It has been verified that an upcoming Hitman game, meant for 7th and 8th gen consoles as well as PC, has been cancelled.
This was originally confirmed on LinkedIn, where no less than the game’s senior designer, Richard Knight, updated his CV to indicate such. Now, his LinkedIn account indicates that he is prototyping games with short dev cycles for tablets. Based on information gleamed elsewhere, the game was to be called Hitman: Gun & Souls.
To be clear, this does not mean Square Enix has shut the door on Hitman completely. There is an apparent mobile game in the works that has yet to be announced. There is also an apparent new AAA game IO Interactive is working on different from this one, which may or may not prove to be the next Hitman game.
An IO community manager indirectly confirmed the cancellation of said game on Twitter. Basically, they contacted our source to clear up that the company has not given up on the franchise, but did not refute the original story itself.
We reported on a rumor last July that the company was focusing on making a Hitman game following a spate of layoffs. It’s not clear at the moment if said game was the older or newer project.
What we can safely conclude is if a Hitman game was being developed for Playstation 4 and Xbox One, among others, it would have been worked on in the same time frame as many of those console’s launch titles.
If IO Interactive has decided to make a new Hitman game from scratch, they would have abandoned whatever plans they had for what would have been a launch 8th gen title. Is it possible this new game will be exclusively 7th gen or 8th gen? Or are the changes along the lines of the scenario, game engine, etc? We hope to report on any clarification from IO Interactive soon.
Image is from Hitman Absolution.
