I just got screwed on an elusive target in a pretty hilarious way

My only regret is that I don't have video. I was playing on PS5, which I think even has a function to capture the previous 30 seconds if you're on the ball about it. But the whole thing was so astonishing that it never occurred to me.

I was playing the current double-target on Sapienza. I believe the Congressman target was an old target from the first game, and that the second target was added to spice everything up.

I wanted to use the opportunity to play with one of the game's significant new toys: the Sieker, a gun that fires an emetic dart. I guess this thing actually got introduced in Hitman 2, but that's the one out of the three games that I didn't play all that much (after maxing mastery on every map in the first game and not having it carry over, I didn't feel like doing mastery grinding again, so I pretty much only played all the H2 levels once or twice and then stopped).

Anyway, it seemed to me that the Sieker would be a pretty hack way to get easy Silent Assassin ratings on these missions: just shoot the targets with a dart when everybody's back is turned, then follow them to the bathroom, murder them, hide the body, and Bob's your uncle.

So I did some test runs. It took me a bit to figure out that the darts have a big arc on them, so you have to aim above your target in some cases and can't be too far away. But eventually I got to where I was hitting the guy outside a cafe (the new target) consistently while hidden behind stuff. Then I'd follow him and choke him out--without actually killing him, so I could practice on the other guy.

Then I did a couple of runs on the Congressman inside the mansion. That wasn't so bad, either. He had a few bodyguards following him around, but all I had to do, again, was wait until everyone's back was to me, then shoot the dart into the Congressman, and once again follow him to bathroom. I did that twice, and finally decided I was good to go for real.

So, I dart guy #1. I follow him to the bathroom, where I choke him out, and then I snap his neck. No going back now. I go and get my mansion guard costume and head to the mansion, to the library room on the first floor where I'd practiced darting the Congressman. I wait a bit.

Finally my target walks in with his bodyguards. After pausing for a moment, he walks further into the room, and his guards start to follow. I'm behind them all. I pull out my Sieker, fire, and hit. I even hear a line of dialogue about needing to go to the bathroom or something like that. But the guy doesn't really pause like they usually do when they get hit with an emetic. He just keeps walking slowly in the direction he'd been going. And then...

He flies up into the sky.

I mean, he just suddenly seemed to rapidly float upwards, through the ceiling. I couldn't see him anywhere. He was just gone. WTF?

Then I notice his guards are moving. Oh, right. They're programmed to follow the guy around wherever he goes. So I decide to follow them, hoping they'll take me to wherever he ended up. That's what I do, and eventually they lead me to the roof of the mansion, just above the spot where my target had flown straight upwards. Then they sit there staring into space, doing nothing.

I waited for a few minutes. Nothing happened. I tried looking up at the sky to see if I could see him stuck way up in space somewhere. No dice. The target menu still read as one killed and one still alive... even though the second target was now completely out of my reach, through no fault of my own.

So in the end, I had to just quit and fail the target. I don't think there was any fixing that. I had locked in the first target, so there's no way to attempt it again. The game screwed me good and proper.

But... eh? I guess I don't really care? I had already gotten enough Silent Assassin ratings on elusive targets in past games to earn me all the rewards I could get from it (not the Suit Only Silent Assassin ones, but the standard SA rating challenges), so it wasn't really for anything other than pride. And I now have a story to tell about a really dumb bug. C'est la vie.

* * * * *

FWIW I did a quick search and came upon this old video of somebody actually engineering 47 flying off the map. Based on how he got this glitch to work, I'm guessing I must have done something similar unintentionally with this NPC--interrupted an action of his at just the wrong time.

That's madness, I had a moment during the run through it where the mansion target just locked into a loop that made me very worried that he wouldn't touch the carefully poisoned drink out for him. Thankfully a tiny jostle from a disguised 47 made him carry on his merry way to lethal wine. However, after many hours into Hitman 1 & 2 I would occasionally get glitches where NPCs would freeze or go into mini loops, but Hitman 3 has had some staggeringly fabulous glitches.

My personal favourite I've experienced so far was returning to the village in the Santa Fortuna mission dressed as the Shaman to see four people in a completely straight line, step towards me, all start their 'I'm following you' dialogue, T-Pose and then ascend to heaven like jump jets. No sure what triggered that to happen.

Heh. Glad to know I'm not the only one playing this game who's seeing NPCs randomly flying off into space. :-D

But this was actually my first experience of a weird glitch like that in this game. And a spent a decent chunk of time on it getting mastery unlocks, too! Had to happen during an elusive target... *shakes head*

"I have to go now, my planet needs me."

NOTE: THE CONGRESSMAN DIED ON HIS WAY TO HIS PLANET

MISSION COMPLETE, SILENT ASSASSIN

The guy in the dark suit I took out through some classic hitman madness involving an overflowing sink and a series of dudes getting knocked out in the same small room.

And then I somehow pulled off this sniper shot from across the street to get the guy in the white suit:

https://gamerdvr.com/gamer/harpua418/video/126927780

Fun stuff! Hitman 3 is great.

edit: I've played a good amount of Hitman 3 at this point and I haven't seen people flying off into heaven. That's hilarious. A little minor jank here and there, but nothing that's broken a run for me.

Aww, thanks, loud and authoritative all-caps disembodied voice! I did win after all! :-P

As long as you can stand the frustration and loss of time, those kind of occurrences can be fun, and sometimes kind of awe-inspiring.

Reminds me of that one T-form in Mass Effect, Andromeda, that turned some banal mission into some sort of Mystical experience, and following that, an ascension into Heaven.

Good Stuff!

And who could forget the Doctor's head rolling around on his shoulders at the beginning of Fall-out 4...

Welp, as it turns out, there's a weird follow-up to this whole experience of mine.

I fired the game up again tonight planning to just do some random escalations or something. It was the first time I had turned on the game since the elusive target had bugged out on me. And lo and behold, what do I discover: the elusive target was not marked as failed on my profile. Huh?

And then I did a quick search and realized something I hadn't known. If you simply quit the application after a failure like the one I had, then you can actually try again. And that's exactly what I'd done, quit to the dashboard of my PS5 rather than exit the mission within the game. I ran the exact same strategy that I had tried the first time--this time opting to record my hit on the second target just in case the same weird bug happened again--and this time it all went off without a hitch, and I got my silent assassin completion. Good thing, too, because I realized tonight that I was on the wrong tab for elusive target achievements, so there's still stuff for me to get. Just cosmetics, but still.

Not sure how I feel about the "quit the app" workaround on these things. It legitimately saved my ass this time in a situation where I really did deserve another shot. But it also cheapens the tension and the achievement of it, knowing that you can actually retry without penalty, as long as you don't die or quit within the game.

Still, in this case I got to have my cake and eat it too: tell a fun story and also get the completion I wanted. Huzzah! Can't complain too much about that.

@atheistpreacher: Glad you got to finish it (or have the possibility to fail on your own terms) finally. I found out about the quitting situation watching a speedrunner this weekend who was suggesting there had been previous from some of the elusive targets bugging out and this was handy to have in the brain bank should it happen.

I've missed so many of them (the very short window of opportunity in the first one made them tough, I think Hitman 2 I missed a lot because after the first few I'd very much overdosed on Hitman at that point) I am quite happy with the rolling out of a few repeats. Finally giving some of the escalations a go too - nothing feels more like playing in the Caravella-style than some of those lead me to - very much a break in my usual methods.

Nah, that wouldn't work, because your Hitman profile data is a server-side cloud thing. So if you fail it and it registers as failed on IO's end, that's it, no backing up of data is going to help. It's why you can't use any of your mastery unlocks if you get disconnected from the internet (which people justifiably complain about). Whereas Bloodborne is all just local save data.

I believe you can back up your in-level saves, but there's no saving allowed in elusive targets, so...