With their new Hitman, developer IO Interactive wants you to 'Enter a world of assassination.' Their vision for the latest entry in this long-running stealth series is an ever-expanding world of targets, tools, and cunning tricks populated not only by the developers, but by the community and your friends. This has led to some very unorthodox choices in how Hitman is being developed and distributed, which we'll cover in the slides that follow.

At E3 earlier this year, IO unveiled a new trailer (embedded below) that gives a good overview of how Hitman will play. In it, Agent 47 is after a man named Viktor Novikov at a fashion show in Paris. We've played this part of the game - a couple of times, actually - and between that and our talks with the developers we're ready to give you a detailed breakdown of what you can expect from Hitman. The game itself launches on December 8th for PC, PS4, and Xbox One. However - as you'll soon discover - this release date is just the beginning.

Agent 47 - the series' bald, brooding antihero - has been working the assassination circuit going on 15 years now. Starting in 2000 with Hitman: Codename 47, this peerless assassin has since starred in seven Hitman games (two of which are on mobile). And during that time Agent 47 has maneuvered all sorts of people into overly elaborate and complex deaths. CEOs, mob bosses, the Vice President of the United States; no one is safe from his creative mind.

You don't spend 15 years pulling off assassinations without learning some new tricks - such as the Batman-style Instinct vision seen in Absolution. However, this new game will step back from special abilities and refocus on what made the series great: creativity. Speaking with , creative director at IO Interactive Christian Elverdam said, "We’ve moved away from trying to create new abilities for Agent 47, since we want tools and planning to be a bigger part of the game. We want Hitman to be a more creative game, about figuring out what’s going on."

From Morocco to Italy to Paris, each stop on Hitman's globetrotting parade of death is designed to feel like a world unto itself. As editor Leon Hurley described , "[Each] level is a clockwork simulation of a living environment that, with enough observation and experimentation, you can manipulate." This is Hitman at its finest: you arrive in a space, size it up, choose a plan of attack, and execute. It's a razor-sharp toy chest; a playpen for sharp-dressed killers.

"One of the series’ strengths the new game is trying hard to recapture is that feeling that every level has somehow been designed for you and you alone," Hurley continued. "There are so many options and potential opportunities that only the ones that make sense to you spring out." Whether it's poisoning a drink or an axe to the chest, if you can imagine it, Hitman wants it to be a possibility. And they're not hurting for ideas. We counted with the game.

Hitman is treating its release date a bit differently from other AAA titles. In short, you won't be able to buy the full version of Hitman on day one because it won't be finished yet. Instead, Hitman will be built online with new locations and other content being added over time. We spoke to about this early access-style approach, "The specifics, about how much content we start with and the specific pace of it, we will talk about later. But for now, just imagine there are going to be locations appearing".

Once Hitman is 'finished' you will be able to purchase the full game as you would normally. "Once we’re done building all the locations...we will put it on a disc so you can buy it as a disc if you want," said Elverdam. So why go through all this trouble? Elverdam hopes that, by rolling out content gradually, it will give the team more opportunities to do things like time-sensitive assassinations (more on those in a sec) and respond to user feedback. "By doing it where we release it over time," said Elverdam, "we actually get [the] opportunity to figure out how people are playing our game and maybe react to things, like disguise mechanics and game balancing."

In addition to the classic, Hitman-style assassination missions, there are two other types you'll have to contend with. Time-sensitive assassinations, according to Elverdam, are the dev team's way of dropping new targets into existing locations. When this happens, all you'll get is a mugshot and 48 hours to make the kill. Screw up the hit and that's it; the mark is gone, forever. "That’s something we haven’t been able to do before: this feeling," said Elverdam. "I just can’t wait to sit there with a sniper rifle knowing that when he’s dead he’s dead. If I screwed it up? I screwed it up. He won’t come back."

The Contract modes from Hitman: Absolution are making a comeback here as well. If you didn't play Absolution, here's how they work: by assassinating any NPC in a location you essentially put a bounty on that character's head, which gets sent to your friends. The manner in which you killed that unlucky NPC determines what other players will need to do in order to get the maximum payout. As Leon Hurley pointed out , "Easy if it’s the bloke on the gate, not so much if it’s a guard behind several security checkpoints and your mate’s specified a 'suit only' run (so no disguises)."