes change’. We can’t really persuade anything that this is a good idea, I think. We’ll have to let the game speak for itself.”
He went on to say that he saw positive feedback from fans in the official forums. ”I recently toured around with the preview code for Sapienza (the next episode due in April), and the feedback was really good. When I look at forums and general chatter about it, I see much less worry about it after Paris came out than before.”
”Before, people were really talking about how much content there would be,” he continued, ”and I think if you really dig Hitman and you turn off the hints you don’t need, there are a lot of hours in Paris, and I think it starts to click with people why it’s a good idea that the next episode then comes out and there’s a new, fresh level instead of just barrelling through.”
IO Interactive plans to release one episode per month of Hitman. However, some of the other content that was supposed to be released this month was delayed til April.
