PC gamers can soon play the entire Hitman trilogy in VR

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VR support arrives in Hitman 3 on January 20, and you can import levels from previous games

Hitman 3
(Image credit: IO Interactive)

Hitman 3 will get VR support on PC come January 20, developer IO Interactive has revealed, as part of Hitman 3 Year 2.

This means Hitman 3 will be updated for virtual reality, complete with support for the “most popular hardware”, although the devs didn’t state exactly which VR headsets will be good to go – but promised the full list will be published before launch (so within the next week).

As you can see in the below teaser trailer from Twitter, full hand tracking means you’ll be able to wave your hands about (in the air, like you don’t care, perhaps), and indeed throw objects around.

VR support is only coming to Hitman 3, but those who import Hitman 1 and 2 levels into the game will also be able to experience these in virtual reality.

In its second year, Hitman 3 is also getting a new ‘Elusive Target Arcade’ game mode, plus ray tracing support is coming later in 2022 (reflections and shadows). Furthermore, Intel XeSS (Team Blue’s DLSS rival) will also be supported for Arc Alchemist graphics cards (which we’re hoping to see launch in the near-ish future).

Analysis: Seriously upping the immersion stakes – with the PSVR 2 next?

Previously, Hitman 3 had only been on PlayStation with VR, of course, but the move to the PC platform really opens things up. Whereas on Sony’s console players had to use the DualShock 4 controller, on PC there’s the extra dimension of hand tracking to really bring the game – and sense of immersion – alive. Including adopting karate stances as the dev mentions in its blog post.

Still, console gamers can possibly look forward to something else, too – the prospect of Hitman 3 getting an update for PSVR 2 when it comes out (for the PS5), to follow the route taken on PC and implement hand tracking. As we pointed out in our list of expected (and confirmed) PSVR 2 games, it makes sense to release a PSVR 2 version of Hitman 3, and there’s certainly demand for it as we can see in the replies to the above teaser on Twitter.

Darren Allan

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).