Although originally supposed to be exclusively online, even when playing singleplayer, Redfall's developers are now looking into making the game playable while offline.
This information comes courtesy of Eurogamer, who interviewed the game's director Harvey Smith. During the interview, they talked about Redfall in depth. One of the topics that popped up was the game's “Always online” policy. This raised many eyebrows, as there are quite a few players who wanted to be able to play Redfall offline in singleplayer. Smith then mentioned that it was something they are looking into.
There are two ways developers could react to that, right? They could say: ‘Oh, my God, you're always online. If you get on your Steam, and it's not online, you freak out. If you get on your Xbox, and you can't get the latest patch, or see what your friends are doing, you freak out. You want to be always online!' But that response, I think, lacks empathy. 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.
Smith then mentioned that their team instead decided to go with the second option, which was to “accept the reaction and find out if things can – at a late stage in development – be changed.”
We do take it with a lot of empathy. We listen. And we have already started work to address this in the future. 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.
Smith also explained why the game was going to always be online in the first place. He pre-emptively said that it wasn't because of an in-game store, nor was it because of microtransactions. In fact, Smith and Arkane Studios are actually very proud that it does not have any. The game will have costumes and cosmetics, however, they will come in the form of DLCs and in-game rewards.
There's no store in the game, and there's no microtransactions… You can find costumes and things like that in the world, those are yours. We do have a DLC plan – a couple of times we'll sell a bundle of stuff like guns, costumes, characters, you know, whatever. We're very excited about those things but it'll just be like DLC that you buy through Xbox or whatever. And there's the “Bite Back” Edition [of the base game] where you get some of that stuff for free. We had that plan with Dishonoured, we have that with every game we make.
The real reason was so that Arkane could collect data on how players were playing the game.
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.
As mentioned above, this is not definite news that the game will be playable offline. However, we can be sure that they are working to see if it would be possible to do so.
That's all the information we have about whether players can play Redfall's singleplayer offline. For more gaming news from us, you can also check out our gaming news articles.
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