I posted this on the Hitman subreddit already, but figured I should post it here as well for visibility.
The past 3 Hitman games all require an always-online connection to the server in order to access the full content of the games (including progression/challenges).
Today, IO has announced that, along with the rebrand of Hitman 3 to World of Assassination and the reworking of its content bundles, they will also be taking down Hitman 2016 and Hitman 2 from sale on all platforms.
Although I think they should have kept those games available for historical purposes (I myself played through the first two games to appreciate all the differences before moving to the third one), I understand why they’re taking them down, as the purchasing experience for the trilogy has basically been a nightmare up to this point, and almost all of the content is playable within Hitman 3.
What I’m wondering now though is how long the servers for those two games will stay up for people who already own the games. Obviously they will likely see very few new players following this change, so it’s only a matter of time before the cost of running the servers outweighs the number of players on them, so they will inevitably shut down at some point.
What I would like to know is, when will the servers shut down, and, when they do, will there be a patch to those games to enable full offline functionality? I think that now is an important time to discuss this, especially since IO has forgone discussion of their always-online system up to this point.
Additionally, there is still some content in those first two games that still has not been officially brought into Hitman 3. This includes a number of escalations and challenges, as well as the Sarajevo Six bonus contracts from Hitman 2016. The latter will probably never be brought into Hitman 3 (at least on Xbox and PC) due to an exclusivity deal with Sony IIRC, but I see no reason for them to add the former since they will no longer be accessible for new Hitman players. I’m interested to see what everyone else thinks, and hopefully we will receive more information about this from IO Interactive as well.
p.s.: I’m aware of the mod to play Sarajevo Six on PC, but I still think it would be nice to make it playable in an official capacity.