Folks, Trevor @ IOI announced the following:

The bummer is that it appears that it's only for consoles (PS4/XBox One) and no mention of PC, but still exciting nonetheless!

Absolution ain’t great and I suspect it’ll hold up even worse after these last two games. But I’d be into this for Blood Money, which I haven’t played. Pretty cool that they’re doing this.

interesting...back when this site first started its renewed love affair with hitman i tried playing the current steam version of blood money (based mostly off of old buzz from ryan and patrick) and i bounced off pretty hard.

hopefully this update improves things a bit.

I think I'd want to be able to jump straight into any of the missions (similar to the Master Chief collection) from the start of the game. There are some levels in Blood Money (house party, chicken suit) that I think I'd want to just play immediately rather than having to get through the rest to get to them.

Blood Money is just the best Hitman game ever!!! Absolution is also very good,it's totally worth this pack.

Blood Money might be a little hard to go back to, but Absolution for all it's faults controlled totally fine, but really the Hitman games that need a remasters are Codename 47/ Silent Assassins/Contracts. Has anyone tried to play the PC version of the first game recently? I don't think i've ever seen a worse control scheme in a PC game ever, except maybe that ubisoft port of RE4 that didn't have mouse support.

Will these have platinum trophies? I'd definitely play through Blood Money again if it does. Great game, might be the best of the series.

Can I just get Blood Money?

I tried playing Blood Money at one point and found it slightly impenetrable. While fundamentally very similar, the modern Hitman games give the player a lot more feedback and guidance.

They should remake every level from the past with the new engine.

Hitman 2: Silent Assassin is still my fav.

@mellotronrules: Right there with you. Blood Money is high up on my list of "games that I wish that I liked more than I do".

Honestly I'd rather go back to Blood Money than play Hitman 2016 or Hitman 2. Blood Money is an amazing game while I think the new ones are kinda boring.

This is great, Absolution is absolute trash but I will still get this for Blood Money, I must have finished that game at least ten times by now between the PS2 and PC version.

If "updated controls" means that it controls like the new games (still not amazing, but the best Hitman has ever felt), then I'd be more interested in diving back. Ab-Solution though, no desire to try that thing again.

I also hope this is paving the road for the possibility of a Freedom Fighters HD release.

This is great news to me. I only played a bit of Blood Money, years after it came out and would love to give it a real go.

I liked Absolution. It strayed a bit far from the formula, but it was fun in its own right.

They should remaster Silent Assassin. That's the best in the series, in my opinion.

Weird choice in Absolution since it is a relatively modern game.

I would have much preferred if they took the very first Hitman and gave it that Resident Evil 2 treatment - overhaul graphics and especially controls. Now that there is a renewed interest in the franchise it seems like a no-brainer to serve up the origin story within the first game with a more palatable, updated remaster. Maybe one day.

Also I'd say that for anyone that couldn't get into Hitman in the past, I'm not sure if this will do anything for them. A different control scheme and prettier graphics aren't going to drastically change how those games were structured, which honestly is not that much different than modern Hitman. You simply didn't have as much hand holding and baked in objectives. This is a sign of the times these games were made in, but back then I concocted challenges for myself and ran through my favorite levels over and over again just because I found it fun rather than striving to unlock guns or challenges. These challenges, apart from being fun milestones, I can only imagine were introduced to make modern folk coming into the series understand the variety of ways you can approach any situation. Blood Money has some of the best levels and a hell of an ending so it would be nice to see it up-rezzed and modernized.

I liked Absolution. I wasn't a fan of Blood Money. I've tried many times to get through Blood Money, but just never liked it enough to finish. I never finished Silent Assassin but I did like it. Also, good Jesper Kyd soundtrack.

My vague recollection of Absolution is that the disguise system was broken - I think anyone who was wearing the same disguise was automatically suspicious of you or detected you. Some of the kill opportunities in the level were cool (I think? I remember a car garage being alright). I wonder if they'll make any changes to it to make it run better. Interested to actually try Blood Money.

I love Hitman and I wanna get Hitman 2 and hearing this news makes me excited! Just for Blood Money though. Could care less for Absolution. They should have picked a different game than that.

@captain_insano: Something like that. The game relied a lot on the blending mechanic where you tip your hat to get past people who can see through the disguise. But it drained the intuition meter or whatever it was called, which was a huge pain.

I loved Blood Money on the PS2. Playing through it on Professional getting SA on all missions defined a period of games for me, im just not sure even with updated controls id be able to go back. While i would of preferred them doing a blood money map pack i understand that doing a remaster would probably be way more cost effective.

Code name 47 is still my best experience, because when it came out it was just unlike anything else. Bloody Money was cool though, not going to pick it up though, still got Hitman 2 to play!

This went live on PSN and XBL today.

It's 60 fucking dollars. Appalling.

That’s a, uh, yeah. 60€ over here too.

Bummer.

I'm not thrilled, but is that really that surprising? Most remasters are at least $30 if not $40, and this is two games.

@reap3r160: on one hand it IS two games, on the other it’s one game that is fairly recent and I’m not even sure how much work they needed to do on it - it’s also arguably the least liked and potentially worst playing of the entire franchise.

The other is a fan favorite but it’s also extremely old and you can get it on PC for super cheap and it still looks O-K.

So it’s a mixed bag. If they had a third game in there it would be maybe an easier pill to swallow. Or maybe if t was Codename 47, Contracts and Bloodmoney.

It's IO. That price will go down in a few weeks. I've just started Blood Money and I'm trying to fathom just what is new. Framerate seems a solid 60 but I need to consult my PS2 copy to figure out what's been tweaked with the controls. I'm looking forward to Absolution. That game looked great, if nothing else.

Between them not offering a platinum trophy for the last two games and the obscene pricing for this collection they're giving me reason after reason not to play them.

So .... there's a fair bit of pop-in when it comes to Blood Money's objects and shadows.

The more I think about this the more I'm genuinely confused why they chose Absolution. It must be some weird business reason right? Or maybe a tech reason.. I just don't get why they would choose that one out of all the Hitman games in their catalog. Surely they know what the public opinion is of it?

I don't think you realise how flat and boring the Hitman games looked before Absolution. It's a cosmetic pick and Blood Money's a fan favourite.

@shindig: I played them all, at time of release of course, so I do know what they looked like. First of all it's the freeform gameplay that was always the draw, and second - isn't the whole point of this package to spruce things up and bring it into the modern day? How amazing would it be to give the Hitman games the Resident Evil 2 uplift? Absolution looked really nice at the time but it had extremely linear level design. Some levels were quite literally long corridors full of sneaking sections where you made your way from A to B. It may have looked nice at the time but it was not fun to play because the levels weren't very good and they broke the disguise system making the already poor layouts a chore to play through.

I would love to see the first game uprezzed simply for historic value. It had incredibly flat and boring levels that they could now completely overhaul with dynamic lighting, high res textures etc etc.

@humanity: Hitman Contracts has an updated version of the most interesting levels from Code Name 47, I would settle for a more Windows 10 friendly release of Codename 47, or a better controlling Silent Assassin.

They picked the two most recent Hitman games (before newest ones) because they are probably the easiest to remaster. Once you start going to the PS2 games, remastering almost becomes rebuilding from the ground up.

Plus IO is independent now too, along with being more modern it's probably a lot cheaper for them to do Absolution. For all its faults, Absolution was a good looking game and mechanically was pretty smooth, where as Codename 47/Silent Assassin/Contracts definitely show their age these days. Also if I remember right the game didn't do terrible critically or sales wise either, while it's the black sheep of the Hitman series it's certainly no Dino Crisis 3 or Red Faction: Armageddon.

Absolution sold 9 times as much as Hitman 2 did in the first week of UK release.