Hitman 3 patch re-adds Freelancer’s Alt+F4 exploit, hallelujah

The Hitman games have always reveled in giving players the freedom to puzzle out their own murderous solutions — even ones that go against the developers’ wishes, as seen in the latest patch for Hitman World of Assassination (née Hitman 3).

The patch was released on August 17 and made some important changes to Hitman Freelancer. It is more specifically called revertedThe previous patch by IO Interactive had removed the option to close the game. Hitman World of AssassinationAlt+F4 is the keyboard shortcut to quit an application in Windows. This allows you to maintain your integrity while running a Freelancer-based campaign. The exploit would be detected by the game and it would count as a failed mission.

For the uninitiated: Hitman Freelancer, which debuted in January, is meant to be a high-stakes roguelike experience — it’s explicitly designed to push expert players to improvise their way through increasingly lengthy sequences of missions. Failure is not an option (or at least, not an appealing one): If you die or otherwise fail to complete a level, you lose all your progress in that particular series of missions, along with all the weapons and equipment you’ve unlocked and half of the money you’ve earned. You will need to restart your Freelancer Campaign if this happens.

Freelancer isn’t for the faint of heart, but it certainly lowered the blood pressure to know that you could always fall back on using Alt+F4 to abort a mission that was going sideways. Of course, IO’s elimination of that failsafe earlier this year suggests that the studio didn’t intend for players to have this eject button at their fingertips. After all, you can’t even save during a mission and come back later — if you need to step away, you’ll have to leave the game paused and your console or PC running. You could argue that Freelancer’s harsh restrictions are essential, and that to neuter them with a safety net is to deprive yourself of the mode’s true thrills.

Alt+F4 is now back. This was probably because so many players complained about the change. (We’ve asked IO for an explanation of the reversion, and we’ll update this article when the studio responds.) It’s worth noting that many players’ complaints didn’t merely amount to whining about the loss of a way to comfortably cheese their way through Freelancer. The mode is all about adapting and coping with unpredictable situations. unfairThere are glitches and other situations that can cause this. “There are so much things that could go wrong during the game (bugs, crashes, NPCs seeing through walls as examples) that not having the ability to cancel this and auto-failing the mission will be a big problem,” a regular on the game’s forums wrote in May.

It’s all part of the endless push and pull between game makers and players. A Polygon article published by last week defended the practice of saving in games like Baldur’s Gate 3The following are some examples of how to get started: Disco ElysiumMore than 200 comments were posted within a short time. Readers debated the practice, but most agreed with the author that it’s perfectly legitimate. (As it happens, save scumming is something I actively recommended in my beginner’s guide to Hitman World of Assassination!) Mimimi Games wanted save cheating in The Cursed Crew – Shadow GambitSo strongly did the studio feel that they had to invent a fiction explanation for saving and loading quickly.

After the Alt+F4 bug was removed, the Alt+F4 exploit has been removed. Hitman World of Assassination, players quickly came up with workarounds — some of which involved going so far as to install additional software. What’s that line from Jurassic Park? Players who want to circumvent a developer’s intent will, uh, find a way.