The main draw of the recently released episodic Hitman reboot is its live world which evolves continuously and gets shaped by players' actions. Unfortunately, this approach has its unique problems and its inherent frustrations.
A lot of Hitman missions can be played online or offline, but there is a caveat: progress is not shared between the two modes. If your internet connection drops for whatever reason while playing online, your progress cannot be continued offline.
Adding insult to injury, there is no way to continue your play session if your connection drops briefly while playing online. As soon as you lose your connection to Square Enix's servers, the game kicks you back to the main menu. From there, you have no option but to reconnect and restart the mission or play whatever missions you've unlocked in offline mode.
IO Interactive is well aware of those problems, but believes that they are an inevitable result of the game's nature. The company has no plans to address those issues.
"When we announced Hitman, we explained to fans and to gamers everywhere how we are creating a live game," an IO Interactive spokesperson told Eurogamer.
"This is a constantly evolving, living world of assassination, that will grow alongside the community with frequent content updates in between the launch of each location. This live content includes new contracts, escalation contracts, elusive targets, and even additional challenges.
It is possible to enjoy the locations offline, but in order to ensure player-progress of the live content is correct and up to date, the save states for online and offline are kept separate."