007: First Light is a damn fine video game. Over the weekend, I marathoned IOI’s next big adventure and had a blast with it. But about 12 or so times during my 14-hour playthrough, I was randomly disconnected from the game while playing single player and it was always very annoying.
At one point, I was creeping through a level and was about to go up behind a random grunt and take him down silently. But as I approached, a big annoying pop-up message stopped the action to tell me that I had been “disconnected” from IOI’s servers and that I could either retry to connect or continue playing offline.
Every single time I hit the retry option, it worked, which made me more annoyed because it meant that the servers weren’t down. And given that I haven’t been having any internet issues, and that other players, including Kotaku‘s own Carolyn Petit, report experiencing similar random disconnect errors, it just seems like this is a thing that will happen sometimes. Bleh.
Technically, the campaign found in the new 007 game from the studio behind the Hitman franchise can be played offline after you download a day-one patch. However, being offline locks you out of some parts of the game, including the mode known as TacSim, various in-game challenges, and some cosmetics unlocks. Some players have also reported worse issues, like lost progress, when losing a connection while playing, but I’ve not experienced that. It’s a shame that such a great game has this odd always-online yoke around its neck. It adds an unnecessary annoyance to an otherwise-superb experience.
There was also something about this annoying disconnected pop-up message that reminded me of the past… Oh, right, this was a problem in the modern Hitman reboot trilogy. As pointed out by a Reddit user on the Hitman subreddit, the server disconnect notification is nearly identical to the one found in past Hitman games. The more things change…