Redfall is one of the highly anticipated Xbox exclusives coming this year. Thus, fans are excited to take on the undead in the Arkane Studio open-world co-op shooter.
While there are many things to be excited about with Redfall, players have criticized its always online requirement even for the single-player campaign. The studio revealed this requirement in the FAQ page for the game.
Arkane has listened to fans and has announced that it is "working actively" to remove the requirement, but the studio has not confirmed that it will be in place when the game launches in May. Redfall’s game director Harvey Smith revealed to Eurogamer that his team is working to take the singe-player campaign offline.
"There are two ways developers could react to that, right?" Smith said. "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."
He adds, "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 shared that his team listens to feedback from the community and has started to work on the things the studio would like to address for future patches. He revealed that the team is working on encrypting save games and reworking the UI to support this feature.
Smith also explained why Arkane chose to make Redfall’s single-player campaign online only.
"It allows us to do some accessibility stuff," Smith explained. "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."
According to Smith, Redfall will not have microtransactions but may have DLCs down the line.
"There's no store in the game, and there's no microtransactions," Smith shared. "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," he adds.
Redfall is coming exclusively to PC and Xbox Series X/S on May 2.
