Hitman has predominantly been a single-player, stealth-focused franchise, right from its humble beginnings with IO Interactive's debut game, the PC exclusive Hitman: Codename 47. That's not to say it hasn't changed, though, as each game has become bigger and better over the year.
However, it has mostly remained focused to be a single-player experience. While this is part of the charm of the game, a Hitman co-op game, if announced, would have a lot of potentials to show for itself.
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The Hitman games may mostly be single-player entities, but they aren't entirely foreign to the realm of multiplayer or co-op. For example, Hitman: Absolution launched with a mode called Contracts, which would let players create custom assignments for other players to tackle, with a set of clear conditions as well. This Contracts mode has elevated the replayability factor of these games to a whole other level. The iterations of this mode in the next Hitman games are a great testament to that, as they focus more on providing dense open-ended sandbox maps where players can create a bunch of these challenges for others to tackle.
That being said, 2018's Hitman 2 also saw the addition of a new competitive multiplayer mode in the form of a Ghost Mode. This mode would see two players existing at the same level as they compete against each other to kill the same targets in their own worlds. The first one to kill gets a point which culminates in the final table to determine who won, though servers for this game mode were shut down last year as it didn't garner much popularity within the community particularly due to its increased speed of approaching the game.
While Hitman's narrative and the gameplay are suitable for one person, many would agree that the games may also work as a co-op experience. Many great stealth games like Splinter Cell are known to have a good amount of co-op missions that significantly elevate the tension and the added fun-factor of co-op that comes with playing a friend simultaneously.
If a restrictive stealth game such as the earlier Splinter Cell games can benefit a lot from these mechanics, it's not difficult to imagine how much of an improvement it can bring to the Hitman games. They are known for housing some of the best assassination opportunities in a densely packed playground of murder, and allowing 2 or maybe even 3 or 4 players to create ruckus would create a lot more opportunities within the same space.
Even the Contracts could become significantly better with the addition of co-op elements, as more and more creative modes could get added. A great example would be a replication of something like Among Us, where a bunch of players have to find the impostor and, in this case, a pair of killers who go on to take out his targets one by one. This is but one example and a lot more can be achieved with this newly formed freedom of playing together.
If a Hitman co-op game does turn out someday and it does involve multiple agents going about missions, there's really a ton of potential. Taking out targets together, creating new co-operative multiplayer sandboxes, and more could really bring all of this together.
Hitman 3 is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.