The director of Redfall knows its always-online requirement isn’t popular amongst players and claims Arkane Studios is working on removing it.
Redfall gained some infamy last month, when the game’s FAQ revealed an online connection was required at all times. As of this time of writing, the FAQ still states, “A persistent online connection is required for single player and co-op.” However, Game Director Harvey Smith revealed in an interview with Eurogamer that this may not always be the case.
Eurogamer asked Smith what his reaction to those who wanted to play offline was, emphasizing that most devices are connected to the internet.
“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,” Smith explained.
RELATED: ‘Starfield’ Release Gets Pushed Back Again As Bethesda Announces New Release Date
“There are people who live in places where there are outages or their broadband is s—ty, 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,” the Redfall director admitted.
“We do take it with a lot of empathy,” Smith assured. “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.”
While some may have suspected Redfall‘s always-online connection was to prevent hacking any online stores or in-game currency, Smith revealed “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 [sic], we have that with every game we make,” Smith emphasized.
Smith finally elaborated on why Redfall was initially designed to be always online, to see how the game was being played, and where players struggled.
“It allows us to do some accessibility stuff. It allows us for telemetry, like – if everybody’s falling off ladders and dying, holy s—t 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,” he declared.
Earlier this month, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League saw monumental backlash after revealing it was yet another battle pass title, and hand always-online requirements. A rumored upcoming delay for the game is said to prevent it directly competing with several heavy hitters, and not to remove the loathed features.