HITMAN 1 Server Optimization
We’ve got some news that we want to share about an upcoming optimization for our HITMAN 1 servers. Our goals here were to give us more flexibility with server scaling and reduce our studios’ daily costs in a low-impact way for our players. We want to stress that this will NOT at any point affect player profile, progression, mastery or any unlocks players have earned.
Starting from April 1st 2020 (14 days from today), players will no longer be able to load HITMAN 1 mid-mission savegames that were created before December 1st 2019. Players that attempt to load an affected mid-mission savegame will receive an error message.
This action will not require a game patch/update, and the process will begin ‘automatically’ on April 1st 2020. The entire process is expected to take between 24-72 hours. HITMAN 2 savegames are not affected in any way. Expanded Information We’ve added some more information in this section to answer some questions that we expect and give more details about this process.
HITMAN 1 mid-mission savegame files currently include lots of data as ‘events’ that we mostly use to evaluate scoring and progression. For example, the events might tell us what items you have picked up or how you eliminated a target.
All of those ‘events’ are sent, processed and stored on our servers. However, we consider them historical data because they are only needed when you want to load a mid-mission savegame that is associated with them. Because they are so closely related, it’s not possible to load the mid-mission savegame and then save it again to try and ‘preserve’ them during this process.
In practical terms, we are paying a daily cost to store these events on our servers, which are only used for loading a mid-mission savegame. In addition, the large (and ever-increasing) volume of events introduces unnecessary scaling issues with our servers, which prevents us from being flexible and agile. Finally, we want to make it clear that we have considered all aspects of this decision and the impact it will have on our players. A key factor in our decision was that the savegames that will become inaccessible do not impact progression in any way and that players who created a mid-mission savegame in the last few months will not be affected. On top of all that, the structure of our game means that you’ll quickly be able to recreate almost every mid-mission save game that was created prior to December 1st 2019. We are confident that the benefit of improved server flexibility and reduced cost will prove to be a significant, long-standing positive for us as a studio. We hope that our players understand, and ultimately accept, our decision as one that is in the greater interest of IOI and our games.
If you’ve got any questions or feedback about this, send it our way on Twitter.
Thanks, IO Interactive
