Sheershaw: I am seeing a lot of paranoia and hostility towards GOG that I think is unwarranted.
We have no idea what sort of arrangement exists between GOG and IOI. I think neither of them were expecting this sort of negative reaction.
I do think GOG and IOI will eventually address this, but given how integrated the online-only progression system is to the game, a proper fix may take some time, and they are probably unwilling to speak until they feel confident that whatever solution they have in the works will actually work.
At this point people need to tone down the histrionics and be patient.
At the end of the day, despite all of their faults, GOG is the best place for games. I will not be so hostile to a company that does a good thing imperfectly when no one else attempts it all.
Here's the situation as I see it: CDPR wants to play in the Big Boy Ball Pit of online game stores. GOG is and has been, from its very inception, a niche market; old games, and now newer games, sans DRM. I wish it weren't so niche a market, it baffles me that it has so little demand relatively speaking, but that's the reality of it.
This isn't good enough for them anymore.
The well of old games and properties and licenses to dig through runs ever drier. Not that I'm ungrateful for the efforts; those Star Trek games that popped onto the storefront recently were a pleasant surprise. In terms of dusting off and digitally restoring old games, I agree that GOG is the best (and only) in the biz, but CDPR has been growing explosively, dangerously fast thanks to the success of The Witcher 3, the Netflix series, et al. The problems with this are manifold; too many staff with management that is too inexperienced to give the kind of direction needed on this sort of scale (I suspect this is but one of the many issues to befall Cyberpunk), and when the company starts growing the business execs and shareholders expect it to
keep growing.
What's the best way to grow CDPR? Grow GOG as an online storefront. How do you grow GOG as a storefront? Get more big name games and publishers on board. Why are more big names not already on board with GOG? The no-DRM stipulation. How do you get them on board? Lower your standards.
I very much suspect Hitman is simply the most blatant case of them testing the waters. Unfortunately, I don't see how they expect to entice anyone to the store with bigger-name releases by compromising their core selling point. If I wanted to deal with a singleplayer game that's going to be 75% unplayable when the servers go down, I would've already bought it on Steam. At least there I'd be able to play it on Linux! [INDIGNANT THROAT-CLEARING]
So, this is why I'm glad everyone is pissed. I can agree with "tone down the histrionics" for the people openly declaring they want the place to burn, but at the same time,
absolutely do not allow the discontent to subside. Make it clear that this will not stand.
Unfortunately, even in a best case scenario I'm not sure we could reasonably hope for IO to spend the time and effort to dig in and rewrite enough of the code to actually make most of the game playable offline; we're already dealing with a several-years old release, and changing the core infrastructure for the game's data management is no overnight task. It's not
impossible, just... unlikely.
So... I'm not holding my breath for anything, but I'm definitely keeping an eye on how things go from here.
