Redfall developer could remove always online requirement
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
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