There will be a free “season’s pass” worth of content released for IO interactive’s upcoming Hitman reboot.
These days, it is fairly common for a $60 game to launch with a $40 “season pass” – promising a bunch of regular content drops over the course of the next year. IO Interactive is planning on doing the same thing with it’s upcoming Hitman reboot… sans the $40 price tag.
“You will buy it and have entertainment for a few months on top,” studio head Hannes Seifert told VideoGamer.com at E3 earlier today. “What we do is we start the journey on December 8 and what we put out there is going to be a big game. But over the course of 2016 we’ll add more locations, more missions and we’ll have things like targets that only appear for, say, 2 days. That’s something you can only do in the live world.”
He stressed that the game is actually fully complete at launch, and these additional missions will compliment, not complete, the experience. “Everything we ship on December 8 will be completely finished, it will be a very polished experience. It’s also going to be a very big game. There are other products that sell a game for $60 and then try to sell you a Season Pass for another $40 on top, so you spend $100 or $120 for all the stuff that happens later on. We said no, we don’t want to do that.”
“It’s a bigger Hitman game than ever before, it will be more than Absolution. Our biggest levels are way bigger than anything we had in Blood Money. The AI entities, we have about 300 of them when we used to have 40 or 50 in the previous games. So it’s a very big game [that] we will keep updating.”
Hannes also confirmed that the game will feature absolute no forms of in-game microtransacitions.
Hannes and IO Interactive can only be applauded for this move. It seems that devs these days are more than happy to “nickle and dime” gamers to death with numerous drops of small DLCs (or the dreaded microtransactions), which makes for a fairly consumer unfriendly experience.
Source: Video Gamer