That’s all fine and dandy, but unless how it exists when they decide to stop hosting it on the servers can be made completely playable without them, it’s not worth it.
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Most likely IOI won’t generate an offline version of Hitman, since it is all coded from the ground up to interact with online servers. It would be a lot of work to create a version that runs in offline mode, other than what IOI have done already. A lot of legacy online games are disappearing though, such as what Ubisoft did recently. But Hitman was designed with porting of new content on a regular basis, which will keep the host servers busy for many years to come… Hitman is IOI’s premier title, so it may be more than a decade before the servers are shut down.
The fact that they will shut down eventually is all that matters. Whether it’s ten years, twenty years, or tomorrow, it makes no difference; all are equally enraging. Without full offline play, this is not a game that I can look forward to playing even into my old age. That is unacceptable.
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Well this is good to know, thanks 
Even if they patch in an offline mode, it’s not going to give the game immortality anyway - it’s just putting it on life support. The game’s chances of immortality died the moment the game released.
Patches aren’t going to be around forever, so even if IO did develop an offline mode - at some point far into the future those patches would become unavailable and then the offline mode dies and only people with the game already installed will still have it. Anyone else will be let the husk that shipped in January 2021.
Dude, I’m all for Let’s Get The Pitchforks Out if IOI don’t patch H3 to be much more fully featured offline and I’ve said as much, but sentences like these where you go out of your way to sound like a knob are pretty wearisome and don’t help the cause.
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So get a pc and install mods that let you do that right now. Seems preferable to letting millions of people suffer
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This is the kind of thinking that leads to the ruin of franchises. Stuff like the “always online” issue needs to be called out, lest Hitman become a caricature of itself.
Even as a PC player myself, I can admit that (1) that’s not so simple for everyone, and (2) that should not have to be resorted to in order to avoid “always online” in a game that is fundamentally single-player only anyway. Hitman simply should have never been an “always online” game.
If you’re not willing to sacrifice millions to a cause, you’re not fighting hard enough for it.
/s
(or am I?)
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I personally agree with the statement your on about here my Chemist Conundrumer.
I’m always thinking about the future, that includes like everything.
I wouldn’t be surprised if i had s condition about worrying about the future, and since i love playing old games many many many years after realise i will still play it, i, and many others, still play games many years later after its release of when it shuts down.
The seevers is a important thing to try and sort out, i can imagine myself playing hitman when I’m 50 tbh.
So to anyone who is disagreeing with Heisenberg’s point: No, it is important and the sooner they do it, the sooner it’s done and forever made offline and fun for many years to come.
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Great point. A game like Hitman, designed from the ground up as a “game as a service”, which comes with constant updates, has lots of upsides for both the developer and the gaming community. More games are “games as a service” now. As many have articulated well in this forum, it does come at a cost though, in that legacy digital content eventually disappears, if the lifeline of the servers are disconnected. This all may be mute since games which are not constantly updated and patched, are soon not able to run at all, in event of the rapid pace of changes in hardware and software running video games.
I think that by the time that Hitman servers are disconnected, we are looking at a release of a brand new and better Hitman in a Hitman 4 release, and few will be asking for updates of the legacy content, whose value is more sentimentality, like those who crave to relive their childhood (depending on your age) in Playstation 1 or Nintendo 64 or Commodore Pet, Radio Shack TRX 80, Amiga, Apple II, PC XT games.
The Hitman of the day would taken 15 minutes of the 32,000 byte executable file to load on a cassette tape, and visualized by sprites on a green screen, operated by keyboard only before the invention of the mouse.
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A game can be a classic. Imagine let one manuscript of Bach get lost because ‘well in the future there will be better classical music’
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If I understand the analogy, it’s not that better music would be available later, it’s that at some point in the future we’d only have trumpets so that symphony would only be playable at a bear minimum level (not that trumpets are inherently bad).
In any case, I agree that at such time as the servers are intended to go offline, all of the content that can be ported to an offline mode should be. Clearly community contract creation and leader boards won’t work anymore (unless they set up some sort of peer-to-peer system), but the rest could/should.
I was actually surprised at how often I do go back and play older games when I really thought about it. Just last night I was playing Bladerunner and last weekend I revisited the King’s Quest games…
Come to think of it, are there any Online components in Freelancer? There is no leader board, no community content, and other than patches or added content, no reason for the mode to connect to servers is there? Feels like Freelancer, as a mode, could/should work in Offline mode from day 1.
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I am sitting here with best video game ever entitled “Escape from Castle Wolfenstein” purchased in 1984 on 5 and 1/4 inch floppy disk. Real graphics and audio of German guard steps and voices. Like Hitman you sneak around guards, sometime finding of the odd gun in a chest. Still waiting for the Apple Macintosh upgrade on 3 1/4 inch disk from a copy that works on my Apple II E. Damn you developer! (single dude who made the game in his basement nearly 40 years ago)
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Well I don’t think we’ll be calling it Hitman 4 as IOI are moving away from the WOA trilogy when the next game drops, as mentioned in the article
It could be a start of a new trilogy, or even it’s own stand alone game, but I believe the next game will be set a few years after 47 and Diana obtained the SafeHouse.
Hopefully 47 will still have it by the next game!! 
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Been having a thought lately… Let’s say you have a Prestigious Objective: SA, but also an objective to (let’s say) kill 3 guards in an explosion.
Normally killing the 3 (non-target) guards would void the SA Ranking.
What if one timed it so that when they exit the mission (with a SA Ranking), then the 3 guards were blown up (as they say) on the way out?
Would you still get the =M= for the SA? Would the 3 guards being killed in the other objective earn you the extra =M=? 
It might be difficult to set up such a thing… I can immediately think of Sapienza… Like the 2 guards at the mansion gates, and another mansion guard returning through the same gate. You could use the RFID Explosive and Coin. Wait by the car exit, then activate the prompt before the guard passes the other 2. While driving away - BOOM!
So that could be something to try. 
If killing 3 guards is an objective, it seems obvious to me that these are still targets. If they aren’t, it should be corrected by IOI. Otherwise, you are pretty much forced to try to exploit the game mechanics.
Nah. It would be user error - since you really should select the PO after selecting the territory and reviewing the objectives you’re given and select a PO that is either compatible with the objectives you’re given or decide you’re going to ignore one of the objectives so that you can fulfill the PO and get more Merces.
IO can’t fix poor player decisions if they select an incompatible PO and also want to complete all four objectives.
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Indeed. There’s a reason the Silent Assassin Prestige is worth 30M. The highest amount you can get from one objective (right?)
So it’ll force you to skip out on the lower-tier objectives, but you’ll get more Merces from completing it instead.
If that fails, good. You still have the +10M Guards objective to fall back on
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No, no. FL actually has conflicting objectives. Maintain SA… Kill these non-targets in whatever way. That “way” has been either with a loud rifle/shotgun or explosions.
The thing is, I’m certain they had many people remark about either conflicting objectives, or being confused by them… So IO may change or fix that… Or just leave it up to the player to decide what objectives they want to fulfill in order to earn Mercers.
I just tried it as I said I’d set it up. I used the car exit and could see a body flying in the background as I drove away. 
I still got SA Rank on the results screen. So I’m wondering if in FL - if a player did the same thing, would they still earn the extra Mercers for the (conflicting) objective? And it all hinges on activating the Exit. Kill them before you exit and it would/should void SA. But if the game is going through the (cutscene) of 47 exiting while the non-targets die… Would I keep my SA Rank while still getting the 3 non-target kills?
It’s possible it may not even count the collateral damage - and thus be completely pointless.