1. An Amusement Park
Hitman season 1 was a tremendous success, but what its six locations really lacked was a sense of humor. The game’s dark comedy was consistently present in the fantastical opportunities the locations provided, but the locations were simply realistic depictions of hotels, mansions, and city streets. Season 2 should spice up the color palette with an amusement park!
We can see it now: Agent 47 has been tasked with locating and taking down a top-level CEO that is visiting one of his most recent personal investments, an amusement park. He could infiltrate as an attendee wearing dorky shorts and a fanny pack, acquire a hotdog suit disguise, and cause a “horrible malfunction” that sends a prototype coaster off the rails as the target is testing it out. A locale like this would make for one hell of an opener to season 2, but we can only hope that IO Interactive agrees.
2. A Space Station
When we asked ourselves just how crazy IO could get with this world, this was our first answer. They’ve already proven their chops at presenting a dense and intricately designed mansion that is entirely explorable, so we have all the hope that they could design a space station (or even colonized planet environment) for Agent 47 to run rampant in.
The potential opportunities speak for themselves here: throwing your target out of the airlock without a suit, causing a terrible “accident” with their life support systems as they’re performing a space walk, crashing a shuttle into their cabin structure, etc. Plus, it’d just be cool to see how IO handles a stealthy environment with low gravity. It’d definitely be the boldest place 47 has dared to travel to, but it’s not all that unbelievable for the greatest assassin the world has ever seen.
3. A Military Forward Operating Base
In season 1, we got to see 47 don military garments in several instances, but this would be a much bigger operation. Whether it involves infiltrating disguised as a photojournalist, contract worker for the CIA, or even a grunt soldier himself, this would be a tough assignment in which stealth and line-of-sight would be key. One slip-up, and you’re likely facing someone carrying a gun.
The target could be a general, prisoner of war being held nearby, or anything really. The opportunities could get pretty explosive. Maybe you hijack a tank/helicopter and rain down hellfire, maybe a 47 disguised as the general orders a drone strike in a very wrong place, or maybe 47 sends the location of the base to an opposing force to cause mass havoc.
4. A Game Show
Before you ask, we’re thinking a fast-moving show like The Price is Right would be a good format for this specific hit, because the target would be an evil game show host and one of their other associates, possibly a sound engineer or producer. Security is extremely tight for these sorts of things, so Agent 47 would have to get more creative than a simple bullet.
We envision some fun opportunities with this one, like rigging the contestant picking so that 47 is called onto the stage for an up-close encounter with the target. Alternatively, that big wheel of prizes might go rolling off its hinges, or that “brand new car” could mysteriously run them down. We can also foresee a scenario in which 47 acquires the host’s disguise and lures the second target out by unsuccessfully running the show.
5. A LARPing Festival
The camera pans over a grand castle (made of cardboard and paper mache, mostly). A crowd of fun-loving individuals in knight, elf, wizard, and goblin costumes roam the street conversing, battling, and consuming mana potions. The camera rests on Agent 47 at the entrance of the castle, duffle bag containing a barbarian costume in-hand. This mission is gonna be awesome.
Your target? Well, you know they’re wearing a knight costume, but you definitely don’t know which one. There’s a lot of fun to be had with this idea, like replacing the plastic guillotine with the genuine article, breathing dragon fire upon your target, and the opportunity for 47 to display his hand-to-hand skills with a wooden sword.
6. A Hotel of Assassins
A hotel is by no means new grounds for Hitman, but this locale would come with a pretty fascinating twist. If you’ve ever seen John Wick, you’re already familiar with the hotel that acts as a bastion for contract assassins on the job. The only rule: no violence on hotel grounds.
Imagine a mission that puts Agent 47 in the uncomfortable position of having to off a fellow assassin in the one place that it’s off-limits. He’d have to be extra careful, as a room full of assassins would be a lot harder to fool, and much easier to become suspicious of “accidents.” Even so, 47 might not be the only one bending the rules of the hotel, and he might need to watch his own back along the way.
7. Washington D.C.
This wouldn’t be Agent 47’s first trip to the nation’s capital, but where that mission had him skulking around the White House, we see this as an opportunity for him to act as a counter-assassin.
What if his target was a potential assassin going after a politician? This would introduce an interesting layer to the traditional Hitman formula, as you’d have to still act from the shadows while trying to prevent a tragedy in the first place.
The opportunities here would land on elaborate ways to ruin the assassin’s day, like sneaking up to their sniping post and taking them down, or even causing a larger ruckus that leads the politician to safety. This would be another tough mission, and the subject matter would need to be handled with sensitivity, but the results could be a pretty thrilling challenge.
8. Westworld
What if the biggest challenge in a mission was parsing the real humans from the androids? That’s the idea behind a Hitman mission in which Agent 47 infiltrates an amusement park that perfectly recreates the old Wild West, like HBO’s Westworld.
Besides the fun of being in a realistic recreation of the West, this mission could bring the fun challenges of working with a limited set of older weaponry and finding the secret passages that reveal the futuristic tech powering everything behind the scenes. 47 could disguise himself as one of the androids and take the target on a “new adventure” that may or may not end with them falling off of a cliff or into a pit of bandits. Or maybe 47 reprograms an android to cause some deadly mayhem at his behest.
9. A Zoo
It’s almost surprising that a zoo hasn’t been done yet in the Hitman universe, but we see this as a night mission. Most of the guests have left, and most of who remains is the night crew and a host of carnivorous animals that haven’t been fed yet. They have no idea he’s coming.
The opportunities speak for themselves here, like locking your target in an animal cage, drowning them in the water habitat, causing a stampede–the potential “accidents” are abundant. Mostly, we’d like a chance to make 47 pet some big animals, the pinnacle of in-game mechanics.
10. Running of the Bulls
This would be a classic “Agent 47 in a big space with a lot of people” sort of mission, but the opportunities at hand would be pretty awesome. The Running of the Bulls is always a fun spectacle in Spain, and it’d make for the perfect backdrop of distraction for Hitman’s purposes.
We’ll get the most obvious opportunity here out of the way: shoving the target in front of the bulls to get trampled. That’s a pretty bad way to go, but there are plenty of traditional ways to tackle this one, including distraction, poison, and drowning heads in toilets. This could also be a good venue for Hitman to place an alternate angle to the mission, like in Sapienza, where the third target was a disease that needed to be destroyed. We’d love to see further experimentation with mission structure to not only involve assassination but still satisfy that aspect of the game.
Published: Dec 23, 2016 12:21 pm