IO Interactive has teased a Colombian jungle level for Hitman 2, and it'll be full of enemies dressed in big blue ponchos and dense shrubbery in which to hide their bodies.

I love the contrast between the bad guys' waterproof ponchos—the kind I'm only used to seeing people wearing in theme parks (although I presume they're actually used in jungles too)—and the mean assault rifles they're carrying. The jungle looks dark and dense, perfect for creeping around in, and buildings are sparse, which should make it feel different to other levels in the game. Perhaps it'll also nod to the Colombian jungle mission way back in Hitman: Codename 47, the first game in the series, which would be neat.

The teaser video shows Agent 47 pulling an enemy into some long grass, but doesn't give us an idea of how you'll approach your mission. I'm interested to see whether IO can make the level feel free and open—which is what you'd hope for in a jungle level—while subtly funneling players down particular paths. Will you be able to explore the whole thing, or will there be hills or dense forests that block your path, ensuring you end up at a particular spot? Let's wait and see.

Hitman 2 is out in November, and it'll include updated versions of Hitman 1's levels as DLC. We've already got a look at its dazzling Miami level, and watched Agent 47 kill a man with a fish. I can't wait for it and, unlike Hitman 1, it won't be episodic, so you can play through the whole thing on release day. 

Just about all the news from Gamescom 2018 was overshadowed earlier today when CD Projekt finally released Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay footage. But let's not entirely forget about last week. Europe's massive gaming show brought us a huge hardware announcement, new gameplay videos, hands-on previews, and even a story about poop that didn't really happen.

You can read all our coverage of Gamescom 2018 here, and there's more to come throughout this week. For now, we're reflecting on the best stories that emerged from the sea of bodies that overtook Cologne last week. What was your favorite Gamescom announcement or news story? Let us know in the comments! 

Jarred Walton: The RTX cards, of course

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2080 announcement was pretty awesome (aside from the part about the prices of RTX series cards). There was all sorts of speculation on how many cores would be in the new Turing GPUs, and how fast they would be, and then Nvidia dropped the ray tracing bomb on us, opening what is likely a new chapter in real-time graphics. 

There's a lot more going on in Turing than anyone expected, including Tensor cores that can be put to use for enhancing graphics and not just AI—or AI-enhanced graphics if you prefer. The reworked GPU pipeline and architecture on its own would have been a nice upgrade from the GTX 10-series. 

Nvidia is calling the RTX 20-series the biggest jump in graphics performance and features since it first introduced CUDA cores ten years ago. I'm inclined to agree, and I can't wait to get hardware and put these bad boys through the wringer. If you've been thinking about upgrading to a new GPU, you should probably wait until September 20 before buying anything.

Wes Fenlon:  Hitman 2, retroactive 

This is such a cool idea. Last week IO Interactive announced that all of the changes they've made to Hitman 2, like new ways to hide, new weapons, improved AI, will be incorporated into the missions from the previous Hitman game as DLC. And if you already own Hitman, you'll be able to replay the game with all those new elements in place for free. For a systems-driven sim like Hitman, that could dramatically change how you approach assassinations in those older missions, giving you new ways to play through levels you'd previously mastered. Just the AI changing alone could make old strategies obsolete. Even though Hitman 2 isn't episodic, this feels like a clever extension of the episodic development, to me. Those older missions take on new dimensions as they continue to iterate on new ideas for Hitman 2. What a great bonus for Hitman fans.

 Christopher Livingston: Coffee break

I do three things in this life: use a PC, stop using my PC so I can get up and make coffee, and drink coffee. If I could have this PC from Gamescom that has a coffee maker built into it, I could shear all that pointless walking back and forth out of my life and have more time to use my PC and drink my coffee.

James Davenport: Ray tracing 

Ray tracing as a concept wasn't announced at Gamescom, obviously, but we got to see how it'll look in some big games. I don't think the average person cares much about 'true' lighting and I don't know how long it'll take until the average PC can even handle ray tracing at decent framerates and resolutions, but I'm excited about the possibilities, subtle as they might be. 

For one, natural lighting will change how developers conceive of scenes. Artificial and hidden lights do the trick now, but ray tracing will allow devs to light scenes naturally, thinking of them like they might a movie set. Based on my understanding of the tech, it's going to one day save a ton of time and make lighting scenes far more accessible. But as a player, I'm mostly excited about what it means for horror. During the Metro: Exodus demo, a monster was completely hidden in the rafters above a dimly lit room. Without the need for soft ambient lighting cast across an entire scene, ray tracing will allow for darkness where it naturally occurs. If light wouldn't bounce into a dark corner, it won't with ray tracing either. Imagine a scene where the only light is a tiny flame. A monster could be feet from your face and you wouldn't know it. It's going to be awful. 

Evan Lahti: Shortest Trip to Earth

About time we got some proper follow-ups on FTL that adds granularity and complexity to its ideas instead of simply selectively picking from them. Interestingly, Shortest Trip to Earth was being designed before FTL came out, but it's surely taken some inspiration from Subset's classic, and it looks promising. Crew members have customizable loadouts, and they board enemy vessels in shuttles rather than teleporting. Sam describes some random events that sound wonderfully Dwarf Fortressy in his story from Gamescom: "You'll discover one planet with strange mushrooms, and if you bring them back to your ship, they'll release spores that grow into living humans."

Tyler Wilde: There was no poop

There was a lot to digest at Gamescom, but the first story to pass through our work chat on Friday required the most research of all of them. We had to know: Did someone really poop in a bag in the Fortnite line, and then leave the bag on the floor, causing people to step in it, spreading poop all over Gamescom? I spoke to some people I knew who were at the convention, and they told me that while conditions were indeed smelly, they had not heard about any poop. There were also no photos on social media. Eventually, Epic stated that no bag pooping occurred. That's one urban legend debunked. I'm glad we were able to get this one right, and I appreciate Andy Chalk for being willing to email an Epic representative to ask them about a bag of crap. I am also thankful that no one at Gamescom actually had to suffer through this made-up poop crime.

IO Interactive and Warner Bros announced today that every location from Hitman Season 1 (Paris, Sapienza, Marrakesh, Bangkok, Colorado, Hokkaido) will be available as DLC in Hitman 2, and will be updated into parity with Hitman 2's new missions—that's with updated combat AI, new items, new difficulty levels, and so on. 

The missions will be sold as DLC in a 'Legacy Pack' (price TBA), but will be free for owners of Hitman Season 1 "without any additional costs" when Hitman 2 releases, according to the press release.

Last year, IO went independent in a management buyout, holding onto the Hitman IP as it parted with Square Enix. Still, a studio offering maps made under its old publisher in a game with a new publisher, rather than the whole series being locked up in a rights nightmare, is a games industry miracle. 

Putting aside that rare bit of cross-publisher magic, IO and WB also announced a statement of intent for Hitman 2, which they're calling 'World of Assassination'—a pledge to offer "a continuous experience that will never stop growing." 

Basically, they're going to keep adding stuff to the game, and that includes the standalone, co-op Sniper Assassin mode, which will "receive new maps alongside the main game."

You can check out the World of Assassination announcement trailer above. Hitman 2 will be out November 13, and presumably instructions will be included then for Hitman Season 1 owners who want to download the updated missions.

To be a good hitman requires many different skills. You need finely tuna-d senses. You need to be in the right plaice at the right time. Above all, you need to blend into the crowd, and avoid looking… suspicious.

You also need to make the best of the situation, and use whatever weapons come to hand, just like Agent 47 does in this new Hitman 2 video.

Titled “How to Hitman”, the video is mainly about showing off Hitman 2’s immersive qualities. Centring around the game’s Miami racetrack mission, the video promises more “expanded” levels than 2016’s episodic reboot. This would be pretty impressive given how missions such as the brilliant Sapienza could hardly be described as small.

In addition, the video discusses how missions will evolve depending on the way players approach their objective. “Thanks to the game’s revolutionary AI, characters react to organic, and inorganic changes to their environment accordingly, creating a domino effect that can have vast repercussions.” The video demonstrates this by showing the same scene of a racing podium, but with two different racers stood at the top of it.

The video also shows us Agent 47 going about his business in his typically multifaceted style, knocking out guards, sniping from rooftops, blowing up racecars with remote bombs. The highlight, however, comes just after the minute mark, when 47 batters an NPC with a fish on a gangway. Monty Python would be proud.

With Hitman 2 launching on the November 13, no doubt we’ll be seeing even more creative kills trickling out of IO Interactive in the coming months. This one will take some beating however.

I think everyone is, at the very least, mildly concerned about Hitman 2. The 2016 episodic series was awesome and revolutionary, and it really seemed like IO Interactive had stumbled onto a formula that could keep Agent 47's macabre adventures alive and fresh forever. But then the wheels fell off in a profoundly mystifying corporate debacle. Square Enix made it clear they weren't interested in funding the company any further, so IO bought themselves out and migrated over to Warner Bros. In the week before E3, Warner Bros. officially unveiled Hitman 2, stating that it will ditch the serial format in favor of a full-length story campaign that, at least nominally, echoes some of the disappointments people had with Hitman: Absolution. Still, I walked into my demo hoping that IO can still deliver the amazing, labyrinthine death traps they perfected in 2016.

So far, so good. I got a chance to play Sniper Assassin, a mini game that exists outside of the full campaign that's available to everyone right now if you pre-order Hitman 2. In it, Agent 47 is perched on a mossy hideaway with a sniper rifle, overseeing a royal wedding full of rich idiots. You're instructed to take out three primary targets with your sniper rifle, which is strange when you consider how the series has always de-emphasized gunplay. 47 is locked into place—no coins, or garrote wire, or disguises. It is a shooting gallery masquerading as Hitman, and on paper, that reads pretty damning.

But miraculously, Sniper Assassin does an excellent job of blending all the elements that made the episodes great into its limited premise. You can target chandeliers to bring them down onto unsuspecting guests. You can blow up the wedding cake, which causes a distraction and lures one of your hits outside. You can destroy the beer bottles that a base jumper is enjoying on a distant mountainside, which causes him to muster up the nerves to jump. All of the twisted, modular Hitman logic is there, which is especially impressive considering IO limited my toolset to a firearm.

It's heartening to know that Warner Bros. realizes the ingredients of the Hitman Renaissance start and end with astute, multi-layered level design—the sort of contraptions that kept us coming back over and over again to chase down elusive targets and pull off increasingly convoluted kills. The only time this series stumbles is when it leans too hard into its thin-lipped narrative, or the occasional too-linear map. But from what I played, IO is still very much working within the formula of the reboot. God bless any game that lets me put a .50 caliber round through pastry. You know, for strategic purposes.