Hitman's November update adds offline profiles

I still haven't got round to playing it, but it feels good that there's a good Hitman [official site] again. Blood Money is one of my favourite games ever, Absolution was terrible, but the general consensus is that the latest is somewhere between good and great.

A new update for it has just been released which, rather than adding more content, aims to improve what's already there. That includes offline profiles, which allows you to continue using unlockable items earned while online when you're offline.

"Items include all mastery items; including weapons, gear, starting/pickup locations as well as Elusive Target suit rewards and Challenge Pack unlocks." That sounds like the kind of thing that should have been there from the beginning - and you'll still need to be online in order to acquire more unlocks.

Otherwise the tweaks sound minor and focused around how the UI communicates things to you, like checkmarks to show when you've completed in-mission opportunities, an update to the statistics page for checking your completion level, and others. The best bit is surely this:

In this update, we've added the ability for 47 to pull people over balconies or out of windows, when he is hanging on a ledge or below the balcony/window.

Unfortunately, there is a known issue for this move: NPC's that see this move will not blame 47, even if they are looking directly at the NPC or at 47.

For that reason, we will remove this ability with our December Update and fix this. It will then be re-introduced with a game update in January, around the same time as the disc release.

They're adding something they know is broken and which they know they're going to remove again before fixing and re-adding, which sounds bizarre, but in the meantime I can imagine having a lot of fun pulling people off balconies and getting away with it scot-free.

Here's what Alec said when he wrote his final Hitman review:

This is an excellent Hitman game, and a substantial one. As an all-in-one package it perhaps doesn’t feel as vast as it did when released in chunks, but it still works well. The experiment to make each level bigger, more distinctive and more ornate instead of having a glut of them has worked extremely well.

You can see a full changelog at the Hitman site, which includes a bunch of bug fixes for each of the game's six levels.