Got into the Hitman 3: Freelancer Mode closed test, looks like there’s no NDA or anything so may as well spill some impressions.
Using a roguelite mode to bring in a persistence they haven’t attempted since Blood Money a great idea, and it’s nothing short of remarkable that they budgeted for this so late in the post-launch support. For a trilogy that’s hardly changed its fundamental UI in 6~ years, there’s a boatload of overhauled stuff just for this mode, much of newest stuff being semi-diegetic like in-world vendors and pick-one loot crates. I was also thankful that the smaller-fry targets aren’t always just existing NPCs with Contracts tags on them. The tech is there, the foundation of a compelling ‘kill some baddies to expose the big bad’ loop is there with a (very) light strategy layer, the potential for Hitman’s last hurrah being a forever-gameifying mode is absolutely there.
But alas, when you get into the nitty gritty flow of playing a mission, there’s a confusing and hard to manage focus on “secondary” objectives being necessary for decent currency payouts that’s prone to flattening a lot of momentum, and it feels like it’s part of a bad habit IOI developed in all of Hitman 3’s extra content to gear towards arbitrary half-optional stipulations that make your runs feel incomplete if you “fail” them.
I can appreciate nudging players to try new things and improvise without always worrying about pure stealth performance, but there’s that, and then there’s tying most rewards to a strict set of challenges. It can quickly change from “try new things” to “try these specific exact things we told you to and don’t fuck up or else you wasted your time”.
Freelancer Mode goes so hard in that direction that it (confusingly) shows the Mission Payout as the largest amount you can earn at first, and deducts it when you ‘fail’ the optional shit. So you’ll look at a mission and think “oh this pays 35 merces (currency), seems decent, and hey more the merrier if I get those bonuses”, and then realize by the end that your payout’s now deducted to just 10 merces because you didn’t feel like doing a Poison A Guy objective. It’s a really demotivating way to present the ingame economy, especially when a lot of those objectives are reliant on specific equipment you have a statistically low chance of having.
Oh yeah, Freelancer also starts you with nothing in your toolset. I get why they did this, what all with emphasizing ~building your (admittedly very cool) persistent safehouse from scratch~, but it’s always an irksome way to start a roguelike, doubly so for one based in Hitman, triply so with the equipment-based objective focus. There seems to be few (or no) adaptive resource systems to make sure you can supply yourself with what you need either; I thought the loot crates would have it but those appear mostly random too. I often get lucky with getting explosives for explosive objectives, but I suspect those just spawn more often so you can more easily deal with frustratingly slow-moving or even static targets.
I’m actually reminded of Heat Signature, and how it did a lot of comparable things but with more flexibility. If nothing else, I’d love for them to figure out a fast-forward button like HS has. I’ve wanted that for ages in Hitman, even tested the concept a long time ago with Cheat Engine’s speedhack just to track some patrol routes, but here it feels especially needed to help the game flow without getting tiresome.
I mean, with some targets (procgen…?) routes here, it almost feels like you’re watching pared down Sims AI… while stuck at normal speed forever. Try doing that in The Sims without losing your mind.
Really between those issues and the strange middle ground between Pro and Master difficulty that it hovers between, with arguably harsher balancing than even Elusive Targets… it all makes for a mode that can end up highlighting the base game’s weaknesses more often than its strengths IMO.
It’s worth noting that the mode proper is nearly 3 months from release, so maybe they knew it’s far from perfect. Even if they stay stubborn about their design priorities, there’ll be a group of people this will consistently appeal to (hell I’ll prolly still end up being one of them, lmao). There’s far less rewarding games that eat far more time in this genre, but as a Hitman fan that’s not typically a roguelike fan, it’s a bit of a bummer that it’s a roguelite-ass-roguelite instead of vigorously applying the ethos of “make a genre known for impenetrability into accessible breezy fun” that made the base games such a success.
