Over the weekend during PAX Prime the first gameplay demo for the next game in the Hitman franchise, simply titled Hitman, was shared publicly after first being shown at Gamescom. We saw an announcement trailer and gameplay trailer come out of E3 2015 a couple of months back.

This first demo is set at a fancy fashion show, and explores the many options players will have in accomplishing their objectives and taking out their target, including some of the weapons, disguises, and various things found in the environment you can sabotage.

You can read more about the game and check out the 15-minute gameplay demo below.

Here’s a bunch of information on the game from the official Hitman website that came out with the E3 trailers linked above:

The new game is simply called “HITMAN”. We did this because in many ways this is the start of a new journey for Hitman. Don’t think of it as a reboot, though – think of it as a pure Hitman experience and the foundation for future HITMAN games. Agent 47 is the aspirational assassin, he’s at the absolute peak of his power this time around. This is our central promise: a pure assassin fantasy. So we liked the simplicity and the power of calling this game HITMAN. We want him to be powerful and embody the fantasy completely, and he will remain a constant throughout everything we do with the games going forward.

So what is this new game? Well first off HITMAN is still a creative stealth action game, featuring the greatest assassin out there, Agent 47. As an operative of the International Contract Agency, his job is to take out high-profile targets all over the world, supported by his long-time handler Diana Burnwood. Each location in the game is a living sandbox, a place where every NPC has a name and every room matters. We’ve focused on making sure you, the players, have complete freedom of approach over how, where and when you decide to take out your target. Creativity from players is fully expected, you have the power and intelligence of Agent 47 at your fingertips and it is your choice whether to use brute force or orchestrate a genuine masterpiece of assassination.

Locations are more detailed, more populated and much larger than ever before, full of things to experiment with and targets to kill without any checkpoint systems in there. Contracts mode, which we’ll talk more about later in the year, returns and really shines in these big sandboxes. We’ve brought back save games, so you can save your progress anywhere, and we have revamped pretty much every system in our Glacier engine to enable this HITMAN experience. We promised you these things a while back and we’re sticking to them because they are important – and because your feedback is important. In fact, it’s so important we’re taking things a step further.

One of the reasons why we’re calling this a new start for HITMAN is also the idea of releasing a digitally led product. That can mean a lot of different things depending on who you are, but for us it means we’re going to make HITMAN available first via direct download.

We’re embracing what digital can offer a blockbuster game series like HITMAN – it allows us to do things that are both bold and exciting and entirely new to the Hitman experience.

We are building an expanding and evolving world of assassination. The experience will begin on December 8th and we will release new locations, missions and hits over time at regular intervals through 2016, which means we’ll all be able to share in the excitement of a new content drop at the same time. Rather than unboxing a game, playing it and then that’s sort of it, we want to deliver a true community experience – creating an ongoing and evolving game which plays out with a finale that brings the story arc together. Our primary goal is to keep HITMAN players fully engaged, so between bigger drops we will be creating one-off live events and live targets to keep you immersed in the experience.

Imagine a target appearing for every player in the world, for a limited time only”¦ let’s say 48 hours. Where your one shot counts. And when that target is gone, it is gone forever. A shared experience where we imagine the HITMAN community will come together every time a new mission or new location appears. For $60 you’ll get full access to all of this content – everything we release as part of this story.

Another big part of this new approach is that we will develop the game with you, the players, and adjust gameplay and create live content and events based on player activity and feedback – so the game will deepen and evolve as time progresses. The experience begins on December 8th on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC and will reach well into 2016.

The gameplay demo looks great for the most part. Perhaps it’s just me but something about the minimap on the bottom left doesn’t work for me, if I had to nitpick. We’ll see how it looks when the game is released.

You can pre-order the game for PS4, Xbox One, and PC now, though it’s not clear exactly when all of these will be available as they are releasing it digitally first on December 8th. Hopefully it won’t be too long of a wait for those of us who still prefer physical copies.

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