Arkane is ‘looking into’ removing Redfall’s always-online single-player requirement

Redfall developer Arkane is “looking into” removing the requirement for solo players to always be connected online.

An official FAQ for the game published last month revealed that while players will be able to play Redfall solo without an Xbox Gold subscription, they will still need to be online to do so.

Under the question, “will playing Redfall require an online connection for single player as well as co-op?”, the FAQ states: “A persistent online connection is required for single player and co-op.”

Now, the game’s director Harvey Smith has told Eurogamer that the team is looking for a solution to remove this requirement.

Referring to players’ request to play offline, Smith explained: “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.”

He added: “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.”

Further reading

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Smith then claimed that the reason for the always-online requirement was to help Arkane analyse player behaviour and tweak the game accordingly.

“It allows us to do some accessibility stuff,” he said. “It allows us for telemetry. 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.”

In a VGC Redfall hands-on preview, we said the game is an “utterly engrossing single-player experience” which “is shaping up to be the studio’s strongest shooter to date”.