But what you’re forgetting is that it costs money to do that. Where are they going to get it from? It has to actually be worthwhile to them. Those games would be delisted, so they won’t get money from updating it.
It makes sense to add it to Hitman 3, because they’re still going to be selling it and making money.
It really is, people need to do it. The engines are different enough between versions that they would actually have to put work into it to port it back. Especially going from Hitman 3 to 2 and 2016. Hitman 3 had the backend of their UI system fully re-written as it got discontinued after H2’s release. So those changes would be need to be either made, or they re-make the update, but with Hitman 2. Hitman 2016 is a whole other can of worms.
It’s more work than it’s worth. Also, the patches don’t already exist, how do you think it works?
I don’t think that it would cost such money, it’s more about a willing to enable an offline feature which again should be something normal in a game like HITMAN.
Their plan was to bring some kind of live-service with those new games, so i don’t think HITMAN 3 would be the prime target for an offline patch as it is intended to last online for a while.
On the contrary of H1 & H2 which are potentially getting delisted and it would take less impact to enable an offline patch into those legacy games.
I don’t think so. Just look over the internet, for example the amazing Peacock Project or the clever Offline Scoring mod that enables those kind of features with a little bit of dedication and coding, at not much cost. IOI has the means to do it efficiently if they’re really willing to, especially after years of experimenting the HITMAN engine and features
That is not how it works. It is the opposite. A game that has now a fixed and decreasing number of players because it is delisted makes it economically worse to develop and release patches for. You rather do that for H3.
If the servers for H1&2 were to shut down, it makes much more sense for IO to gift the owners the H3 Starter Pack (or however it is called, which includes just Final Test) plus the extensions needed to play the game content they owned.
It is obvious here that IO does not want people to play the older titles of the trilogoy. They want them to switch. That is not the signal that is compatible with the intent to enable you playing them past the server life time.
And that’s the concern. We should be able to play those games and their whole content even after servers being shut down. That’s sad to see all those complications for something that should’ve been implemented right in the beginning
Again, i’m sure that it’s not a huge challenge to make the game playable offline. Some people outside of IOI did it without the same amount of resources
It’s a shame that most of the game content is locked behind online services while it’s mostly a game that plays on singleplayer. If you don’t remain permanently connected you can do nothing except going through the levels, without even being able to unlock the content or having a mission scoring. And THAT is a major issue in my opinion
Not even mentioning the times where you get a disconnect right in the middle of a game, sometimes at very critical and key moments
I hope that they will be able to enable an offline patch sometime in a near future, either for legacy games or for the whole content. This is one of the major flaws of those new entries in the series
Has this ever happened before? You have two games that won’t be sold anymore, that could have their servers shut down at some point, effectively destroying the games (since so much of the content is tied to the servers) YET both games and the majority of their content would still be playable in Hitman 3/WOA with that server.
Until the H3 servers gets shut down or a maintenance makes the game unplayable (check EPIC launch of the game for example): not really funny imo…
Anyway if you think that it is normal for a game like HITMAN to lock most of its content through online, and defend it as hard as you’re doing, then i guess that it’s a lost cause.
Not only for the players, but for the future of gaming in general
The whole game is designed around being connected. As far I can see it most stuff is “fire and forget” telemetry that is not hard to remove. But other stuff might be not as easy.
You can ask these “other people” if they would bet their job on the quality of their work. Because that is what is the difference here: A modification that is “good enough” and a quality-assured patch with a more optimal implementation than a dummy server running locally.
Note that the game and IO is very visible about the game being online. You knew what you bought.
This is also about to become another derail of the “always online bad” topic. Let us rest this with the statement that a patch to do that is not trivial.
Of course i knew what i’ve bought, and that’s one of the points who made me reconsider pre-ordering this sequel. Actually a lot of players complained about that always-online aspect and this was the reason for a part of the gamers to not purchase those new titles sadly
Even if it’s not perfect, a slight but efficient offline patching would be way better than keeping everything locked online. At least give us proper scoring/ranking and items unlocks with a better ability to save local profiles. That would be good/close enough i guess
Fingers crossed
Sorry for the derail but it’s an important matter and a major concern that have been spoken everywhere. Alright, back to the main topic: the WoA upgrade…
I still think that they should keep at least a standalone version of HITMAN 3, even if they’re changing the name and migrating everything into the same roof. At least to not confuse much more consumers who were advertised with a third sequel for years and who might find it disturbing that it suddenly changed its name/brand, even if it’s for the greatest.
Putting another “game title” as a standalone would make more sense and they can still put a straight redirection from either HITMAN 3 store page, or within the game itself
Well I’m glad I managed to grab the Requiem pack for H1 a while back before it’s tossed down the abyss forever. I understand wanting to focus on the latest game but I’m really not a fan of removing video games from sale for any other reason than “stocks ran out”.
If IOI wants to streamline the H3 experience I would also have liked them to merge the contract servers for the Epic and Steam versions, not being able to cross-play contracts between consoles and PC is already annoying but that divide makes even less sense
Nah, H1 FCs remain exclusive to H1. I’ve seen some of Urben’s H1 FCs remade in H3 but that’s pretty much it.
I agree with others that switching between game menu colors and music would be great. It’s why I added the option in Hitman Roulette.
I also agree that the old games should somehow remain available. But me, like others, just don’t see that happening. It’d be one hell of a good gesture, but not a practical one for them.
This is very ironic to me as I “fondly” remember H2016 had so many complaints around it’s optimisations and animations that I was convinced the community thought it was the worst Hitman game ever made. Back then you couldn’t say you liked the game in any capacity without being assaulted.
If I am to take these comments at face value then apparently this game is terrible and has only gotten worse.
I think you have a skewed memory of the talk back then.
The strongest opinions I remember were about random headturns, and these were fixed in H2016’s lifetime.
Also the game menu design was never loved, but it was better back then as you had less items and suits to scroll through. And as the menus otherwise did not change, it is not a special quirk of H2016.
My memory is fine thanks, this place was increadibly negative and I recall all the complaints about how the fibre wire was too fast, how certain interactions lacked animations, how everything was generally sped up to name but a few.
And yes the head turns, lack of a briefcase etc etc.
I wonder how well the legacy titles are selling. TBH I was gifting so many people H1/H2 whenever they were on sale and telling them to play it through the next launcher lol.
I honestly prefer the subtitle, Hitman games feel fun with them, but I’ll definitely miss the 2/III.
Agreed. I know that IO (and Mipumi) has done a lot of work internally for Hitman 1 and 2 servers in 2020 and 2021, to move them to a much newer backend tech (.NET 5-6 / .NET Core). So the server infrastructure of Hitman 2016 and Hitman 2 is much more recent and cost effective than people might think (far from the 2014-2016 codebase). With that in mind, IO could keep the servers running for a long time.
“A long time” is still not indefinitely. When I get a game, I want to be able to play that game in full all the way until I’m an old man, so long as I have a console and electricity to make the game run. This dependency on servers running to play a game properly that has come up in the last 20 years is bullshit.
