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).
(The Sims, I’m looking at you).
It is 2014. I am twenty years old. I am booting up The Sims 4 for the first time. I find myself disappointed by the amount of content that is missing when compared to The Sims 3….
It is 2024. I am thirty years old. I am booting up The Sims 4 again. I have not touched the game for months prior to this, but I just spent $40 on the newest expansion. I find myself disappointed, but I feel like I need to play it a few more times to get my money’s worth.
It is 2074. I am eighty years old. I am booting up The Sims 4 again. I have not touched the game for months prior to this, but I just spent $700 on the newest expansion. The game now requires an entire 512TB drive. It takes 23 minutes and 41 seconds to boot up. My computer chair hurts my back.
grim reality where EA survives till 20174
My point was simply that EA will never release a new Sims game as long as they can keep expanding on Sims 4. They even outright said that they have cancelled production of Sims 5, to focus on expanding 4.
And here I went back to sims 3
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.
I’m still bitter about that whole debacle. CS never really clicked with me, so after trying ever other contemporary city sim under the sun I went back to playing SC4, but only every now and then. Goddamn, Simcity was so good and what EA did was a fuckin crime.
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 love steam. but something you need to realize is, the community is just gamer facebook.
every idiot, shitposter, racist, bigot, propagandist, and cousin-fucker is on there and outside of a few specific cases, allowed to say whatever they want.
Better to compare it to gab than Facebook. Steam community supports and allows way worse shit than Facebook because they have no advertisers who will pull out if the site is crawling with Nazis.
I saw someone saying literal Nazi shit and it never got taken down 😬
one of the worst ones, for a game I still somewhat care about is Arma 3
the community section and to some extent the workshop, have become a free speech zone for russian fascist war propaganda.
Better to compare it to gab than Facebook. Steam community supports and allows way worse shit than Facebook because they have no advertisers who will pull out if the site is crawling with Nazis.
As a general rule, Steam itself doesn’t moderate their forums - game forums are moderated by the dev/publisher or whoever they designate, and user communities are moderated by whoever runs that community or whoever they designate, barring content that is actually illegal in the US (like CP) which Steam will actually take action on. Steam will rarely moderate user profiles, but only if it’s extremely egregious.
Well generally I’m referring to the Steam Forums and reviews, but you’re right they don’t moderate game pages, and most game Devs aren’t attentive enough to do it themselves or limit the pages to customers of the game if not lock them entirely. It’s a very bad combination.
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.
Interesting - how are the old games better? To me, the World of Assassination trilogy is peak hitman, a condensation of all they’ve learned from the past many games, and an all-round improvement on Blood Money.
Oh I hear you, the new hitman games are far from bad, and I agree with you they are kinda a culmination of lessons learned in the previous games.
The main thing which bothers me is the handholding, where it comes up “mission story revealing” and then guides you. I’d love to at least pretend I’m working it out for myself. I understand you can turn that off, but I’ve also read online that doing so skips some story dialogue, would love it to turn out that’s wrong.
It’s also down to personal preference for me; I just happen to prefer some of the levels from the classic games. I also dislike the UI and general vibe of the new ones, how it feels like a live service. I appreciate my word choice of “superior” was overly strong in hindsight, I really meant it subjectively and was not trying to make a reaching claim. Both classic and new are very good, marketing and DRM aside.
The handholding is too much, I agree, but I had honestly forgotten it since I turn off that and the minimap at the start of each game. It doesn’t seem to skip any dialogue, I’ve at least not seen any dialogue online that wasn’t in my game, but I guess I wouldn’t know.
Overall the games are indeed not that challenging if you know a little about what you’re doing, but I appreciate that you can set your own challenge, and be rewarded in-game for e.g. silent assassin or suit only runs.
Yepp doing Silent Assassain / Suit Only really adds the challenge back in where the handholding takes it away. It’s what I’ve spent most of my time with the game doing.
That said, thanks for your insight on having the guides turned off. It’s only just hit me I can always just turn it off and replay levels I’ve already done to see what I miss, if anything. So I’ll do that next time I play.
https://thepeacockproject.org/
Annoying that something like this is needed, but still pretty cool that talented coders stepped up and made it happen.
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.
The newest games are genuinely the best in the genre. The live service parts are very interesting ways to build on the fanmade blood money contracts, and experiment with the genre, but ultimately not worth the always online requirements.
That being said, the games are hardly predatory. Genuinely the best Hitman has ever been.
They gave that cunt and elderly abuser Conor McGregor money to put him in of the DLC’s of the game. So fuck IOI I will never buy a game from them.
the main reason it got review bombed on gog, and evetially got banned from the store
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.
cyberpunk keymapping isn’t the best out-of-the-box, but it’s completely customizable…still could be a lot better…
It was not the last time I used it. Tons of hard bound and duplicate keys I needed to edit the .cfg for.
I’m pretty sure that was fixed with 2.0, but i can also remember that being a pain… anyhow: no longer the case!
Lemmyists use this one simple trick to get people back into cyberpunk2077!
was meant more like an FYI for anyone reading, not just you, but if you wanna give it another shot, go for it!
the 2.0 update really is one of the best updates of any large game in recent years ;)
there’s still a bunch of problems with the game, but none that are important enough to keep anyone from playing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Still no toggle ads after all these updates unfortunately. I’ve elected to use a controller instead.
really? i was pretty sure there is a toggle for that…might be misremembering tho.
i find toggle ads to be kinda clunky, so i always use hold ads anyways…except in games with lots of sniping/camping, that’s the only exception!
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.
“steam” isn’t DRM: it supports DRM, but it’s not DRM in itself. it offers the option to devs, and many use it, but it’s entirely optional.
saying steam “is DRM” is misinformation.
if you want to install a game you bought, you habe to go througj their fuckass client
and that is, by definition, NOT “DRM”.
I return any single player game that requires online connection. As long as you play under 2 hours, steam will give a full refund.
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…
I was gonna buy it until I learned about that. instead I pirated it and play using Peacock.
Inherently Steam Reviews are usually inclined to support the game. Because they’re from people who bought the game and are thus pressured to support their decision which they feel starts to represent them. There’s a inclination that a defense of the game is a defensive them. This is especially true when controversies involved and when the game’s more expensive. When it’s cheaper it’s easier to circumvent this.
so the support for this i found on steam community posts for the game. where people were asking if there’s a way to run freelancer mode offline. and comments were support always online decision and calling it as genuis anti piracy decision… which is ridiculous
