Hitman is now more deadly thanks to a major new patch

It’s been nearly a month since IO Interactive set us loose in Paris, and what a month it has been. Many hapless rich people have had their costumes stolen, and even more have been craftily assassinated. It’s still a while before the second instalment of Hitman arrives, but patch 1.03 should help the wait a bit: in addition to a bunch of fixes, it introduces ten new challenges to the Paris sandbox.

The “Vampire Magician” challenge pack features challenges based on what IO has learned watching people play the game. Meanwhile, loading times have been improved, in-game menus are more responsive, and a bug that resulted in players getting a “0 second” time bonus and a score of 210,000 has been fixed. Leaderboards will be reset some time in the future.

Oh, and there are a tonne of smaller improvements, ranging from quality of life fixes through to NPCs no longer having telephone conversations with dead people (although I’d argue that’s a feature). The full patch notes are over on the Steam community forums. The next episode visits Sapienza, which is in… (consults Google) Italy. That’ll hit on April 26.