Hitman’s best feature, the Elusive Target, has arrived in Hitman 3 – The Verge

Fans of Hitman’s excellent Elusive Target missions will be happy to hear that the first of these made for a Hitman 3 level is now live. The mission tasks you with hunting down “The Collector,” aka Kody Haynes, in the game’s Dartmoor map. The mission is live for 10 days starting today. It’s not the first Elusive Target to have released since Hitman 3 came out (there was a legacy mission set in Hitman 1’s Sapienza map, for instance), but it’s the first available for one of the third game’s new levels.

For those who might be unaware of Hitman’s Elusive Targets, they’re some of the funnest missions the game has to offer. Ever since the 2016 Hitman reboot, developer IO Interactive has regularly added new missions as time-limited events to its games. You get a certain number of days to complete the mission, and once it’s gone, it’s gone. You also only get one shot — so players (read: me) can’t rely on their usual trial-and-error tactics.

This time around, IO Interactive deserves kudos for coming up with a truly bizarre character for you to assassinate. Yes, he’s an art collector, but he’s also an art collector who went into hiding after embezzling money from his wife’s family’s fast-food empire (?) and insists on murdering any and all previous owners of the artwork he collects (?!). If ever a fictional character deserved to die, it’s definitely this bozo.

The Collector joins a host of colorful Elusive Targets that IO has politely requested that its players murder. Perhaps most notably, Hitman 2’s first such target was played by none other than Sean Bean. “The player can kill me any way they want,” the famously death-prone actor told The Verge in an interview, “I don’t know what to say about that.”

After The Collector, Hitman’s next Elusive Target will be The Politician, which will be available in Hitman 2’s Hawke’s Bay level starting on April 23rd.