Arkane Studios is working to add a fully offline mode to the upcoming open world zombie shooter Redfall. It’s not to be ready for the game’s launch across Xbox Series X|S and PC, and as part of the Xbox Game Pass library on 2nd May 2023, or even a firm promise from the studio, but this is still encouraging news.
Speaking to Eurogamer, game director Harvey Smith responded to the online pushback about the requirement by acknowledging that “There are people who live in places where there are outages or their broadband is shitty, or they’re competing with their family members, because their mum’s streaming a movie or their brother’s on another device. And so I think it is a legitimate critique.”
He continued, “We do take it with a lot of empathy. We listen. And we have already started work to address this in the future.”
However, it does seem like a rather tricky element of the game to walk back, and Smith isn’t promising that an offline mode will be released. “We have to do some things like encrypt your save games and do a bunch of UI work to support it. And so we are looking into – I’m not supposed to promise anything – but we’re looking into and working actively toward fixing that in the future.”
As for why the game requires online in the first place? There’s no online transactions built in (outside of standard cosmetics for pre-orders and bundles of guns, characters, and the like), but Smith said, “It allows us to do some accessibility stuff. It allows us for telemetry, like – if everybody’s falling off ladders and dying, holy shit that shows up. And so we can go and tweak the ladder code. There are reasons we set out to do that that are not insidious.”
Redfall is Arkane’s latest twist on the immersive sim genre, blending it with an open world setting and online co-op. With that in mind, it makes sense that the game would have deeply ingrained online systems (even if co-op campaign progress isn’t shared between players, which sucks for different reasons) but requiring online connectivity is just a ticking time bomb for a game’s existence.
We’re seeing this time and time again, whether it’s something as fundamental as the Wii U and 3DS eShop shutting down next week, Bungie vaulting Destiny 2 content, full games like Babylon’s Fall shutting down, and even successful and popular games eventually reaching the end of the road of server support. It could be 2 years, 5 years, 15 years, but there’s almost always a ticking clock these days and that sucks, even if it’s seemingly quite innocent – I don’t know why they’d need full player-base coverage to spot a ladder death, when 70% would surely highlight that.
Thankfully Arkane is looking to make a reversal, though it’s still a long-term problem since the game bought physically will still require an internet connection in order to get that offline mode patch.
Source: Eurogamer
