[Scarlett.]

Dear Hitman fans,

We wanted to share this open letter with all of you out there eagerly awaiting more news about what’s happening next in the franchise.

At Io-Interactive right now, we are building the next AAA Hitman game for PC and next-gen consoles. It has our total focus and we wanted to take a moment to tell you a few things about it.

In the next game you will experience a globetrotting Agent 47 at the prime of his career – the apex predator stalking his prey across the world, with the support of his long-term handler Diana Burnwood and the whole of the ICA.

The game concentrates on the core Hitman fantasy of using a wide range of tools to take out a diverse group of targets across expansive, exotic locations around the world. We are building this game on the backbone of the Glacier 2 engine, using the best parts and what we have learnt through Hitman: Absolution and drawing inspiration from past titles like Contracts and Blood Money to fulfil the core Hitman fantasy. That means we’re packing in an extreme level of detail on the largest levels we have ever built for a Hitman game. We’ve adopted an open, non-linear level design approach to the game, ensuring the game will play out across huge, checkpoint-free, sandbox levels. Our aim is to create living, breathing and believable levels which will allow gamers to play around with the AI to create those unique moments every fan of the Hitman franchise loves.

Contracts Mode is back – you will be able to create and build challenges by experimenting with the large levels and possibilities within them. And of course, you can share them with the world and challenge your friends or foes to complete your hits. Your rules, your Contracts.

You will also be glad to hear that we have removed 47’s magic pockets. We believe that’s all we need to say about that subject.

As we get further into 2014, we will reveal more and get into much closer contact with all of you. There are so many things we have planned and we are extremely excited for the future of Hitman.

Thank you all for your dedication. We will share much, much more in the coming months.

[Scarlett.]

See in full resolution here

Since we posted our open letter back in January, we’ve had our heads down working on our next Hitman game. So you’ll have noticed that we have been pretty quiet, but we wanted to give you a short update about a few things.

First up, we’ve seen a lot of people talking about what we might be bringing to E3 this year. We know the worst thing is to hope for something that doesn’t turn up; so we wanted to let you know that our next Hitman is going to be under wraps for a bit longer. We’re focusing all of our time and efforts into creating the best possible Hitman game. That’s our number one priority and we don’t want to divert valuable resources to show something before it’s ready.

The good news is we’re making great progress with building exotic and expansive locations for the new game. To give you an idea of what we’re aiming for, here’s the first piece of concept art from the game. This location is set in Central Europe and you’ll be able to explore the entire building you see in the image, inside and out. For a sense of scale, the building on its own is larger than any location in Hitman Absolution.

As we move through the year, we’ll have some details to share with you and we’ll keep you posted right here on the blog. We will only lift the lid on the game once we feel we’re ready to. In the meantime, we’ll continue to answer as many of your questions as we can both in the forums and on Twitter.

On a separate note, we were happy to see so many of you enjoying Hitman GO from our friends at Square Enix Montréal. They’re pretty close to announcing new details about upcoming updates for GO as well as the first details about their second Hitman game for smartphones and tablets, we’ve been playing it here at the studio and it’s a lot of fun. Anyway, we’ll let them be the ones to tell you about it, so stay tuned for a blog post from them soon.

Thanks for your dedication, let’s stay in touch.