Arkane Studios will be working on the removal of the single-player always online restriction from its upcoming Redfall first-person shooter game. This follows significant backlash expressed by gamers, after the presence of this function was brought to light in February 2023. In an interview conducted by Eurogamer, game director Harvey Smith has revealed that the Austin, Texas-based branch has taken the negative feedback seriously. The development team is active in making changes to Redfall's underpinnings, so that an offline single-player experience becomes a possibility.

Smith acknowledged that modern games are intrinsically linked to online services, but these should offer functionality when offline circumstances occur. He imagined situations from the perspective of being a potential Redfall player: "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 reaffirms that Arkane Studios Austin will try to act on gamer community requests, even at late stages in a game's development: "We do take it with a lot of empathy," Smith said. "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."The always online nature of the game was a key design choice according to Smith, but he was quick to confirm that microsanctions and an in-game store are not part of the equation. He says that their systems will be focusing on player analytics - automated feedback is key to finding and making fixes once the game goes live: "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."

It is interesting to note that Smith makes no mention of the single-player always online restriction being annulled in time for the game's launch on May 3. It is somewhat ironic that the changes could be patched via an online channel - be it Steam, Epic Games Launcher, or the Xbox Live Dashboard.


Harvey Smith started his games development career at Origin Systems in the mid-nineties, and has contributed to a number of highly acclaimed titles since then, with tenures served at several award-winning studios. A couple of these games count as all-time fan favorites: System Shock (1994), Deus Ex (2000), Thief: Deadly Shadows (2004), Dishonored (2012) and Prey (2017).