Psst.
You didn’t hear it from me, but there’s a tool called the Peacock Project that lets you self-host (effectively) the backend for the game. Big up to the folks who put it together, it’s a life saver
yea i am trying that, but i will remain pissed off that this is the case. and those who defend it, not caring about us where internet isnt reliable or fast
Oh it’s definitely a systemic issue for sure, I loathe it with a passion as well.
I remember way back when EA told everyone Simcity 2013 require always online because “the simulation was so advance, it had to run on servers!” Yet it was just 2 months later, people reverse engineered the “server” and i was able to play for game on my complete peice of shit laptop… so much for advance simulation.
SimCity getting absolutely annihilated from existence be releasing a corrupt flop of a game just before city skylines offered a much better base game out of the box is something I wish would happen more with games that singularly rule their subgenre (The Sims, I’m looking at you).
Battlefield 2042 nearly had this happen to it too.
The game was shit. And battlebit came out same time which was way way better.
Sadly the battle it devs screwed the pooch and vanished then the game died.
Does this let you play freelancer normally? I assumed the online requirement was because freelancer could let you play on maps you don’t own.
I’ve been playing freelancer without issue, but I’m afraid I have no idea how it works if you only own, say, half the maps it uses.
I enjoy the game but these practices need calling out. I didn’t realise how bad it was when I purchased it. The whole marketing for this game is awful as well, it’s the first game I’ve needed a user made guide to show me which version to purchase.
Honestly in many aspects the old games are far superior anyway. So many awesome levels. Strongly recommended checking out Blood Money Reprisal on iOS and Android as well.
oo i will check it out
and yea it was confused as fuck to find what game to get. its apparently world of assasination but u also need chapters which are dlc but also not really. its stupid and hard for no reason. only matched by how confusing buying an xbox is
Yepp it’s pretty ridiculous. I purchased most of the game but still missed on 3 DLC levels I wanted purely because the cost to add them was ridiculous.
i get 1-4 new games a year at most to play, almost never AAA games. but i liked hitman as a teen and i heard praises for the ‘new’ ones online so i tried the ‘new’ one. the confusing ‘what to buy’ and so many different bundles on steam already confused me so i did what anyone would and use the dark side to get it. realizing that its online bs made me not willing to buy it anymore, i have gone through days without any internet and that has made me immediately get erked when anything requires internet to functional properly.
and i kinda didnt like the missions, i heard freelancer mode solves the issues of following directions and steps (like in the original games u could just do whatever to finish). but i cant try it offline, and its not worth really setting up things just for one game. ill try peacock tonight (mostly bc sunk cost on time lol) but im not supporting the game financially with all this bs
Absolutely understandable. I didn’t get it that way purely because I personally get very anxious about viruses etc when it comes to sourcing games/software. But I did deliberately get a key off a grey market site to give them as little profit as possible.
I also hate how handholdy all the fun stuff is, it totally removes that element of working it out yourself which felt so good in the previous games. I haven’t tried freelancer mode yet, I’ll give it a go.
I was a huge fan of the Hitman series. I haven’t bought a Hitman game since they switched to the always online, buy the gamepass, dark pattern crap.
Wait, what “new” Hitman game? Isn’t the last Hitman game like five years old? Did I miss something?
the new one came out in 2022, for me thats current releases. old is like pre 2018 minimum :p
I think Hitman is in this weird haze where… yeah, there was a game’s worth of new content three years ago, but it was just the same engine and even inside the same launcher as 1 and 2, so that’s just been an ongoing thing since 2016, so it feels older than it is, even discounting how far away 2022 feels right now for other reasons.
Still, you said “new Hitman” and got me excited. I guess it’s back to waiting for the inevitable cancellation of that 007 thing they’re supposed to be doing now.
to me, any game after 2018 feels new because i’ve yet to really see any generational difference between games in that period. 2018 is just random though, so like late 2010s and now is ‘new’ to me. though thats coming from me who genuinly gets confused about ‘graphical differences’ in games over time, like have had to pause videos of ‘comparing half life 1 and black mesa’ lmao (im autistic like that, and i literally have worked as modeller in games lol)
Eh, I get it. Someone recently said “twenty year old” games, presumably meaning something like the N64 and when I checked it turns out that twenty year old games are Shadow of the Colossus and GTA San Andreas.
Personally I have a hard time getting past the PS3/360 cutoff. Part of it is personal lived experience, part of it is you still get stuff like Crysis 3 and Red Dead Redemption show up in benchmarks. I think with Hitman since it’s been a bit stale after Hitman 3 I have more of a sense of waiting for another full sequel or reboot separate from the World of Assassination trilogy.
Its new since if it was released today it would be basically the same game. This is because compared to most of gaming history, there are barely no innovations gameplay, physics or visuals wise anymore. Kinda like in cinema where a lot of the films are either a remake or coloring book character movie.
Hitman 2025. Is the same as past year, but this time it’s title says 2025 instead of 2024.
Still confused. Hitman 2025 seems to be a Jason Statham movie. Hitman World of Assassination is IO’s weird episodic game thing where they released Hitman 2 and 3 in this strange, convoluted platform that was meant to drop a map per month, which didn’t really work, so they rolled back to doing full price games.
I don’t like that, there’s a reason I did finish the first season with the monthly episodes but not the other two “games”. The whole platform framework is also incredibly convoluted and impractical. Great games, messed up wrapper and release strategy.
If they changed something this year (or last year) I didn’t hear about it.
You absolutely nailed it, fantastic games but absolute dogshit launcher/wrapper/online service.
If they’d just released 3 games packaged normally and didn’t try to nickle and dime people everyone would be raving about how great the games are.
I genuinely don’t think the wrapper impacted much one way or the other (the sequels got tons of praise in any case), but it’s definitely way more cumbersome than it needs to be. Especially when they went from 1 to 2 and they started doing this thing where you needed to transfer not just your saves but the entire first game over to the second game as DLC to put it all in the same place.
The thing is I actually preferred how the first game was released as an episodic thing in the first place. To me that sort of justified having a big wrapper to launch each episode. I get that keeping the wrapper going across the sequels then allows to have seasonal missions and user generated missions across all maps of the franchise, which is pretty cool, but they just never found an elegant way to handle it and without the episodic cadence there is just less of a reason to mess with all the live content anyway.
What I don’t think is that the games are too similar. If anythingI think more games should be like Ryu Ga Gotoku/Yakuza, where they just keep using the same tools to pump out a ton of games with the same tech and leave the iteration for the story and the level design. Games are too expensive and consistent anyway, you really don’t need to reinvent the wheel from scratch every time.
Don’t need a massive platform launcher to consolidate all of it, though. If anything, once you’re moving at that speed the game itself rolls back to becoming the seasonal content.
I adore the game otherwise, but totally agreed.
It’s especially egregious when cutscenes are interrupted by “Reconnecting” bullshit.
Peacock works great and even adds some of its own content. But it’s unconscionable that it’s even needed in the first place.
I love the franchise but they really fucked it all up.
What do you dislike about the most recent 1-3/WOA other than the online requirement and the microtransaction bullshit?
to be clear, either of those alone are a totally valid dealbreaker!
That’s really it.
If they’d packaged the game as a standalone it would’ve been fine. I’d played both 1-2 on a console. When I wanted to play 3 on a PC I was faced with installing WOA signing into their servers, and buying per-pack/location/etc vs just paying the $60-$70 one time and being done with it.
It sucks because they’re really good games. There aren’t a lot of pure stealth games like that and it’s easily one of the best but they completely messed it all up with the weird packaging/launcher/server stuff.
yeah, totally agreed. Really phenomenal game once you’re in it, but the constant attempts to upsell shit and the pathetic online stuff really do seriously detract from the overall experience.
I still do recommend trying 3/WOA if you can get it for a good price. Freelancer genuinely adds a lot to the game and the new destinations from 3 are excellent.
But I totally understand not wanting to even bother.
Oh I’ve got it and I absolutely love it, BUT, their launcher and the way they release everything is so janky and just such a blatant money grab it turns me off in a big way.
I’ve just learned about thepeacockproject.org from these comments so I’ll probably check that out at some point.
Yea peacock is great! You can even copy your vanilla save file over to the Peacock-ified game (though, importantly, not the other way round)
The sims.
And the worst is: your saves are not even stored in your IOI account: A Steam save is not visible on EGS and vice versa.
It seems the “always online” feature is just for the leaderboards, alias the stuff I don’t give a fuck about.
This is a shame because Hitman WOA is really great.
I like nu hitman and it’s the best hitman by far but I wish the always online pissed me off as badly as the terrible key remapping, which is only second to cyberpunk.
I return any single player game that requires online connection. As long as you play under 2 hours, steam will give a full refund.
people defending steam are built different.
badly, but different.
This isn’t normal for Steam, though, it’s something the game dev/publisher/owner implemented (even if Steam is somewhat complicit in allowing it at all). Most single player games on Steam still work when you’re offline.
Steam on the whole is alright, obviously there are things that could be better but it works well as a centralised distribution platform with some nice extras. Ofc it’s still DRM but it’s probably the best way you’re ever going to see said DRM.
I was gonna buy it until I learned about that. instead I pirated it and play using Peacock.
Just clicked on this because of Whitty. In my opinion, it’s one of the best FNF mods I’ve seen. When I first saw it I even thought it was official! Well, too bad it ended…
