I Lost My Hitman Progress And Subsequently Dealt A Fatal Blow To ... - TheGamer
One of the big perks of working in media is that you don't have to trauma dump on your friends and family, you can do it on the entire world instead. So here I go - are you in the right headspace to receive information that could possibly hurt you? Through a very specific and convoluted set of circumstances, I have lost all of my Hitman progress. My entire profile, my lifetime XP, all of my location mastery levels and unlocks, and my challenge progression - all gone, forever.
Losing this hard-earned progress gave me a feeling I haven't had since I was a little kid fighting for memory card space with my siblings, and it's just as miserable as ever. I realize now I never learned how to deal with this particular kind of loss. I still have the game, I still remember the experience of playing it, but I've lost all the evidence of the time I've spent with it. It shouldn't matter at all, but it really, really does.
Here's how it happened. I played the Hitman Trilogy on Stadia. A lot of you are probably thinking 'well there's your first mistake', and can I just say, don't kick a man when he's already down. Playing Hitman on Stadia was fantastic. Sometimes I played on my TV via Chromecast, sometimes I played on my PC with mouse and keyboard, and occasionally I'd lay in bed and play on my giant Samsung tablet. One time I took my phone into the bathroom and choked out the lead singer of The Class while cutting a loaf. Disgusting, but goddamn satisfying.
Playing games on Stadia was a delight, but as an avid user, it wasn't very surprising when Google announced it would be shutting the service down earlier this year. Though the company promised to issue refunds for purchases, there wasn't anything it could do about existing save data. Luckily, Hitman makers IO Interactive came up with a solution.
The Hitman Trilogy is unique when it comes to data transfers between games. When Hitman 2 launched, IOI reconfigured all of the locations and missions from the first game to work in the sequel. If you played Hitman, you'd be able to carry your progress over into Hitman 2, and even replay all of the old missions with all of Hitman 2's new devices and systems. IOI did the same thing for Hitman 3, allowing players to carry their progress forward and play all three entries as if they were one big game. This may have uniquely positioned IOI to deal with the Stadia closure, because it wasn't long after the announcement that that studio revealed it had devised a way for Stadia players to make a one-time transfer to another platform.
The ability to carry over progress between games is impressive, but the process isn't exactly straightforward. Normally, when you wanted to move your Hitman 2 progress to Hitman 3 on the same platform, you had to create an IOI account and log into it in Hitman 2 in order to create a backup of your file, then conduct a transfer through IOI's carryover portal. For Stadia transfer, IOI temporarily added an additional carryover portal just for Stadia players, but making the transfer was a multi-step process that stretched over several weeks.
Complicating matters further was the fact that at the same time Stadia was shutting down, the Hitman Trilogy was going through a big change too. Last month, Hitman 3 was rebranded as World of Assassination, officially combining all three games into a single platform for a one-time purchase. In order to make the transfer from Stadia, my understanding is that I would need to link my IOI account to the Stadia version after IOI set things up on January 11, but before Stadia shut down on January 18. Then, I'd need to buy Hitman 3 on Steam and wait until January 26 when it became World of Assassination in order to continue playing right where I left off.
I linked my IOI account before Stadia shut down, but as I discovered last night, I missed a crucial step. Apparently the new progression portal for Stadia players was only available on IOI's website until February 17. When I booted up World of Assassination on February 22 and tried to make the transfer, I found out that I was five days too late, and all my hard work murdering folks was gone for good.
This has happened to me before, but it's been a very, very long time. I have two core memories of losing saved files as a kid, both at my little brother's hands. He deleted my Super Mario RPG save at the Axem Rangers fight, and he wiped my Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix Critical Mode run just as I was leveling up to take on Lingering Will. I've never forgiven you for that, Malcolm, I hope you're happy.
It's a strange feeling of hopelessness I haven't been able to shake off today. I already enjoyed the games, and I can continue playing them if I want. Hitman even lets you play any mission you want right from the start, so I could skip everything I've already done and just continue on like nothing happened. But I've lost the record of my accomplishments, and that matters to me a lot more than I expected it would.
I don't hold it against IOI - it's great that the studio made the effort to preserve our Stadia progress at all. I have no one to blame, it's just an unfortunate situation that I'll likely never run into again. Cloud saves and automatic backups have completely inoculated us from these kinds of problems, but I still managed to find an ultra-specific way to relive one of my most formative childhood traumas. Thanks Stadia, I hope you're happy too.
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