Credit: Arkane/Bethesda

Redfall, the upcoming vampire-busting game developed by Arkane, with backing from Bethesda and Microsoft, has been primarily advertised as a multiplayer affair. You and a gaggle of buddies team up online to explore the open world, put bullets in vampires, and develop your characters in a similar vein to Arkane’s previous endeavor, Prey. However, not all players want a game that requires them to be online 24/7, and Arkane wants to prove that they’re sympathetic to that, which is why they’re working on some tweaks for Redfall to make it more offline-friendly.

Arkane Working to Remove Always-Online Requirement for Redfall

In an interview with Eurogamer earlier this week, Redfall director Harvey Smith said that, in the last couple of months before the game’s release on Xbox, Windows, and Game Pass, they are testing to see if they can cut out some of the game’s always-online requirements.

“There are people who live in places where there are outages or their broadband is s—–, 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 explained.

Why Does Redfall Have Always-Online Functions?

Credit: Arkane/Bethesda

While always-online frameworks for online games are often frowned upon by players for their inconvenient and debatably intrusive nature, Smith assured that Redfall, at least, had good reasons for such a design. “It allows us to do some accessibility stuff,” Smith said. “It allows us for telemetry, like, if everybody’s falling off ladders and dying, holy s— 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.”

Smith is admittedly not entirely sure if they will be able to cut the online requirements before Redfall’s release on May 1, but Arkane is in the process of trying. “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,” he said.