I doubt that. We've heard this before with the always online Sim City game. Supposedly the always online was so tightly woven into the game that it would be impossible to remove. Then clever people managed to get working offline, and eventually the always online requirement was dropped in a patch.
Other than elusive targets, I doubt things like storing a save file locally instead of on a server would require a ground up rebuild.
Sim City 5 always online was a dumb thing that EA made, the game had offline support in case your connection dropped, someone just found out how to keep that permanently. so much so that if you currently crack SC5 you'll get "unable to connect to the servers" while you are plopping your 7th megatower.
The only issue is that Denuvo was a protection system that got removed even on Steam, but that's is entirely different than what Hitman 2016 has going for it since its DRM thing is about unlocking stuff and the elusive targets appearing, along with fan-made contracts an, etc., so the question is how you make these features available while being offline for players? Also, I fucked up about it being Origin, I actually went to double-check and it was Battle-net that you needed if you wanted to play Diablo 1 along with Warcraft 1-2
Elusive targets are easy to be triggered, they are a literal scenario mode but the problem is the server check, just let the game trigger that file without doing a server check.
the elusive targets are in the game files and can be loaded, also diablo 1-2 and warcraft 1-2-3 had a bnet connection cd-key activation back in the day until people cracked it since the game ran on offline modus no problemo, you couldn't connect to old bnet since it would tell your cd-key was invalid but you can lan/ip play, i mean GameRanger exists...
since well like you said they need to re-write it and essentially rebuild it from the ground up.
not really quite, make it save on the gog folders just like steam does and do cloud sync.
going through the billions of line codes for that might be a hassle, but
they are the ones that want to sell their shit on gog, not the other way around.
Anyone who is complinaing about how Hitman would need to be rebuilt from the ground up is a Grade A faggot. People have been able to hack the game so it plays fine offline since the very beginning. Hell, one of the first things people discovered in Hitman 2 behind the scenes was that all of the cut content like suits were already in the game and modding the save file activated them.
It wouldn't surprise me if someone managed to mod this GOG game in less than a week that fixed everything, but the problem was never 'fixing it' it was about making sure IOI was able to collect data about every playstyle for bizarre reasons. What exactly is IOI meant to do with data from Hitman 2016 in 2021? They're not going to patch Hitman 2016 to modify the playstyles, so the only other thing I can think of is soft DRM.
I think the modern Hitman games are great but I also fucking hate IOI for being massive faggots for first a) blaming Square for their stupid always online DRM b) blaming Warner Bros for their stupid always online DRM and c) having always online DRM even when they were an independant studio and capable of doing whatever they wanted.
The problem was never the big evil publishers, IOI have been using them to deflect criticism since 2016 now.
most of the "preorder bonuses" and even time-gated unreleased stuff is always avaliable to crackers because usually preorder editions have specific files which contain the extra assets and time gated shit means fuck all if the assets are in the game and can be pulled any time of the day, Far Cry 5 for instance had a
Kriss Super V weapon which was time gated, pirates can buy it anytime they wish and even use the skins without problems not to mention the Arcade clothing which they can unlock by not even touching arcade mode.
even on MMO's that doesn't really matter since their packets can be reversed and the client can be fooled into thinking it's talking to the master server, else single player repacks of world of warcraft with bots wouldn't exist.
