It's a lazy saturday and we just recently got news of the next Elusive Target, so I figured it's time to make a thread for the upcoming episode as well.

While we did end up only getting Elusive Targets in May instead of a new location, they are going to announce the release date for Morocco next week and this tweet already mentions that it won't be after E3, which probably means that it'll be out on the June 7th (or May 31st if we're real lucky). We're indeed lucky and it's getting released on the 31st!

No trailer for it yet, but here's a few screenies. Pretty excited of the whole riot thing happening near one of the target locations. I'm also sure the market offers up a whole variety of deadly fruits for you to throw at your targets.

Yay! Loving the level design of these episodes, both artistically and spatially.

The levels have been fantastic this far. Morocco looks pretty drab in screenshots but I trust they will make another good level.

Well, they haven't released any details of the later episodes as of yet, but I feel like the United States one could be similiar to "A New Life" (only theory here being that it was also set in the US). Obviously way bigger in scope, but maybe without crowds of people.

Unless of course there's a yard sale and you can buy a boombox from there to kill your target with.

@dudeglove: I found Sapienza to be a good in between but yea it'd be nice to have an area where it's more about sheer variety scope rather than scale scope. Something that's smaller but has a lot more to do in it. I really liked A New Life and Flatline for those reasons, they were relatively pedestrian locales but as a backdrop they worked perfectly for innocent murderin'.

Also I really hope the targets in Morocco don't have body guards that follow them the whole time. Every single target so far including the elusive ones have had people following them, it's not challenging at this point I just want a new way of challenging other than that.

@baronsamedi: RPS wrote a preview of it in April and lists both of the targets. No idea whatever the bodyguards follow them, but I imagine the other one (judging of his status) at least having one or two.

For me, the elements of the level (cool disguises, random events, methods to take out the targets) are always what makes the best Hitman levels so tough to tell from screens. I do like the riot and the crowd though.

So far the levels have been huge in scope and that fits more with how the game works mechanically (allowing room for the Contracts mode) and with its release schedule. I would be surprised if they dial it back. I also hope there is something a bit different than just urban areas.

@dudeglove: Man I'd love another version of that level.

But I do love how wide and open this level is.

There's a helicopter, so I am now expecting the following features:

1. Commandeering the helicopter: (Challenge: "Get Out")
2. Blasting away with a mini-gun: (Challenge: "Butcher of Bakersfield")
3. Escaping by helicopter: (Challenge: "Get to the Choppah!")

I don't have much interest in playing this game myself, but I sure look forward to new episodes coming out. Have made for great videos :D

Excellent!!! Can't wait to play it!

Excellent!!! Can't wait to watch it!

The first time I saw that crowded market, I thought about a hunted type mode, where 47 has to take out guards hunting him down, so they are actively looking for him in the market, and you sneak around, change disguises, etc; to take the hunters down silently.

WE HAVE A DATE AND IT'S NEXT WEEK!

@grulet: Looks nice in the screenshots, can't wait! Details and screenshots from Sqaure:

The mission titled: ‘A Gilded Cage’ enlists Agent 47 to take out two targets, private investment banker Claus Strandberg and Army General Reza Zaydan.

In a city teaming with life on the brink of a full-scale riot, these are the moments before a coup d’état, where the visible military presence exacerbates a situation where tensions are running high.

Bustling Berber markets, alleyways crammed with stalls and shops, a clinical Swedish consulate and shaded rooftop terraces are just some of the areas that players can explore in Marrakesh.

Why they gotta be releasing on the same day as Blood and Wine?

A bit different trailer.

Episode Three: Marrakesh Release Notes

New Destination: Marrakesh

• New Story mission: A Gilded Cage
• 8 new Opportunities for ‘A Gilded Cage’
• 20 levels of Marrakesh Mastery, with the following unlocks:
  7 new Marrakesh Starting Locations
  8 new Marrakesh Agency Pickup locations
  6 new weapon/gear unlocks
• New suit for Marrakesh: Summer Suit
• 70+ Marrakesh-specific challenges
• 7 new trophies/achievements
• New 'The Sarajevo Six' Contract. Target 3: The Extractor. (PS4 Exclusive)

episode is out!. some console owners seem to have a little trouble getting it. but should hopefully be fixed soon.

i really like it so far!. anyone else tried it yet?

I have played it for a few hours now. It's big but not quite as open to roam around as Sapienza (at least without plenty of disguises), though for understandable reasons. It's real good and athmospheric still and I'm kinda grinning at few Finland remarks and having to sneak my way to a Swedish embassy.

Just did the new level. Nothing here should contain spoilers that I am about to say [all as generic as can be]: I had a lot of fun. It definitely has a different feel in how you go about it. One of the targets went mostly smoothly, but didn't get any fancy kills. The other oh man I had to reload so many saves..... I found this one more difficult in navigating without getting caught, but I will have to go another run and explore the level more.

Man I really can't wait till Brad and Dan try this new level. Maybe they will breeze through it, but I found this one to be the most difficult. Of course I do turn the opportunities off. Those would probably help a lot.

This one was tricky, just did one opportunity in the first go through. Something tells me Dan's gonna get Brad killed a whole lot for this one. Doesn't seem to be as chill as Sapienza, which I'm cool with.

This is 100% what I want from those videos. I've yet to try it, probably look at it tomorrow as I've been playing Blood and Wine instead. Good to hear that it's keeping up the trend of quality.

Yeah Totally. Some of the narrow passages and other stuff in this level made it a lot more difficult for me. But not in a negative way, really fun though! I can only imagine tons of deaths inc on this vid.

I imagine it's the General that'll cause them the most trouble. Heck, they might even have to try and actually stealth their way through it...

it's not right, and it's not nice/to try to kill the same thing twice

Is it up on the ps4 store yet? I can't seem to find it.

@alphasquid: It just went up. If you go to Store > AddOns and then hit one of the banners for it, it should work.

Up on the NA store but they want me to pay for it, even though I bought the full game. Maybe they'll have this sorted out by tomorrow.

Ok found it

I haven't played any of the previous episodes, I'm just excited to see Brad and Dan play!

Played through it a few times now. Killing the General while posing as the prisoner was pretty great, though first I expected I'd be able to give him a knife and let him do the dirty work. Also a bit disappointed I couldn't just use a melee weapon of choice and stab Zaydan in the ear with a screwdriver, but good old necksnap is a-okay too. Actually the first time I've killed both of my targets by snapping their necks. I liked how both of the targets had different surroundings to them.

Also might be reaching for straws here, but amongst the laptops near your starting location, I saw a few screens with pictures of Sapienza and then this.

I'd really love a night-time map in Hitman, but we'll see.

Am I crazy or is the framerate on PS4 like really terrible on the new location? The other 2 levels ran great.

It took a while for all the textures to pop in when I first started, but haven't really noticed anything after that. With that said, I had a similiar thing when the patch before Sapienza came out and I tried the Paris level. The framerate was somewhere below 20 the moment I started and continued to be garbage 'till I restarted the game, then it was business as usual. Edit; Actually, I haven't looked at my settings for a while, I'm not sure if I have the framerate locked to 30 or not.

Some of those load times still, tho. That same pre-Sapienza patch was suppose to improve load times by approx 50% on PS4 and XBone, but I don't think I've noticed any difference in that. Not 50% at least, unless the load times used to be *really* long and my memory's just blocking that.

I just completed the mission, this map so far is just as good if not better than the last two. So much to do, I completed the mission and got silent assassin and no evidence but on the score screen I didn't get the never noticed or no recordings bonus, anyone know why that might be? I'm never really playing these for score so I guess it doesn't really matter. I don't know if it's just luck or what but this one was much easier to finish than the first two on my first run.

just realised part of what made it easier is that two separate times I was able to throw something to knock someone out while another person was fairly close by and they didn't notice. I feel like you couldn't do that before?

I feel like I got a free pass in a similiar manner. I whacked someone over the head with a crowbar and sure, it did say 'silent attack', but the other guy wasn't that far away.

Also I'm a bit disappointed that there's probably no way to have you escort the banker outside for whatever reason and have the angry rioters lynch him. Dropping a moose on him was still good, though.

@grulet said:

Played through it a few times now. Killing the General while posing as the prisoner was pretty great, though first I expected I'd be able to give him a knife and let him do the dirty work. Also a bit disappointed I couldn't just use a melee weapon of choice and stab Zaydan in the ear with a screwdriver, but good old necksnap is a-okay too. Actually the first time I've killed both of my targets by snapping their necks. I liked how both of the targets had different surroundings to them.

Also might be reaching for straws here, but amongst the laptops near your starting location, I saw a few screens with pictures of Sapienza and then this.

I'd really love a night-time map in Hitman, but we'll see.

Nice catch. It seems plausible enough for the U.S. map, with "White Edge" potentially being the shadowiest branch of the shadowy organizations.

I haven't had framerate issues on the Xbox One, but I did have a few times on this map with an audio glitch where I'd walk up to a guard and have him say two different lines at me simultaneously. The load times are improved, though not on the initial load of the map. Reloading a save has gotten quicker. It used to be around 45 seconds, and is now 15-30 seconds. I timed it. That's probably where they're getting the "50%" claim, but the first time you boot a map up, that wait hasn't changed.

Throwing things is effective, but can ruin SA pretty easily. It seems like if you throw something at an NPC who's facing you, they can notice it and ruin the "never spotted" portion of SA without really triggering any alerts. However, the game is fairly buggy on translating in-mission behavior to post-mission achievements in general, which is somewhat forgivable given all that's going on, but frustrating nonetheless. I've had unlocked challenges/feats pop in-game and then not actually unlock, I lost SA on the last Elusive Target due to a glitch of an NPC dying from being subdued, etc. I've gotten to where I save the game right before walking out the exit so I can reload if necessary. That sometimes fixes challenges/SA that didn't pop and should have.

As for the level, I'm not sure I like it quite as much as Sapienza, but that's a damn high bar and not really a criticism. I found Marrakesh to be more difficult, simply because there's less space to work with in the tighter corridors and generally smaller windows of opportunity to take guys out. I like it from a design standpoint because it forces you to play a bit differently, so that's cool. This is the most "traditional stealth" of the maps so far and reminds me of Hitman 2 in a good way due to the setting/structure. I managed to pull off SA on my first go (and got credit for it!), but it wasn't easy.

Getting to the second level of that consulate area is rough, man. Everyone could see right through me whether I was in the consulate guard disguise or elite soldier disguise. I'm sure there's a much easier way to do it with a janitor outfit or something, as opposed to how I did it by slowly taking out everyone on the back stairwell. I'm jealous that @grulet pulled off the moose assassination. I noticed that possibility, but couldn't figure out how just yet and it was getting late, so I poisoned his wine. I shot the general during the interrogation, which was satisfying, but I really want to figure out how to shoot him with the turret or drop the toilet on him.

Brad is screwed, and we're probably in for an amazing four hours or so on the GB feature. Dan will be tantalized by the opportunities, and Brad will constantly be getting caught. I hope they discover the save system at some point, but everything else can remain the beautiful disaster it has been so far. Based on how their Sapienza run went, they might want to collect several of the many bricks lying around Marrakesh. Bricks are the new spaghetti.

I knocked out the entirety of the Sapienza mansion by throwing crowbars, wrenches and hammers - then picking them up - without being noticed so yeah it was in the other ones. Loving this game.

Right, the Providence Branch #340 or something....there is a story in this game, I guess. Someone has been kind enough to write up a synopsis of it so far on the game's Wikipedia page (excluding this episode) but it's still just eugh.

Well, that's unintentionally hilarious. I especially like the sentence "an unknown agent is discussing the details of the assassination and the destruction of the virus over the phone before he is confronted by the unknown individual in his car". Yep, that's spot-on. Thankfully, the game is incredible, so I can forgive however dumb/ridiculous the story gets. I'm fully expecting the last contract to be on the leader of the illuminati.

Damn, it's gonna kill me not being able to watch Brad and Dan play this but I can't afford premium atm.

Finished the level earlier today, it's a great mission with some cool challenges that I'll get to later but there's one thing that has been bothering the ever loving shit out of me with these levels.

Why is everyone in Paris, Sapienza and now Morocco speaking in US English and 1 Australian woman accents. This shit really bothers me in video games it pulls me out of the experience so much, they've made amazing recreations of these locales and then they use the same pool of voice actors that make no sense with where they are. It's even more apparent in Morocco now with the heavily non-white populace. I understand that the game might have a limited budget but I walked past one of the soldiers working for the General and he said "Semper Fi Soldier" to me. That to me doesn't speak of a lack of budget but just a lack of care, I usually never sign up to forums to tell developers whats wrong with their games but this is getting me there.

Although the level seems large and full of interesting areas to explore, I felt that the main assassinations were more bottlenecked than the last two. I found myself relying on conventional sneaking more than having free reign to explore which was ok, I'm just worried the later levels will have the same problem they did in Absolution.

I hear what you're saying, but expecting them to have hired Russian, French, Italian, Arabic/Tamazight, Thai, American, and Japanese voice actors is a bit much. I don't view it much differently than a Hollywood movie about foreign events that isn't linguistically accurate and fully subtitled. I guess I've just gotten used to some suspension of disbelief. As for the "semper fi" comment, there's a good argument that it's another example of the game playfully mocking itself, as the humor/dialogue in the game is consistently silly and self-aware. That, or I guess it could be looked at as sharp commentary on American entitlement, white imperialism, and/or cultural erosion stemming from globalization of communication in the information age. Regardless, it doesn't seem like something worth getting too upset over.

I found this one to be easier than the previous two right off the bat. Maybe because I stumbled upon a very easy way into the consulate and everything after that just sort of fell into place. I'll get back into it and try something else.

Completed my first run at Marrakesh. Dropped a toilet on the general, then took the tunnel into the consulate, got the masseuse disguise and snapped the banker's neck mid-massage. Strolled out the front doors like a boss and left.

how did you drop a toilet?

I don't think it's a bit much, they're only short lines of dialogue, the characters aren't having big long winded conversations. Besides when you have games like The Witcher 3 with over 450,000 words of spoken dialogue that they recorded in 7 different languages I don't see that as an excuse. That point even makes me question the budget argument I made myself as Hitman Absolution alone sold almost as much as The Witcher 1 and 2 put together. Voice acting agencies exist for a reason, it allows developers to source out voice acting without having to cast everyone themselves. This is what most companies do when seeking to find good talent across the globe.

Hah! great justification but the cynic in me doesn't think it rings true in this case. It was too much of a one off moment said by an absolute nobody of a character, a character that by the way had black skin and spoke in a very white American accent yet clearly worked for General Zaydan and not for the United States Marine Corps. The 'Semper Fi' thing isn't what upsets me though, that's what just made me think that this whole issue I have is just a massive oversight or something that IO Interactive has no interest in working towards, and to me that's just a real shame.