If you attempted to play the new Elusive Target Arcade game mode in Hitman 3 during the first few days it was available, then you surely experienced some maddening glitches that locked you out of the content. If you fail one of these missions, you’ll be locked out of it for 12 hours — that’s how it’s supposed to work. The glitched part was that the game was triggering fail states randomly, sometimes before a player even started a mission.
IO Interactive tweeted today that they released a server-side patch to address the issue. Here it is:
Because this is server-side, there’s nothing to download; the game mode should just work now. I’ve been monkeying around with it a bit today, and it does seem like it’s working, though its pass-or-fail structure does make it kind of hard to test thoroughly.
Because of this fix, I’ve been able to figure out what’s intended to be a fail state, and Elusive Target Arcade should work exactly the same as an Elusive Target combined with an Escalation. That means you can reset a mission so long as you haven’t completed any objectives. You will fail if you either die or create a scenario in which your target is no longer killable (knocking them out and putting their still-breathing body into a trunk, for example). You’ll also fail if you mess up one of the complications — so if you can only pacify a single NPC, you’ll automatically fail when you pacify a second one.
If you fail a challenge on a later level of the contract, you should be able to start from where you left off once your lockout timer expires. So if you get to the third target of a three-target contract, then you fail, you should be able to start from the third target when your 12-hour timer expires.
It is good to finally see this game mode working as intended, but the fact that it was this broken at launch really does raise some eyebrows. Perhaps this is what happens when you try to launch a game on Steam (finally), release a bundled trilogy, and add VR to the PC version all on the same day. With all that going on, Elusive Target Arcade probably didn’t get tested as thoroughly as it should have been.
Either way, it’s good to see this game mode working now. Good luck out there, fellow killers!
“If you fail a challenge on a later level of the contract, you should be able to start from where you left off once your lockout timer expires.”
-> this is not working for the elusive arcade targets for the PS4 version at the moment (31. january 22)! After failing there in level 2 and after the 12h timer expired afterwards it seems that I can only start level 1 again (i tried with two elusive targets). Or am I doing something wrong? I am not willing to play missions, that I have already completed, over and over again! Hope they fix this soon!
Before the patch, it seemed like it was designed to work this way (picking up contracts from where you left off), but since the patch that seems to have changed. It’s really hard to tell which way it’s supposed to work because it’s been so buggy, but I’ve had the same issue as you.