Is it just me, or is Level 20 Mastery significantly more difficult in Hitman 3? I am noticing that you have to complete just about every challenge to reach Level 20, which is a significant increase compared to Hitman 1 or Hitman 2. Feels a little more grindy...

Agreed. I was excited to get full mastery in all of the levels but it took me about 10 hours to get it for the first level. It was really fun and you have to listen to the in game dialogue to learn how to do the challenges but, I’m kind of burned out. I’ll get back to the rest of them later. It shouldn’t take as long since I’m better at the game now though.

I can't say I noticed it when playing it upon release but thinking about it, Berlin and Dubai in particular did seem like a bit of a very slow progression to unlock things. I always had a trouble unlocking things on the maps I wasn't as keen on though (although I do like Dubai, not so much Berlin) - Colorado and Mumbai both seemed to be real grinds for me to unlock fully, but I think I also found them quite hard to do the challenges with how I tend to want to play the game. In contrast I managed to unlock almost all of Dartmoor pretty quickly but mostly because the time to get through the level was always pretty speedy compared to some of the other maps.

@skuski: I completely agree and honestly it kind of stalled my enjoyment of the game. Knowing that I would probably never achieve mastery on levels where the challenges were to elaborate and I would have to Google them just kind of discouraged me

I've went back to the first series to get my mastery up. Marrakesh has really stalled me. Sapienza felt the same but that was probably down to Paris being so open. You have so much freedom of movement in that level.

Really? I've hit 20 faster for all levels than the other 2 hitmen. Guess I got good

Dubai definitely felt grindy, but generally I've found mastery to be pretty easy since the Hitman 2-era change where you can get mastery points just for playing, instead of tying them exclusively to the challenges.

It's not harder, there are just fewer challenges in the new levels.

This. The old games have more escalations and even whole extra bonus missions that you can get mastery XP from, so you can skip a lot of the more tedious challenges. But for the new levels there's very little extra stuff, so you pretty much just have to do it all if you want max mastery. That should change with time, but for now, yeah, it's definitely kind of a grind.

You hit the nail on the head. It’s not that the game is more challenging or anything like that. It’s that there are less challenges per level. If I remember correctly, I had to do all but one challenge on Dartmoor to unlock mastery. In the past Hitman games there were so many challenges that you didn’t need to do them all to get mastery (especially Sapienza and Marrakesh).