A game-breaking Hitman exploit is back by popular demand

polygon.com:

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).

Released Aug. 17, the patch made a key change to the Hitman Freelancer mode. More specifically, it reverted a change that developer IO Interactive made in the previous update: In May, the studio had patched out the ability to shut down Hitman World of Assassination by using Alt+F4 (the keyboard shortcut for quitting an app in Windows) while still maintaining the integrity of a Freelancer campaign. Afterward, the game would detect this exploit and count it as failing a 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. (If this happens in certain types of missions, you have to start your entire Freelancer campaign from scratch.)

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