Why HITMAN is always online (and why you should care) 

Referring to your servers as basically immortal is a 'red flag'

IOI's answers are outrageous. Most people don't plan to die but they still do, it IS inevitable. That is not a reason to not take precautions. It's sad when we won't be able to play bonus missions like Landslide anymore and IOI doesn't care.

When I bought my motorcycle, I bought a cheap helmet and someone asked "what happens if you crash?". Even I wasn't stupid enough to respond "I am not planning on crashing at this time".

It's such a shame that they made such an incredible game and all these unbelievably detailed maps, and then made all these weird and harmful decisions around the game itself, eg always online, paid dlc to carry maps over on PC, those disastrous launches (ESPECIALLY Hitman 3), I really hope IOI leaves this business model behind for their future games. On a technical and artistic level they're genuinely one of the best devs working today

Felt like this needed to be incoherently rambled, and I was nerd enough to do it.

I can't stand the "we aren't planning on closing the servers" response that devs give out for always online games. We've all experienced online game closures once or twice in our lives, many more if you happen to play EA games. Its a very real concern and its especially insulting considering its not some cloud computing kind of situation. The players machine can run the game, it doesn't need access to the server for anything other than "anti-cheat" and some stupid shit about an online profile like the majority of players really give a shit about that. Plus anti-cheat isnt even a valid reason. It's, for all intents and purposes, a single player game. If someone has bought a single-player games, whats the big deal if they cheat or hack it? Who fucking cares. Leaderboards, since the dawn of time, have always been filled with cheaters anyway, thankfully thats where group/friends list leaderboards come in, they're more meaningful and have greater social checks & balances than anonymous international leaderboards. But all that is pointless because again, people are free to cheat all they like when what they are doing has zero impact on any other players experience with the game; it doesn't matter at all and should never be accepted as a 'reason' for always online in singleplayer games.

100% agree, IOI needs to get their shit together about a future plan. These past two years have shown us that things can change on a dime. Having no plan b is the real red flag. "We have no plans to shut down the server" you might not, but your economy department might have, dude.

I don't really care about the leaderboards. But they could simply add something of a "competitive" mode or "Speedrun" mode which forces you to play online. If I just wanna play for myself casually I don't want to be forced to be online.

We wanted to avoid cheating. SPRUT: "hello."

i play hitman 2016 on mac (the rest of the trilogy isn't available), and even though it doesn't get ANY updates in terms of contracts, ETs, or anything it STILL requires me to be always online. this port for mac wasn't even done by IO, yet they still require always online. For a game they don't even support anymore. Even user made contracts aren't updated, its like the game is frozen in 2017, it may as well be offline. It's a sad situation since Hitman is such a good game. I wouldn't put up with this from any other franchise.

Thanks for providing a measured response to IOI's position and reasoning. Hadn't seen that second source talking about the development of the online systems. I agree with your analysis, that the lack of a long term plan (or at least lack of communication about it) is a worrying sign. It's with good reason that an always-online-requirement for a single player game is considered DRM. Anything that prevents me from potentially playing the game that's part of the game is essentially DRM.

@7:12 Bit of a gaslighting answer. The question isnt "are you planning to shut down the servers soon" but "what happens when you decide its time to shut down the servers"

"We're not dodging anything" *proceeds to dodge the question*

Whenever I see a developer speak about the decision to make something a live service platform, all I hear is "I know this may look, smell and taste like piss and every example of this in the past was and continues to be piss, but you don't have to worry about that, this is a great thing."

It’s so illogical to choose to “stop cheating” over the alternative. Hitman is a single player game, pure and simple, contracts and the leaderboards are a supplementary system that DOESN’T MATTER. If contracts mode, player profiles, and the leaderboards were deleted tomorrow, nobody would notice! The main game is in the levels, challenges, and unlocks. NOBODY really plays the contracts, and those that do often don’t care about the leaderboards AT ALL. To screw over 98% of the game to supplement 2% of the game is dumb.

Well said from the Hitman God. I just wish IOI understood.

I'm going to hate it when the servers shut down if they don't fix this before that happens.

Pretty sure, one day, HITMAN's servers will just go offline "temporarily" and we'll be left alone forever. Modders will have to take that on them and mod the game back to a fully playble state. Just like any other time. Also, I surely don't believe "it's not for DRM" bs, I'm sure as hell they did it to avoid piracy.

What I hate is every single Elusive Target ever released in Hitman 2016, 2, and 3 are all in the game's files, but the always online restriction means you cannot access them until IO graciously gives you a chance.

I'm still salty about Absolution contract being shut down before I had the chance to get the trophies related to that mode. I just hope they find a solution to Hitman 3 before they abandon the game completely. Like have the unlockables available from the start...idk

I think you did a great job with this video, compiling sources from IOI themselves rather than conjecture and such. Server shutdowns are my greatest fear with the WoA trilogy. Anyone who has been a PC gamer for a long time will remember all the games who's multiplayer [even LAN based] was lost because of GameSpy going down, GTA 4 becoming unplayable because you couldn't sign into Windows Live anymore, etc. All games should be fully playable offline.

Yeah, because all these SA kills done in 5-10 seconds topping the leader boards of every level are totally legit, no cheating involved. Meanwhile, I can't even see my score when the servers are inaccessible...

Didn't want people to cheat. IO care about people cheating... clearly not the case and allowing Sprut and other 7s score entries to still have access to the leaderboards massively undermines the argument for always online.

Great video Kotti. The longer they wait, the more complicated it will become. It’s already complex because there are 3 games to handle, but in the years to come they will also have to find the right people who can do the job. Again, I use Might and Magic X released in 2014 as an example, even if it’s a smaller game. Ubisoft pulled it from Steam because players couldn’t access the game’s single-player content or DLC in offline after they decided to end online support for a bunch of older games. The situation is not likely to improve because the developers (Limbic Entertainment) who worked on this game a decade ago, no longer work for Ubisoft since 2016. Unlike Might and Magic X, Hitman WOA has a more aggressive online requirement, which makes the situation even more complex.

Who the F cares about some leaderboards in such a game? It doesn't matter for the majority what time anyone has achieved when u have basically ENDLESS tries and different builds of the game that allow for different bugs/broken mechanics.. they talking about leaderboards like it's the only thing that carries this game.. -.-

Sounds like they shouldn't have made it online in the first place. Saying it's hard to change it isn't an excuse.

We should have made a bigger noise. This was a thing we were always passive about because we trusted IOI to do the right thing.

trying to curb cheating in hitman, a single-player game? that's ridiculous. who's going to complain if you cheat? the guards?

The way this is going, the only way to play hitman 30 years from now will be to play the pirated version or maybe use some of these alternate server mods. Not an ideal solution indeed. What if IO goes bankrupt? Are they really going to implement offline mode in the middle of a bankruptcy just to preserve their game? Come to think of it, do they even have any extrinsic incentive to preserve their game? If they're not around anymore why should they care whether their games are still accessible?

Imagine playing a mission halfway through the objectives and suddenly you cannot go through that door or exit because Oh Mr. BOND! YOU OFFLINE! _-Project 007_

The virgin Hitman 3: Always online DRM The chad Hitman Absolution: Playable offline, no DRM (RIP Contracts Mode, though)

Great video. Pretty disappointing that IOI is anti-server replacements if the servers aren't meant to be DRM. And I fully agree with your stance that the servers will eventually go down for one reason or another, so even if they don't plan to shut them down right now, that doesn't mean we don't need a long term solution.

The launch of HITMAN 3 (a whole week of not being able to properly play the game!) should've been a wake up call for IO on why the always online requirement is a horrible idea and that they need to make a proper plan for an offline mode, but no. There continue to be very vague in their communication and pump out sub-par content for the game and barely fix anything for the game...

Really enjoyed the video, cheers.

And now they've announced Hitman 2016 and 2 are being removed from storefronts and using Hitman 3 as the complete replacement. I give it a year before they quietly pull the plug on the servers for those two games.

I replay games that are 15-20 years old on a regular basis. The first Splinter Cell games, Deux Ex, KOTOR I & II, etc. And although sometimes it's finicky to get some older titles working properly, at least I never have to contend with them only working if there's a server to connect with. Will I still be able to play this trilogy of Hitman games, which is among my favorite game series of all time, in 20 years ? How about in 40 years, when I'm old and probably retired ? Will I still be able to play these by then old classics (to the fullest extent, with all the content I PAID for) ? Probably not in both cases. Hell, I'd be surprised if the servers are still available in 10 years really...

a big reason ive never bought this trilogy is the online dependence tbh, should they ever fix that i may buy it but until then ill stick to the og hitman trilogy

Hitman offline is essentially like the old Hitman games where improvising your way through a level and discovering the map and all its ins and outs is the only way to play.

I have been boycotting the newer Hitman games because of this. To this day, I have not played Hitman 2016. This is very important to me. I care about game preservation. I care about having a real ownership over the games I purchase. I hate to see games getting permanently killed and none of it is actually necessary.

Thanks for bringing awareness to this.

Here's what I want mastery unlocks and challenges in offline elusive targets and escalations offline too I understand contracts have to be online because its community And nobody cares about leaderboards anymore

"No plans to shut down the servers", "No plans to sink in the North Atlantic". Said by some idiot, 2021 and 1912.

I've wanted to try hitman for a while but a single player game requiring a constant internet connection is never something I'll pay money for.

I haven’t been able to connect to IOI since the 1/20 update. If they want to be online only, there needs to be line of communication with their consumers.

Sorry, too busy playing ghost mode to care ab... Oh. Right...

Thank god peacock is a thing, because personally I need hitman for life. thanks Rdil

6:13 He disconnected ingame and in real life! :D

I love this trilogy and it would be absolutely soul crushing to see the servers shut down and it becoming unplayable in the future just because it’s not optimized for offline play

I'm going to be deeply sad when the servers go down

"So what? I've never had any problems with the online stuff" says hypothetical man who doesn't exist because we definitely HAVE all had problems with the Hitman servers

Hey there man, I was wondering if you could do like a review of all that is to come for Hitman year 2.

appreciate the concern but despite what they say they *are* dodging offline-mode questions, and I see no reason to think they'll listen to anything except people just boycotting it, which won't happen i'd love to be wrong on this

If the software was designed properly then offline mode would not be a problem at all. Just run the same server code that they use on the local machine, switch the game/client to localhost and you would have fully working and separeted online/offline modes ... that's all. Of course it would require the server code to be able to run on a single machine without any other dependencies but that's no magic.

Always a fan of these kinds of videos Kotti

This sucks because I can't afford online. Every single game that I play is offline, single player only games... I'm 45 years old and work my butt off and still can't afford online... Looks like I'm S.O.L. I guess...damn...

Project 007 is not out yet and I can already see how much work lol is putting into hitman 3 (regarding to the delux edition and 7ds) Once 007 comes out all the attention will go towards the new project leaving hitman into more darkness. This is the time we bring this issue into the light

Sounds alot like what "accursed farms" is talking about. Not only is there alot of games on the life support, but few are already unplayable. I try avoid games like this and hope general public would aswell. Make this practise non profitable.

Worst thing about IOI's decision is it is just going to hurt them and/or the players regardless. Yes, they don't have plans to close the servers. Let's say, hypothetically, they *never* shut down their servers and keep them open until the heat death of the universe. Let's be honest, at some point, that's not going to be cost effective for them. Speaking as a fan of the content they create, I would like them to be able to do other things in the future and not have to keep the servers open for eternity so that they can make more great games. But they have dug themselves into a hole. The only thing I can hope for at this point is that they known its not sustainable forever and have plans to reduce the impact playing offline will have. What a shame.

They potentially wouldn't have thought up elusive targets if they chose to make the singleplayer videogame actually playable offline? That hardly sounds like a bad thing. Escalations are barely "content" either, they're just meh little challenges that often don't even net you anything but XP, which if you've already mastered a level, doesn't matter. It just sounds like IOI takes a big hit off the company crack pipe any time they talk about these kinda things.

If all they did was give us scoring progression and SA HUD marker offline that would be good enough for me, but I'm sure they'll just not do anything to fix the issues and we can probably expect the same kind of always online nonsense in the next james bond game

this really should be the most viewed video on your channel

Just a quick question with regards to the cheating thing, what percentage of players care about the online leaderboards in the first place? I mean their main reason to go always online was to curb people cheating on the leaderboards (So they say), but what fraction of the people that would pick this game up would even care if the online leaderboards were filled with cheaters? From personal experience I don't, and most the friends I play games with don't either.

Thank you for this video. I play games very slowly, and it would be quite sad if most of the game was suddenly gone because of the server shutdown.

personally, I understand their reasoning, but I think it's a fucking shame. I played the first one and liked it a lot, but the amount of issues I had with the online mode (disconnects, lagging etc) was not small. even the difference in performance and loading times online vs offline is absurd. I refuse to support them with hitman 2 and 3, unless they remove the DRM, but I know I'm in the minority.

Bro when are u gonna make a new video

The fact that you mentioned removing the online component would be much more complicated like something than denuvo is an very good point, and the fact that it isnt considered an drm is something people should seriously think about. Even tho IO gets flak for the content that they put out on official servers sometimes (see ex. Media Blackout, a featured contract in chongqing that was added back in march), i still think their format of putting out content without requiring a patch has its ups and downs. Ups being that you dont have to download a patch every week or so, but the downs being that they could use those updates to maybe(?) ship bugfixes and other stuff more often. Also as an avid user of the peacock server replacement, it has its own benefits, as the content added is much more community centric than what the offical servers have to offer (community created escalations, and featured contracts for example.) Overall the video is well made and i agree with most of the points you made.

Best option out there is PEACOCK Servers.

Hitman blood money soundtrack on the background, so cute

Middle finger to the developers for forcing me to connect to their servers and not being able to play the game (I fully paid for) without internet connection. The offline mode requires internet connection? What a bunch of horse-shite. More online monitoring, more privacy limitation. We as players no longer own games - they take money for offering a service to play games that are installed on our PCs.

@TheKotti Removing Hitman Online features is not possible,because you would need to replace,make custom server so to say,basically emulate the processes that happen when you play Hitman and it comunicates trough server and so on and on,it's not harder then remuving denuvo protection,it would how ever take more time to implement everything because there is a lot work to do,not that is complicated like removing denuvo protection,specially latest versions(many people won't understand this,but it's fine).

Piracy is my best friend.

Is it for data collecting so they made it online only? It doesn't sense at all.

Thanks for the video, well explained and completely true.

ten thousand Freedom Fighters "arcade cabinets" in the damn game YO IM SITTING HERE PATIENTLY. FOR 20 YEARS.

Found this a great criticism. Tbh I have had similar thoughts for a while, specifically "fans shouldn't have to fix a game while it's still getting official support"

Probably what is going to happen is that when they decide to shut down the servers in the long-term future , they just gonna make a offline mode but only with the main story of the game excluding everything else. I'm afraid this is a really high possibility. Peacock and the guys behind this project are saving this game in the long-term.

Reminds me of what sports games do in 2k13 introduced currency called vc and now that the servers are done you can’t buy any accessories or anything thus making my career basically unplayable and make you play them new games

I believe the reason why hitman is always online for the most part but you can play it off-line the only difference is your score is not on off-line mode and you have to be online for your score to increase it’s basically almost just like the reason why division and division two and ghost recon breakpoint it’s to keep people from cheating from modifying their scores and supplies and so forth it’s basically to keep people honest you can’t modify the Xbox one saves but you can modify the PS4 saves and also hitman Hass to be online because of the content especially the exclusive targets if that was off-line you would be able to redo the target if you screwed up but being online it’s a more tougher egg to crack

I think the DRM is a very redeeming feature for using online systems. Weird how they don't consider it as that.

Great video.

Most people are not speedrunning, so time, points and all of that hold little interest to most. It's more about managing goals no matter the time, and just playing it as it should be played - With care. It seems like more and more devs are catching on this always online trend though, so I at least see it as something that will just increase. I at least hope they will do some serious work to improve it.

Hi! As a Hitman fan, I really like your video. Can I repost this video to a Chinese video site and add Chinese subtitles? I'll make sure to tag you and add your video address.

I hadn't seen that engineer's post, and I'm surprised that there is some sense to it. Still, come on IO!

I was a big fan of the older Hitman games, but never played the new ones because of the always online stuff and time-limited features. I'm sure they're good but I have no interest in playing something like that. :(

Edit: ohh nvm, it's in end of vid 🤪 There's a way to play offline now, some people made a way.

It will be the same with the bond trilogy but almost everyone is always online anyway these days ,sadly io will probably never make another hitman game

lol. they just want to pull the plug whenever is convenient to them, just like they did with absolution online feature.

maybe a new anthology run for the next year's video? :) good one mate, cheers...

That's why i didn't even care about collecting the new trilogy on discs (although i have all Hitman games on various platforms, from Codename 47 to Absolution (Yup, even Absolution))

I don’t even understand it I wish I can just play the damn game as a story mode but there’s to much going on for me with this Online bs and doing this and that I tried it out a little bit ago and I liked the game and challenges of it but it keep disconnecting me off-line it was really frustrating I gave up on that game completely

I just don’t understand how a studio can be so arrogant and so foolish to think that their servers can live forever. Especially seeing as how IO is not a huge studio, how do they expect to have the money and resources to keep the servers going for even 8-10 years (not to mention keeping them running forever)? It’s also a shame to see IO’s continued unwillingness to listen to and openly communicate with their fans…

So, Hitman 3 was released on Steam, and the servers were down for two days. Unfortunately, IOI is not going to learn from their mistakes, whether with DRM or (>especially

What is the financial motivation behind a live service game? Is it just continuing to sell DLC?

I'd rather simply live without leader boards and rely on the community to police cheaters and call out their videos. It's worked simply perfect from since the vhs era to now, and technology will always keep up with any stupidity cheaters try to get away with. Plus you could release two game modes with everything side by side, all progress saved on your system and cloud, plenty of games have accomplished it for over a decade. It will be up to fans to jail break the last generation of games, and I applaud and I am greatly thankful to those with the passion and skill that do so.

They could've had a hitman 3 customer but I only buy on steam

Funny enough, the video is not loading for me...

Sinceraly, if freelancer is going to be offline, (and i think it is going to be) i will not care much, cause when that comes out i will play only that, and i won't even play the story anymore

I've just playing old good Blood money for years and I don't concern about new Hitman. Because I don't like new system except graphics.

It's not really a problem in the new Hitman trilogy, you can play the full story and complete opportunities while offline, which is everything you'd do in the older Hitman games. The online requirement is for the bonus content which isn't necessary at all to fully enjoy the games.

We aren't planning to shut down the servers? Well Ghost Mode and Sniper Assassin Co-Op would like to take a huge, posthumous laugh in their graves. Those things happened well in the middle of Hitman 2's life span, can you imagine if IO were to somehow go out of business? The only thing that developers who don't plan for EOL accomplish is heartbreak. It's all up to everyone else to pick up the pieces to compensate for bad planning. We shouldn't need to rely on modders to get and keep all your progress and stuff, it's on IO to do right by everyone and unteather progress from Online.