With the first season of Hitman now wrapped up, Io Interactive says that today's November update is the first in a series of "major game updates that will tweak the game and add new content leading up to the launch of the disc-based edition early next year, and beyond that into season two." The biggest change in this patch is the addition of an "Offline Profile," which makes all the rewards you've earned in the live game accessible even when you're disconnected.
That means all Mastery items, including weapons, gear, and starting/pickup locations, plus Elusive Target suit rewards and Challenge Pack unlocks, are yours to use as you like when you're away from the internet's sweet embrace. (Hey, it happens sometimes, right?) You'll need to connect to the game servers once to acquire your Hit-stuff locally, but after that you're as free as a bald bird in a well-tailored suit.
The update also makes a "stability sweep" through the game to fix various sorts of crashes and instability, adds an "opportunity completion checkmark" to simplify the process of tracking your progress toward claiming achievements, rewards capable players with a "Silent Assassin" rating on the scoring screen (when they've earned one), overhauls the statistics page, and adds a "success state" indicator to contracts.
My favorite addition is a new move that didn't work out quite like it was supposed to: The ability to pull enemies over balconies or out of windows, Sam Fisher-like, while you're hanging below them. "Unfortunately, there is a known issue for this move: NPCs that see this move will not blame 47, even if they are looking directly at the NPC or at 47," the studio wrote. It's apparently too late to do anything about it now, so the plan is to let players abuse it to their hearts' content until the rollout of the December update, when the feature will be removed. It will be brought back into action in January, around the same time as the disc-based release.
The Hitman November update is about 2.1GB in size, and "mandatory" for all players. Full details are available on Steam.
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