Half of Hitman Players Blew Their One Chance to Kill This Guy

Hitman's Elusive Targets, the first of which was available last weekend, represent maybe the most interesting version of the game possible. Players have just a single chance to kill a target during a limited window of time, and only half of the people who attempted to do so last week came away successful.

Hitman developer IO Interactive today released some statistics about the first Elusive Target, Sergie Larin. 53 percent of the attempted contracts saw Larin eliminated and the player get away safely, with 9.9 percent achieving a Silent Assassin rating. This requires you to kill only your target and hide the body without any witnesses, which is certainly a more elegant outcome than my approach of shooting him and his security guard in the head and leaving them in a stairwell.

Unfortunately, IO didn't provide any further information about the approaches that players took; I'd be curious to see what weapons were used most often and how long the average attempt lasted. It did, however, share how quickly the mission was beaten--it took just six minutes for the first completion, and only 34 for the first Silent Assassin run. Keep in mind, you had only one shot at this and couldn't use the minimap or Instinct mode to find the target.

Following the conclusion of the event, IO emailed players asking them to complete a survey about the experience. The developer isn't committing to changing anything for future Elusive Targets yet, but did say in a blog post that it's "still digesting [feedback] and having discussions internally about what, if anything, we might want to change, tweak, or adjust in the future."

It did promise that more Elusive Targets are on the way and they'll be "just as integral to [the] live content as Escalations have been in recent weeks. Expect a more even balance between the two modes going forward."

A new Escalation mission, The Scorpio Directive, is now live in the game. It's set in Sapienza, the setting of Hitman's second episode, and introduces laser tripwires to the area.

IO also revealed that it'll share a release date for Episode Three: Marrakesh sometime next week. More information will be shared about it prior to E3, and the episode itself will then be playable at the show next month, so expect to hear much more soon.