The more I get into live-service games likeXDefiantandThe First Descendant, the more I realize that no game-as-a-service will ever match the highs of my favorite game-as-a-service:Hitman: World of Assassination.
Hitman 3 Is The Best Live Game
You might be thinking, “Andrew, that’s a single-player game!” And yes, it is. But, that’s what makes it such a great live service game. Do I like it when games are consistently updated with cool new content that keeps me engaged for years after launch? Of course. Do I like playing games with other people? Eh.
Hitman: World of Assassination is the best of both worlds: an excellent single-player game supported like a game-as-a-service. It has a metric ton of content, collecting all three games inIO’sHitman reboot trilogyin one unified launcher. That means that it has every map, the DLC levels, the additional missions that IO retroactively built into levels like Sapienza and Hawke’s Bay, the optional objectives that make each level near-endlessly replayable, and all the creative kill opportunities, all under one roof. Hitman: World of Assassination is the kind of game that you may play for hundreds of hours and still not see close to everything it has to offer. I know because, in 2021, that’s exactly what I did.
I have never gone as deep on a game as I went on (the game formerly known as) Hitman 3. There are others that have captured my imagination more deeply — Breath of the Wild — and others that I spent years longer thinking about — Ocarina of Time — but in sheer hours played, Hitman has them both beat by a few hundred.
So Why Can’t I Get Motivated To Play It Again?
And yet, I haven’t touched the game in a year-and-a-half at this point. I played a bit ofFreelancerwhen it launched back in 2023, and reviewed theAmbrose Island DLCmap when it dropped in 2022. But, aside from those brief excursions, I haven’t had a good excuse to jump back into one of my all-time favorite games. I miss it, but what am I gonna do?
This is the difficulty of being a game fan in the Way Too Many Games era. We talk about how Xbox doesn’t have high-profile exclusives and how the PS5 doesn’t have any games, and there’s some truth to both of those criticisms. But we’re also living in the busiest time in the history of the medium. It would take me the rest of the year (at least) to play through all the games that have dropped just this week across Steam, itch.io, the App store, and all the console storefronts. I’m still working throughthe crop of indies that were released over the course ofone weekback in May.
When there are so many cool, new things to play, it feels hard to justify putting more time into a game I’ve already dumped hundreds of hours into. I need to finishIndikaandFinal Fantasy 7 Rebirth, put some more time intoRise of the Ronin, get good atXDefiant, and finally return toBaldur’s Gate 3. And yet, I would enjoy playing another dozen hours of Hitman more than playing basically anything else. Maybe that, on its own, is enough reason to install World of Assassination one more time.
