The Hitman games have always reveled in giving players the freedom to puzzle out their own murderous solutions â even ones that go against the developersâ wishes, as seen in the latest patch for Hitman World of Assassination (nĂ©e Hitman 3).
Released Aug. 17, the patch made a key change to the Hitman Freelancer mode. More specifically, it reverted a change that developer IO Interactive made in the previous update: In May, the studio had patched out the ability to shut down Hitman World of Assassination by using Alt+F4 (the keyboard shortcut for quitting an app in Windows) while still maintaining the integrity of a Freelancer campaign. Afterward, the game would detect this exploit and count it as failing a mission.
For the uninitiated: Hitman Freelancer, which debuted in January, is meant to be a high-stakes roguelike experience â itâs explicitly designed to push expert players to improvise their way through increasingly lengthy sequences of missions. Failure is not an option (or at least, not an appealing one): If you die or otherwise fail to complete a level, you lose all your progress in that particular series of missions, along with all the weapons and equipment youâve unlocked and half of the money youâve earned. (If this happens in certain types of missions, you have to start your entire Freelancer campaign from scratch.)
Freelancer isnât for the faint of heart, but it certainly lowered the blood pressure to know that you could always fall back on using Alt+F4 to abort a mission that was going sideways. Of course, IOâs elimination of that failsafe earlier this year suggests that the studio didnât intend for players to have this eject button at their fingertips. After all, you canât even save during a mission and come back later â if you need to step away, youâll have to leave the game paused and your console or PC running. You could argue that Freelancerâs harsh restrictions are essential, and that to neuter them with a safety net is to deprive yourself of the modeâs true thrills.
But now, Alt+F4-ing is back, presumably because enough players decried the removal. (Weâve asked IO for an explanation of the reversion, and weâll update this article when the studio responds.) Itâs worth noting that many playersâ complaints didnât merely amount to whining about the loss of a way to comfortably cheese their way through Freelancer. While the mode is about adapting to unpredictable circumstances, some of them include unfair circumstances such as glitches. âThere are so much things that could go wrong during the game (bugs, crashes, NPCs seeing through walls as examples) that not having the ability to cancel this and auto-failing the mission will be a big problem,â a regular on the gameâs forums wrote in May.
Itâs all part of the endless push and pull between game makers and players. An article Polygon published last week championing the use of save scumming in role-playing games such as Baldurâs Gate 3 and Disco Elysium quickly racked up more than 200 comments. Readers debated the practice, but most agreed with the author that itâs perfectly legitimate. (As it happens, save scumming is something I actively recommended in my beginnerâs guide to Hitman World of Assassination!) Hell, Mimimi Games wanted to encourage save scumming in Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew so strongly that the studio came up with an in-fiction explanation for quick-saving and -loading.
And anyway, upon the announcement of the Alt+F4 exploit being removed from Hitman World of Assassination, players quickly came up with workarounds â some of which involved going so far as to install additional software. Whatâs that line from Jurassic Park? Players who want to circumvent a developerâs intent will, uh, find a way.