Hitman Havoc

When I was in my 20's, one of my good friends at the time said she would never date a man who played any kind of video games because it was a sign of immaturity. She was in her 30's at the time and having trouble finding a man who did not, except for older men she had no interest in. She went on to marry a man who did play video games and they later divorced, and now she's married to an older man who does not play. The moral of the story? People are complex and think carefully about what your actual deal breakers are, kids. One of the memories I have of my childhood was mom saving up to buy a Nintendo for us kids, and then promptly getting hooked on it herself. My mother is in her 60's and still plays video and now occasionally tablet games. Some 84 years after getting my first Nintendo, I still like to game. But there's a secondary purpose to it now. Video games have been found to help patients with brain injuries recover, as well as help with anxiety. I literally have a doctor's note to play games. Yay for brain damage! That said, I'm not a super hardcore multiplayer gamer with some expensive ass setup. I tend to stick to single player games to unwind and help me focus.

In May of last year my nephew suggested I download a free preview of a game called, "Hitman 2" and it was love at first play. H2 is the sequel to 2016's "Hitman" and follows the story of a born and bred assassin called Agent 47 who works for an agency that caters to the wealthy. Agent 47's handler, Diana, feeds him information and he does the dirty work actually taking out the people who have contracts on them. The games are incredibly immersive and have a ton of replay value. It's actually encouraged that you go back through each contract multiple times to get all the achievements and discover new areas, and it's been great escapism for these Covid times, (ironically, there's a side campaign for H2 that involves a deadly virus getting out at a medical facility and infecting people quite easily). Having played through both of the games, I was excited for the release of the final installment this month, and The Greek pre-ordered the fanciest version of the game for me for Christmas. When I bought the first two games, it was years after their initial release and so I had no experience with what release days were like from this company. Boy, did I find out last week.

The "Hitman" games all operate within one place, meaning that you can open H2 and have access to both that game and H1 without having to load each game independently. In theory, the final release, H3, should allow you to access all three games and any side missions from just launching H3. Since each game is tacked onto the last, one would think you could just install H3 and fire it up and be good to go. But no. A week before the game was released, the company that makes it, IOI, posted a very long-winded rundown of what players needed to know before playing. First, there would be a website you'd need to visit and register for an account there in order to link H2 to H3 and carryover your progress. At the time, it said that website would be up "soon" and that it was highly encouraged you link the two games before playing the new one. If you waited to link them until after you played H3, your progress in that game would be wiped. Also, PC players who used one particular store to play games would have to re-purchase H2 on a different store if they wanted to play at all, thereby wiping out any of their H2 progress and ponying up an extra $20 for a game they already owned. Even more ridiculous, all players had to download various free "access pass" add-ons for H3 that would allow access to H1 and H2. Confused? Yeah, so was everyone who intended to play the game. The PC re-buy thing did not go over well at all and apparently the backlash was so severe that IOI backpedaled a day or so later and promised no one would have to buy content they already owned.

The night prior to the game's release, the website to transfer your progress was still not live and I just knew there were gonna be problems. Since release day was also Inauguration Day (praise the Gods), I wasn't in a huge hurry to do the progress transfer. Good thing too, because that website went live at the very time the game released worldwide and almost immediately crashed. Since the transfer was basically required before playing H3, a lot of people were just stuck not playing at all until the website came back up. I managed to do the transfer late afternoon and then fired up the game that night to find some progress did not transfer at all, and I wasn't the only one with the issue. Even then, a lot of people complained they still could not even get to the website. The following night I played the game with few issues, but still saw people who were unable to. On top of that, complaints began to flow in about how nobody had been able to access the extra content promised in the deluxe edition of the game. That night, IOI released a new FAQ saying they were aware of the issues and that they would make the content available to PC players and then, at some point, all other console players. They also slipped in a new fact about how that progress that did not transfer was never meant to, something not in their original guide about the carryover. I logged on Friday night to play and could not connect to the game's servers. "Hitman" requires that you be online to play, a move supposedly made to combat piracy but that has never actually worked to do so. Upon checking the Reddit board for the game, I saw that a lot of people either had never been able to connect (either to the website or the game itself), and more had played fine for awhile but now could not get on. Still, some people apparently were able to play without issue. The lack of connectivity persisted throughout the weekend and only seemed to be getting worse, with more people reporting they could not play the game. IOI further compounded everyone's frustration by stroking their own member on Twitter, posting something about how the game was their highest rated ever and, in a second tweet, asking how everyone was enjoying it. They tacked on to the end of both those posts some one liner about how they were aware people had issues logging in. Some players were able to deduce that the problems had to do with those who did the carryover, since it appeared those who did not do it could play. Finally, on Monday morning, IOI posted that they were taking the servers down for a few hours to fix the problem and, as of this writing, it seems like they may have. But...wow.

The thing that struck me over the weekend is how this company has zero self-awareness and some massive cojones. First, you tell people they have to hand over even more money than they already have, and you do this five days prior to the game's release. Then, you make it a requirement to go through this ridiculous process just to carryover game data for a game that shouldn't need to be so complicated. You wait to put up a website you know will be overwhelmed, then don't seem to comprehend that everybody who was on that website will then go to the game, completely overwhelming your servers. And when the servers go to hell, only then do you decide to toot your own horn and ask how awesome the game you made is. It's almost a week later and I'm just now able to (knock on wood it works) take a deep dive into the game. I still don't have the extras that I paid for and was promised. To top it all off, game data that I assumed was going to be carried over, that I spent countless hours completing (and some of it sucked so hard to do) was never meant to be imported into H3 and they knew and didn't say anything until after people found out. I didn't have much experience with this company prior to last week, both the previous games fired up and needed to extra attention since they were so old. But now they come off shady as hell and very unprofessional. I understand it's a smaller company than when they started out, but come on. This is just a choice to not be as transparent as you should have been. When you wait to get all the pre-orders and then spring new, costly information on people, of course they're gonna be pissed. You didn't anticipate that? You didn't anticipate that a game that's been pretty well advertised (at least on Xbox) to attract a wide audience that would want to play on day one? Nobody calculated that waiting to put up the carryover website until literally the 11th hour wouldn't have a negative outcome? It's just all so amateur. And it makes me very happy this is the last game in the series and I have no interest in their next project, some James Bond thing.

As for my first impressions of H3, having only one play though under my belt, meh. They took out a lot of things that gave the first two games such tremendous replay value. The last installment of the game is shorter than the first two and the vibe of it is very different. Time will tell how much of that is my dislike of change and how much of it is just the newness of the levels themselves. The end of the story was very anti-climactic and the lack of interaction between Agent 47 and Diana is a definite downside. Going back to redo some of the stuff that reset is both intriguing and upsetting, especially considering IOI also removed some items that I used to complete those challenges. I will never understand why they continue to require a single player game to always be played online, especially when you consider someone had already cracked the game and put it out to the masses hours after its release. Seems like that requirement is doing more harm than good. Hopefully having actual access to the game without issue will be worth all the BS from the last week.