it feels wrong, imo, for IOI to delist hitman 1 and 2 from the store with no other legal way to own a copy. i completely understand why: it eliminates confusion for new players into the WOA trying to figure out what version to buy. but if i wanted to play hitman 1 and i didn’t already own a copy prior to the WOA rebrand, i can’t.
what IOI should do, is give hitman GOTY and hitman 2 to steam users in their library when they purchase WOA. that way, the games are preserved easily. it’s not that different to how hangar 13 gives you “mafia ii classic” in your library when you buy the definitive edition. also, IOI should give you the gold expansion pass for hitman 2 if you buy the WOA deluxe pack too
the only caveat is that it might create conflicts with square enix and warner brothers. i’m not a lawyer so i genuinely don’t know. but if IOI is unable to do this then it is a shame
the problem is that the price of those discs are just going to skyrocket to unreasonable prices as time goes on. look at the first two results on amazon canada when i search for the godfather game. (this is a game you cannot buy on steam or the EA app since EA no longer owns the license btw. nor do they plan to port it for current gen)
I think it was a good decision to seal the two games away. As a new player, you will be absolutely happy with the WOA thing because from start to finish you experience everything there is with the same progression. Minus some things like Challenge Packs, Escalations and E-Phone which you probably will not miss as someone who never knew them in the first place.
What IO did wrong in my own opinion is to not use this occasion to get the game even more easily: Include all Sniper maps, New York and Haven in the base game. Especially because the sandbox maps are part of the story. And everything other than that should have been a single extension.
i agree. i don’t expect newcomers to care about this at all
but from the perspective of game preservation it just feels wrong. for long time veterans of the series, hitman 2 and especially 1 feel different from WOA, which makes them worth preserving
Not really, The Godfather video game isn’t highly sought after and isn’t nearly as iconic as something like Pokemon titles where their resale market value only appreciates in value over time due to the demand people have for older generations/games. There isn’t a demand for something like The Godfather video game so you can easily find one between $15-$30 depending on the condition.
Word of advice, don’t use Amazon as your one stop shop for retro gaming simply because their listings are always marked up. I recommend looking into eBay or Retro gaming stores that specialize in making these older titles accessible. Even flea markets if you have the time to attend them.
For example I bought the Godfather game last year on eBay for a drastically cheaper price on eBay.
There’s really nothing to preserve with Hitman 2016 and Hitman 2 when the differences are minor/subtle at best. The games are “preserved” within the WOA formally Hitman 3 and they’re their definitive iterations of the locations with the systems and mechanics built up between all three games.
It can also be added that the Classic edition is still available to people because the Definitive Edition has been labeled at a broken, buggy experience from the original. Comparing Mafia ll and the Hitman WOA trilogy is a reach given one had more care and time put into it and the other was a blatant Cash Grab to make preorders for the at the time yet to be released Mafia: Definitive Edition.
I’ve never understood the desire to have H1 and H2 preserved. Had IO not split from Square Enix, their goal of using the H1 launcher for everything would’ve come true.
As a result, the games that exist as H1 and H2 today wouldn’t exist. HITMAN would look more or less exactly the same as WoA does today because everything else would have been patched away and would be lost anyway. In this scenario, very few people would care about things that were lost along the way so why do they care about things being lost along the way with how the games were released?
Exactly. Outside of escalations which debatably were the worst part of 2016, you’re only missing out on glitches and exploits that exist in these titles and that’s it.
I did really like to go back and play 2016 and 2 after 3 and I gained an appreciation for how the trilogy evolved and improved over the years. However, I would be fine with the other two games going the way of the dodo if and only if they bring back all the content from those games into Hitman 3. That means bringing back the 38 escalations from 2016’s levels that are missing, bringing back the 111 Content Rich challenges from 2016’s and 2’s locations, and bringing back the ICA Electrocution Phone in all its “OP” glory.
I still maintain that the phone was not OP on anything but Elusive Targets, however they’re likely going to be done with the normal ETs after the ET Galore (I really doubt they’ll bother with Year 4 versions yet) so why not bring it back once they’re done?
Speaking of, I really regret not buying 2016 when it was available on GOG. People complained, but I would have loved a legal DRM-free copy of the game, even if it is offline-only. The possibility of its returning was already very low, but with the WoA update, it is forever gone.
For the record : if you buy a (second hand) disc version for console, you will not have to the full game.
On xbox it will give you access to Paris, Sapienza, Marrakesh, and Bangkok. But not Colorado, nor Hokkaido. Due to the file size, they are separate download, and demands a verification key.
Which is now impossible to buy.
One hand this frustrates me, because I will never be able to play the original Professional mode on those two maps. (I also prefer the slower, more deliberate approach to some of the animations in H2016)
On the other hand, I suspect that the delisting of Hitman 2016 is what opened the door to the release of the Sarajevo Six in H3, on all platforms.
It is OP, you don’t need to put it in quotes to try and downplay that because you disagree with this. The E-phone broke the games’ intended gameplay loop of interacting with the level and targets, it broke contracts mode as it perverses the incentive of figuring out the custom target missions and solving their puzzles, and it broke Elusive Targets for both those same reasons. It was a badly designed item that should not have released, and the only reason people want it back is because they miss it. If they ever brought it back, then the only want it makes sense to balance it is to make it work in puddles or other water sources only.
It was too much of a temptation, and in a game about establishing meta’s for the best weapons per level and mission and speedrunning said missions to get SA, bridging the gap between speedrunners and casual players like this with weapons that make quick, easy, and actively beneficial kill methods, is generally considered a bad move, both design and balance-wise. There’s a line, and they crossed it when releasing it.
Contrary to popular belief, the art of balance is not confined to multiplayer games, single player games have their own blueprints and design philosophies they stick to, and no game is unbalanced. And if a game is like that, then it’s either Goat Simulator (which is more of a sandbox to dick about in, and even that has a delibverate effort to quash bugs and exploits), badly made, or badly maintained (or hell, both are possible).
At the very least with the Molotov Cocktail, I can see a version of that where it could be balanced to make Accident kills less cheesy (it was already pretty hard to use on release when throwing it; that shouldn’t reward an accident kill, but maybe breaking it when static like a gas canister would be better). I want that to be rebalanced as I think that’s been overtuned, because in its current state, it’s not any better than any explosive, unless you really like fire. It’s not even in Freelancer!
Funnily enough, Hitman WOA is actually DRM-free; it has a standalone mode, surprising as that may seem for a game that has an always online connection and a barebones offline mode. At least on EGS, where it’s not tied down by Steamworks, and EOS itself is basically semi-optional SDK. You can see how to do it here.
This might be true of Hitman 2016 on EGS too, but I’ve not tested that.
De-listed games cannot be given away when you do bundles and such, at least, that’s how I understand it.
Honestly, this wouldn’t help. It’s pretty clever that it lets you do this, but I fail to see how this would be beneficial to the end-user. Yeah, sure, you have the older games in your library now… but it’s not like Hitman Blood Money or Absolution where they are on different engines and are different styles of game. Hitman WOA has the same engine with the same core mechanics between 2016, 2 and 3 and it is very similar between releases; even 2016 which is the most different of the lot. I wouldn’t be against this, but again, I fail to see much of an upside for IO for doing this. And it’s not like those games cannot be bough physically either.
This goes against every fiber of my being as a cutting-room-floor user, but the people who would’ve wanted to play Hitman would’ve done so by now. And from a content standpoint, there’s really not missing, both in the games’ files and content-wise. I’m gonna be honest here, I don’t miss the challenge packs they removed, and the 2016 escalations, while they should absolutely be re-released, should be modified to either play better and make them conform to the three-stages that we’re all used to.
