IO Interactive co-owner and chief creative officer Christian Elverdam recently joined Eurogamer Podcasts for a one-to-one interview where he confirmed that HITMAN is now on hiatus, with the studio busy on other games like Project 007 and Project Dragon (the online fantasy RPG that was finally confirmed two weeks ago).
Right now, obviously, as a major new HITMAN game, that's a little bit on hiatus as we're building another agent fantasy that's also taking up a lot of our time.
But obviously, we'll come back to our beloved Agent 47. He's still very much in the heart of this company, so I think and I hope we can have our cake and eat it, too. In the sense that we have such a wonderful platform, we can keep experimenting with what the formula can do and what people expect of it.
And then, at some point, obviously, as any creative, it would be nice to then go in and say 'Okay, with everything we've learned, what would that be if we had to re-articulate a sandbox? What would HITMAN look like? I think that's a super interesting question as well.
Later in the podcast, Elverdam also briefly touched upon the subject of Project 007.
There's obviously not so much we can disclose right now because we're working on it. I think we can say a few things. It's extremely inspiring to work with the people who are behind everything Bond. From my perspective, I've been used to defending Agent 47. People want to do things with our franchise, and you kind of feel that stewardship. Obviously for them, that is their role in the Bond franchise, so for us, it's been about finding a mutual understanding of what James Bond is about. As we talked about, we're doing an origin because...To show the trust they have instilled in us is that we were allowed to build a James Bond for the games, which I think is a profound homage to where our industry is and where the medium is in the sense that yes, it's time to have a James Bond character who was not a movie character but who's actually comfortably just his own game character. Getting to earn that trust has been very humbling and we feel a little bit honored.
[...] The journey we're on right now is trying to understand... On one hand, I think we can safely say we're very good at the agent fantasy with everything we've learned with our HITMAN franchise, and now we're kind of rediscovering new sides of the agent fantasy with James Bond.
As for HITMAN, you can always play the Freelancer mode released earlier this year. A short while ago, we also published an exclusive interview with Freelancer co-directors Jonas Breum Jensen and Torbjorn Vinther Christensen.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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