If you have an XBox Live Gold and have yet to pick up a copy, the first season is currently on sale for $30 over on Xbox Live.

I went to Steam to check if there happened to be a sale there as well and got really excited when it said "$14.99" for what should be the complete season but the price is actually referring to one of the chunks of it, which is even listed as DLC for the full season. Kind of odd. Oh well.

Thanks for the heads-up! I'm tempted, but I still want to wait for a sale on the PC version.

The game just went on Steam sale as well (50% off). Purchased and can't wait to finally start playing.

Funny timing, I just added this to my wishlist on steam yesterday. There's no chance of my playing all of the GOTY contenders before the awards podcasts but looks like I'll be marking off this one, at least.

I'm so happy right now. Almost picked it up last week but thought, "There's gotta be an end-of season sale, right?" 50% off is way better than I was expecting, too. I'm so ready to enter A World of (Pure) Assassination for myself. This game has totally converted me from "intrigued but cautious onlooker" that just dipped the occasional toe into the series to a full-on enthusiast. They really nailed it.

yyyyeah I totally just spent 15 bucks last weekend on the first episode. Damn it. At least I can get the rest at half off.

I'm waiting for a sale on the PS4 version. Can't wait to play this.

I picked this up on Xbox. Now the question is will I have time to play through it before GOTY.

@isomeri: Never has waiting for that little bit longer for a sale felt so liberating.

For anyone having framerate issues on PC: try turning shadows down to medium.

I have a GTX 970 and an i7 6700 but was seeing the framerate drop to 50 or even 40 constantly in the tutorial area (this is at 1080p). This seemed bizarre to me so I spent a long time tinkering with the options and found that I could leave everything else turned up and as long as I turned down shadows to medium I held a steady 60fps. No clue why just shadows alone are making such a huge difference, but they are.

@nnickers: There's also an issue where Anisotropic 4x can lower framerate by between 5-10 frames and even turning it up to 8x can give you an improvement. The game is also a massive CPU hog so if you're like me with a 6+ year processor it can start to bottleneck.

Had to buy at 50% off. Looking forward to playing.

I ended up picking this up due to the sale and the hitman videos on here. Any tips for a Hitman newbie?

@johnlocke: Hitman tip; If you start getting into doing challenges to max out your mastery level (the thing that unlocks new items and spawn points) you don't have to start from scratch each mission. Best practice is to save before each hit, kill the target one way, reload, kill a different way, reload, etc. If you unlock a challenge, you just have it, you don't have to finish the mission.

Mind you, it's best to do this after you've played Hitman your own way. Don't worry about challenges in your first run, just play it on your own. Usually, the way i play it; first run is a freeform playthrough, then i do a few playthroughs to see all the oportunities, and last i'll do the playthrough to unlock the challenges as described above. Originally i didn't know the challenges were locked-in when you completed them and so i wasted a lot of time finishing whole missions when i didn't have to.

Been waiting for a sale, excited to finally play it :D

Finally! I've been waiting for a PC sale. I just bought it today and the download took forever but I finally started it a couple of hours ago and it's soooo much fun! I can't wait to go OCD on it and unlock everything I can!

Also been waiting on this!

Pre-Ordered the Intro Pack on PS4 and was a bit miffed when I realized I'd have to pay more to upgrade than people who bought the whole thing. That and the super slow load times on PS4 made me decide to wait and switch over to PC when it finally goes on sale - and here we are! Finally I can enjoy all those other levels!

@johnlocke: Don't view following the opportunities as cheating, unlike what has been said by Brad and Jeff they don't ruin the experience especially if you're new. Treat them as you would a quest in an RPG like Skyrim they're there to show you the ropes of the the level and guide you to areas by teaching you what disguises allow you to go where and do what. Once you get comfortable with the game mechanics you can safely turn them off and work them out on your own, but I just think having the stance that they're cheating is a mistake. The previous Hitman games didn't have them, so most people who aren't determined players didn't know what to do, couldn't figure out all the numerous things you could interact with and quit the games.

I've been waiting for this to go on sale. Picked it up. Thank you!

@burncoat: Yeah I read about that. Apparently every aliasing option besides 4x has the same impact, strangely. And I've actually been thinking about finally overclocking my 6700 for this game because after getting a steady 60fps in the first tutorial area I'm now seeing pretty horrendous and frequent dips down to 35-40. Seems insane that a stock-speed 6700 might already be bottlenecking anything but I'll see if there's any marked improvement. I already turned down all the settings from ultra to medium and saw no noticeable improvement from that.

30 bucks on PSN now, 27 with the discount code.

It's back to 50% on Steam now, Autumn Sale.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/236870/

@fredchuckdave: I've no idea why but us filthy Europeans don't have a code for the PSN sale.

Am I the only one hesitant to buy it? Watching Brad and Dan play made me really want to get it, but then when I actually saw it was on sale, I wondered if I enjoyed Brad and Dan playing it more than I would actually enjoy playing it.

I dunno, it won't help that I am being extra stingy when it comes to parting with my money, but I think I might be one of "those" people who enjoys others playing a video game more than playing the game myself, despite the game seeming like a real masterpiece of open world design and stealth. Also, I suck at stealth games.

I enjoyed watching them play it more than I am playing it myself. But it's still fun/a really good game, I don't regret it. I generally don't like stealth games at all, either.

Only thing I regret is that it's a lot more demanding on PC than I expected. Paris and training missions were fine but Sapienza really dips low for me in certain places.

You are not the only one... I haven't bought this yet either due to reasons not known to man. It's weird since I loved the old Hitman games and think that Hitman (2016) looks really good. I guess it's a combination of these points, questions and fears:

• Watched too much, knowing about tricks, mechanics takes out the magic out of it. You play by the knowledge of the AI-scripting instead of role playing a clever assassin. The AI behavior also seems a bit flat/basic/shallow? It's like magic tricks, not as fun when you know how they do it. Coin tossing for example.
• Content, I feel that I would be fine with one or two hits per map due to the above point. More than that could get grindy!? I can't say anything bad about a map like Sapienza, it looks great, but I don't feel that interested in doing 20 hits on it. 7(?) total maps and me directly disliking at least two of them raises some questions about content.
• DRM. They need to stop with this crap in a single player game. The same with custom launchers like Origin.
• As willza92 said, is this game perhaps as fun or even more fun to watch than play?

With that being said, I'm still very unsure. As with some other games on the Steam Sale.

Picked it up for $30 on PSN. I've spent way too much on games this fall. I need to be more conservative next year.

I don't think I would've bought the game if I hadn't watched Brad and Dan get up to their antics. Could never really get into the previous Hitman games all that much.

PC version (steam) is $15 at Gamestop. That's the best deal I've seen so far. 75% off.

@dudeglove: its a shame, I've read several people with beefy PC's reporting issues with frame rate. Let's say on the PC the highs are definitely high - 60 FPS, great details, fast load times, but the lows get pretty low as well.

I was going to grab this on disc but a digital version now at £10 cheaper is not to be sniffed at.

Picked it up on Steam. So good!

If you haven't given this a shot, turning ShadowMaps to Medium keeps framerates more consistent. During benchmarks, Ultra and High didn't affect the avg much at all but if you watch the stats, you can see that it causes significant dips in spots. Medium kept me at a fairly consistent FPS.

Quick update: So I bought the game on PS4, and I'll readily admit that I was wrong. The game is just as fun, if not more so, to play than it is to watch. I loved watching Brad and Dan play, but being in control of Agent 47 and all the different routes you can take just makes my brain tingle in the best of ways that you don't get from watching Brad and Dan.

The load times are a little long and it's hard crashed on me once, but I must have spent 6+ hours yesterday in the training and Paris levels yesterday while babysitting my brothers new kitten.

The game is incredible. It's stealth mechanics and subsequent gameplay feel natural and also seem to lean in favour of the player, so you get away with things that might otherwise screw you. I liken this to in movies when the good guys are about to be discovered and caught, but then the guard looks the other way or his buddy calls him to another floor, it's pulse pounding stuff. I got a really cool James Bond vibe from that Paris mission, especially with me taking on a contract to eliminate 5 guards with a sniper rifle in my suit, which meant I had to sneak in through the gardens and climbing across the building to be able to get to my sniper before quickly eliminating all the targets like Daniel Craig did in that once scene from Spectre (you know, with the Stormtrooper shooting level guards while Bond has his auto hit hack enabled).

This game is a treat.

It's fun to just go back in and use your knowledge from previous runs to kill your targets in more and more exciting ways. I think the fiction falls down a little bit where *I* (the player) can predict the future and guide 47 through to kill people in ways that would otherwise seem pure chance and bad luck on the part of the targets.

Anyway, for anyone on the fence about Hitman, I could safely say that, as someone who too was unsure about how much satisfaction I would get, I feel like I've already got my £22.50 worth from the opening chapters alone.