If you do not know what Hitman is, then where have you been? Hitman is a game franchise, (which also unsuccessfully attempted to develop into a film franchise) that was originally published by Eidos Interactive. Now owned by the legendary Square Enix, the creators of the renowned Final Fantasy series, Hitman is preparing to make its new release on March 11.

The trailer for it, released June 15, 2015, was a fantastic show of the game’s new features. Going back to the old days, the new installment, which is confusingly named just Hitman, is going to place the player, as Agent 47, in vast maps with a few fixed objectives, and allow the player to do whatever he pleases to get to his target.

The main goal, as in all other Hitman games, is to kill select individuals. However the game allows the player to choose how this will be done. Does the player wish to grab a fireax and run through public, flinging it back and forth? Or, does the player prefer to spent hours scouting the level, learning every nook, cranny, and corner until the target is isolated and swiftly killed by a knife to the back or a chandelier to the head?

The new game seems to be everything people would want and expect out of a Hitman game. Until Jan. 14, when it was reported that Square Enix is releasing the game in an episodic format. Now this is no new or unknown practice. One ought to only view TellTale Games’ critically successful “Wolf Among Us” or “Walking Dead” games for examples. However, with Hitman, this case can be problematic.

To see the why this form of production may have poor results, one ought to look at Capcom’s Resident Evil Revelations 2, released Feb. 24, 2015. Originally intended to be a full game, it was later released in chunks, causing its relatively low rating. The entire point of an episodic video game is to provide the same suspense with the end of every episode, as a TV show would, building up interest for the upcoming episodes.

Resident Evil Revelations 2 was chopped up after being made as a full feature game. The result was very weak immersion, so much so that many episodes ended very promptly with no overarching storyline. For example, one episode ended with the player moving boxes back and forth. This same issue may be present with Hitman.

The game will be released with each episode featuring a separate city where the game will take place in. So the first episode is set in Paris, the second in Rome, etc. Except there is absolutely no guarantee that the episodes will be properly set. For all the customer knows, the first episode may be a complex assassination lasting over two hours, while the second episode may, for all intents and purposes, consist of small shooting sections that totals one hour of mindless firing.

The issue with such poor optimization of the plot regards one key concept of video games, atmosphere. In the modern age, video games aren’t just the usual run-to-the-left-and-jump games. Games, like Journey, Witcher, Undertale and BioShock have proven that games can be more story focused, filled with atmosphere and emotion, so much so that these aspects become the driving force behind many games.

Stealth-focused games, especially, are strongly rooted in these aspects, since they require to create a living world as the player explores the world around them. To have a game broken up, risking damaging the flow of the story and the atmosphere, could be catastrophic for a immersion-based game.

The reason for this is unknown. Perhaps the developers don’t want to keep delaying the release as the development eats away money, something the developers most likely are running out of. So it would make sense that the company would release the game in pieces to make some money as the game developed. But it is obvious that the game wasn’t originally made to be episodic.

Square Enix recently proved to be very poor with overall managing releases. First it was the “Customize Your Pre-Order” from the “Deus Ex: Mankind Divided,” then the news that Final Fantasy 7 will also be episodic, and now this. It seems as if Square Enix is having a bad time with publishing video games.