Its hard to believe its been a year since we first announced Hitman: Absolution. A lot of stuff has been going on in the past year - from sharing the first gameplay at E3 2011 and releasing the full 16 minutes for everyone to see afterwards to showing off the gorgeous orphanage level, launching the Barcode Society, revealing the fate of 47s long-time handler Diana, showing off new features like Instinct and introducing exciting new gameplay series of videos called Introducing, we can safely say the fans have been with us through quite a ride thus far.
And so, on this anniversary of sorts, we find it fitting to announce not one but two great things. One is the release date of Hitman: Absolution. We know youve been waiting for this for some time now and its with great pleasure we can let everyone know that November 20th is the day that needs to get a big, fat circle around it in your calendars.
Now, the second announcement, which you may have already seen some chatter about online, is the pre-order bonus that were releasing on May 15th in just five days. This is the Hitman: Sniper Challenge, a way for us to say thanks and we love you to all the dedicated fans who have been waiting these last few years for a new Hitman experience. The team has been hard at work to create a great game for the Hitman fans and weve tried out many different things in the process. One of those things was an early prototype for sniper gameplay. It started out as two grey boxes with 47 on top of one and a target way off in the distance on the other. A few more items were added to shake things up a little and the thing was shared internally to see if it worked or not. It didnt take long for the code to go viral across all of IO Interactive. Leaderboards were built, people started spending more and more time on it and we realized that this was something awesome. So we decided to expand upon it and make it in to a gift to everyone out there. A few of the guys rounded up some internal resources and started building the level out as a bonus to the fans that had been waiting for so long already.
So, heres how it works. The Hitman: Sniper Challenge is a stand-alone hit, only available for Hitman: Absolution pre-orders. As the original assassin, youll unpack your Agency Kazo TRG sniper rifle, scope out the penthouse balcony of one Mr. Richard Strong Jr., CEO of Stallion Armaments and soon-to-be dead guy. And the great thing is you get to play it immediately upon pre-order! Take out Mr. Strong Jr. and his entire staff of bodyguards, score big on the leaderboards and unlock equipment upgrades and carry it over to Hitman: Absolution when the game comes out on November 20th. All you need to do is pre-order the game with one or more selected retailers in your country, get the redeem code, boot up your PS3 or Xbox360 and grab the Sniper Challenge from May 15th and on. Thats it. That should have you covered. Now please enjoy the announcement video for even more greatness. Please note that this is the US version of the trailer where Gamestop has this outstanding pre-order exclusively.
Now, you may have noticed that we didnt mention PC up there. Its not because we hate PC, in fact 47 made his debut on PC and IO have always loved the PC-based fans we have. Were building a PC version thats not a port from the other versions and adding liberal amounts of PC-only features in there but that also takes some time to get right. Sometime after E3, we will reveal a lot more about the PC version of the game, which incidentally is also set to go out on November 20th as well, so no delays there. So for that reason, were looking to bring Sniper Challenge to PC through Steam on August 1st to allow it to truly shine.
We truly hope youll enjoy it as much as we have. And dont forget November 20th is the day of Absolution.
http://www.barcode-society.com/weblog/sniper-challenge-release-date
