Redfall isn’t out until May 2nd, but thanks to a recent round of hands-on previews (you can read our own here) and interviews with the folks at Arkane, we now know a little more about the game than we have before.
One thing that’s stuck out as an exciting new bit of information relates to the game’s current always-online requirement, meaning that players can’t play the game at all – even in single-player – without an active internet connection. While that might not seem like an issue for most, it definitely drew some ire when it came to light a couple months ago, with consistent internet access still not a given for absolutely everybody.
Now, speaking to Eurogamer, Arkane’s game director Harvey Smith has confirmed that the studio has heard the feedback and is actively looking at ways to revisit that requirement.
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“We do take it with a lot of empathy,” Smith told the outlet. “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.”
Smith also explained to Eurogamer that the online-only restriction has nothing to do with the uglier side of live service gaming, saying “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 where you get some of that stuff for free. We had that plan with Dishonoured, we have that with every game we make.
“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.”
