Square Enix’s latest Hitman debuted one year ago, and now the publisher and developer IO Interactive are looking back on 12 months of the live assassination-as-a-service simulator.
Since launch, IO updated the game weekly with new content and then on a regularly basis with full episodes that introduced new locations, but it’s what the players did in those spaces that is the most interesting and why so many people are looking forward to the second season.
In an infographic, IO revealed that players completed more than 70 million challenges. Because IO built the latest version of Hitman as a live service, it can track all of this data. Whereas previous Hitman releases were complete, on-disc experiences, IO Interactive slowly released the new content for the 2016 version throughout the year before releasing it all on disc in January. But because you needed an internet connection prior to physical copy, the company was able to see an enormous amount of behavioral data. Essentially, the studio knows how you like to kill.
For example, only 2 percent of Hitman players killed the lawyer Ken Morgan with a coconut on the Bangkok level. Also, 70 players died in one of the puddles in the game.
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IO also revealed that The Fixer was the most difficult of its Elusive Targets, which are missions where you get one chance to take out a target. If you screw up, get caught, or die, you lose and cannot restart the mission. The Fixer had players tracking down the pharmacist Xander Haverfoek in the Marrakesh level, and plenty of people screwed that up by subduing the wrong person.
Finally, players created 250,000 custom contracts by selecting mission parameters for their fellow Hitman fans. Of those, IO featured 100 of them.
Here’s the full infographic:
