I’ll be honest, I feel that this video is very incomplete to what I see as my experiences and what people in the fanbase actually feel.
For me the fanbase isn’t being silent on this at all, the memes we make aren’t because we feel it’s just a quirky thing IO are doing. It’s because we feel that as a community when we satirize something it tends to gain more traction as a talking point, and the other way around: a common talking point becomes something we use in our humor.
The reason the Sapienza protest didnt work isn’t because we weren’t loud or disproving of it, it’s because money talks and just like the Part One pack it seems we’re a vocal minority as opposed to the silent majority of players who clearly have bought into this stuff and have made IO money. This is the same reason these news sites didn’t pick up the story like they should, the Sapienza pack coming out isn’t part of their juicy news cycles.
And for me I have to explain that for me I’m not nearly as down on how Hitman is right now because of a specific way I have engaged with the franchise and that is that I got burnt out in the same way you did already and the state of the game right now is to me better than what I felt was the nadir with H3 Year 1. Compared to then, where I felt IO were abandoning their golden goose with mediocre DLC for a disappointing set of maps, I felt that Year’s 2-4 brought back my enthusiasm. So to me I see anything that Hitman gets now is a bonus, that it’s sundowning. I still have my criticisms, to me Freelancer feels like an unofficial fourth installment in the trilogy and thus feels super barebones compared to the richness of 1-3, but that’s just the reason why i’m not angry. I was angry then, i’m not now. I dont think either of us are wrong to be angry or happy with the game at any moment in time, it’s a nuanced thing. Passion can breed hate for what you love and vice versa
I also think with @Combatglue i have to admit a sort of bias that i think he deserves a chance given that i have corresponded with him a few times and he’s been nothing but nice to me and receptive to my ideas. I think that he could do a lot more to engage with the old guard of fans that popular reddit and HMF, but i do understand that Hitman is a complex af game and a lot of MY requests i do a lot to give context to because we have years of knowledge of how things should be done. I still view that as a rookie mistake and that he should engage more with fans who can guide him on stuff but at the same time we need to give context to everything rather than talking like we’d talk to eachother about this stuff
My advice for Combatglue would be to use the discord servers more, because to me that will help us to coach him on how to be the best Hitman community manager he can be because we can get almost instantaneous questions from him as to what we want, what we know and teach him nuances that take years to develop in mere weeks. The thing with Hitman is it’s a game that is difficult to community manage for because u will always know less than ur fans
I also have problems with the way the game is being conducted relative to its success. Hitman is a gem in the AA scene, it seems to only be gettting more and more popular but it’s still being treated as this cult hit that could stop being supported at any time and that to me is weird because Payday 2 and Postal 2 got regular free and paid updates for a decade and yet Hitman can only manage three ETs a year. Huh?
I also think IO as much as they are having success with this DLC model, need to throw us a bone and make efforts to press this down again into something more manageable. Let’s take the Sapienza episode, Part One packs and Celebrity packs as stuff that are too popular to get rid of for IO: that still gives us the Deluxe packs, Freelancer cosmetic packs, Sarajevo Six and Trinity which could be squeezed down into the base game
Ideally, the store page should be this:
Try Hitman
Free Starter Pack: Includes the Tutorial maps
Sapienza episode: Includes Tutorial maps + Story Mission 2: Sapienza
Part One: Includes Tutorial maps + Story Missions 1-6
Buy Hitman
Standard Edition: Every story mission, every escalation, every bonus mission, every sniper map, every special assignment, all in one package
Expand Hitman
Celebrities Pack vol. 1: Drop, Splitter, Undying
Anything that comes after this
That’s my frustration with this. They have the financial success, they have a business model that works, they don’t need to make this totally inconvenient to new players like they’re doing. You can gouge ur players and still have the store page to be coherent to read, dawg
