The July Roadmap for HITMAN 2 has arrived with a lot of new content on the horizon for all players!
We’ve got hot Challenge Packs, Featured Contracts, a Legacy Elusive Target, Escalation Contracts and more! All wrapped in this month’s theme “Jungle Music” (previously known as ‘Jungle Summer’)
After all that music, you’ll need a silent retreat, therefore we’re also stepping a bit out of the theme this month and going to one of the coldest and harshest environments on the planet far away from music and jungle summer vibes on July 30th with the release of The Prison; a new Sniper Assassin map that is coming to all owners of the HITMAN 2 Expansion Pass.
Read the full blog post here and get a great visual summary with our very own Community Developer, Clemens, in the July Roadmap Trailer:
Hitman 2 is preparing for a hot, loud summer full of killer musicians and killing musicians, kicking off tomorrow, July 4, with The Babayeva Dissonance. It's an escalation contract where you'll be blowing up a noisy band on the Isle of Sgail. Agent 47 apparently doesn't appreciate a good tune.
On July 4, Agent 47—no doubt wracked with guilt over the last contract—will try to make amends by joining a band himself. The 'I'm with the Band' challenge pack will make you the newest member of the Santa Fortuna band and give you five band-related challenges to complete. Success means you get your very own violin.
July 18's featured contracts will carry on the musical theme, with Io asking for submissions that fit the theme of 'tone death'. You've got until July 15 to submit your entry, and the best of the bunch will appear a few days later. The next day, you'll also get another crack at the Badboy elusive target, but you'll need to the Legacy Pack if you want to give it a shot.
Another escalation contract will appear on July 25, sending you back to Santa Fortuna to blow more stuff up. Completing the Calvino Cacophony escalation with net you the Hot Summer Suit, which makes Agent 47 look like a serial killer on his holiday. It suits him.
Finally, on July 30 Hawke's Bay will be added to contract mode, and anyone with a free IOI account will get a trio of anniversary outfits. If you've got the expansion pass, you'll also get the second Sniper Assassin map, sending you to an extremely chilly prison. Mastering this map will unlock the Druzhina 34 ICA Arctic sniper rifle. A game update will drop on the same day.
Busy July for assassins, then. Do assassins take holidays, I wonder, or is it just working holidays? I get it—it's hard to escape work when your attached to your phone or, indeed, your silenced pistol.
I’ve been playing the new Hitman 2 level for about ten minutes when I decide that Ian Hitman needs some change. Not change in the Smashmouth sense where the bloke earnestly asks him for some money and he responds by uselessly philosophising at him in F# major for a bit, but actual hard currency. Maybe an artisan market has popped up in the high street and they’re cash only, but he wants to buy himself some baklava. Maybe he needs a quid to play Time Crisis. Maybe I’m of a mind to test the sequence of events and player-agnostic world. There’s no way to ever know for sure. But whatever the reason is, Ian Hitman is still queuing in the bank.
11:00 am: The queues are pretty short. Things are looking good.
When Ian Hitman isn’t hitting men, he’s apparently knitting his own cold-weather ensemble. At least, that’s what he says in the trailer for the New York bank mission DLC coming to Hitman 2 tomorrow. I see no reason not to believe him, as he’s very candid for a man of mystery and murder. The first full, regular mission coming to the stab-puzzle sandbox since launch, The Bank looks like a gloriously dense machine full of bustling NPCs playing out their deliciously fragile routines. While you’re there, you might as well off the bank’s director and raid the vault, I suppose. Below, a trailer.
Hitman 2's first major new location, a New York-set bank level, is finally coming tomorrow. The trailer above gives you an idea of what to expect: a heavily-guarded bank, naturally, and an introduction to the deserving target you'll be taking out, director Athena Savalas.
This level will open up for Expansion Pass, Silver Edition and Gold Edition owners on PC at June 25, 6 pm BST / 10 am PT. The bank level has previously been described as a 'sandbox location', so it'll hopefully be comparable to Hitman 2's existing murder puzzles boxes. It'll launch with contracts mode enabled, and feature 15 levels of location mastery.
Here's more on your target, from IO Interactive. "Over the years, Savalas has also developed a refined disdain for the middle class, reducing customers to numbers on sheets of paper with no thought to the things she destroys with her constant 'less is more' approach to small and medium-sized businesses. Rumors of wanton gambling with client money and the bank’s finances are beginning to catch up to her and with the board of directors looking for a new CEO of Milton-Fitzpatrick, Savalas is eagerly covering her tracks, using any means necessary." A nasty banker sounds like a solid pick for a Hitman 2 target in 2019.
If you're interested in more details about how the bank was made, IO Interactive ran a livestream today explaining the bank's creation. I've embedded that below for your convenience. How big is too big, when you're making a bank level? That's among the subjects discussed in detail.
Another Hitman 2 level and location will be added to the game later this year.
Quake II - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Katharine Castle)
The number of confirmed ray tracing games for [cms-block] and selected GTX graphics cards has just got a little bit longer. With E3 2019 in full swing, Nvidia have confirmed that both Watch Dogs Legion and the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare will also be getting full ray tracing support, and in the case of Call of Duty, adaptive shading support as well.
That ray tracing games list is still pretty small, admittedly, and the number of games you can find it in right now> can almost be counted on a single hand. Indeed, a lot of confirmed RTX games are yet to receive their ray tracing and performance-boosting DLSS support, so the list below is more of a complete ‘this is how many games will have it eventually’ kind of thing than ‘these are all the games you can play with ray tracing right this very second’. Still, if you’re currently on the fence about buying one of Nvidia’s RTX 2060, RTX 2070, RTX 2080 or RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards as opposed to one of the new [cms-block] GPUs, this guide should hopefully help you decide whether ray tracing is something worth investing in. Here’s every confirmed ray tracing and DLSS game we know about so far.
IO Interactive has detailed what's coming up for Hitman 2 over the next month.
In its June roadmap (thanks, PC Gamer), the Hitman 2 report that "a ton of new content is on the horizon for all players" as the month kicks off its new theme, "Greed Kills". As well as a new Challenge Pack, Featured and Escalation Contracts and a new Double Elusive Target, we can also expect new sandbox location, The Bank, to roll out on 25th June.
"'The Bank' will include a new campaign mission titled 'Golden Handshake' and takes Agent 47 to an investment bank in the United States," IO1 explained in the update. "Expect new gameplay opportunities, new challenges to earn location mastery and new unlocks that will change the way you play."
