The bald man always hungers for more folks to drown in toilet water, so IO Interactive have kept feeding their Hitman a steady stream of post-launch targets with each entry in the World of Assassination trilogy. It sounds the devs’ll be taking a similar approach with 007: First Light, albeit with some Bondy twists.

The question is, would such regular updates scratch the itch of folks who’re in it for the long haul as effectively as the elusive targets Agent 47’s been taking out on a regular basis?

IO boss Hakan Abrak teased this being one of the “learnings from World of Assassination” that the studio may be applying to Bond in a chat with The Game Business.

“We obviously have tons of experience now from World of Assassination, and tons of experience on how to extend a single-player experience by giving desirable free content to players,” Abrak said when asked whether First Light will follow the post-launch plan the past three Hitman games have ridden to long-term success.

He was keen not to get into too much detail, emphasising that IO are focused on nailing what the game has to offer at launch first, but did go on to say the following:

With Bond, we have really upped our stealth, we have really evolved the action aspects of our technology and features. Seamless combat, coming in and out of range and melee… For Hitman, it was interlocked animations, here it is freeform. We have [players] driving different exotic cars. That gives us more challenges to play with. In Hitman, you have these live challenges. And besides the things that we are able to do in Hitman, we can do more actiony things and more kinetic challenges in Bond.

While a lot of that is just Abrak oulining the differences between how Bond and Hitman will play that IO have been chatting about since the game was revealed, it’s the last bit that’s got my attention. Hitman’s elusive targets are all generally slightly different twists on the ‘go somewhere, prep to kill someone, kill someone, get out’ formula that the games have refined into a lethal art, with twists like no saving or restarting to spice up the challenge.

With Bond looking like it’s much less intensely focused on just eliminating certain people, I’ll be keen to see how expansive the extra challenges it offers are. I can see the likes of car chases or more straight-up shootouts being part of the equation, much like they are in the base game. Will we get longer missions that chain a number of these elements together as post-launch extras, will IO opt to just add them as individual challenges so it can drop new stuff more often, or a mix of both?

I’d prefer the former, but it might not be as efficient development-wise as the elusive targets have proven to be – something Abrak notes IO are so keen on that they’ve stopped making as many new toilets in their games. Plus, we’ll have to see if the Bond formula, with its glitzy Hollywood sheen in contrast to Hitman’s darkly hilarious murder experimentation, lends itself as well to keeping a game feeling fresh once that initial surge of interest runs its course.