Is is possible to play without internet connetion?

Tend to disagree that R3E was not designed for online foremost, the whole competitions and challenges, the community portal aspect... is extremely "online" and is where the game had its roots when it came out. So to me it always looked more "online" then an "offline" game (despite the SP features). That's not saying "offline" would be nice to have...

 

Do you have a source for that?

 

It would be nice to have a source!

 

Its been posted in multiple threads and forums here and in Race Department, id suggest trying the search function.

 

Ok, what's the best option for those who have frequent internet connection issues?

buying these offline versions will help but can it be updated?

http://www.dtm-experience.com/en/dtm-experience-2013-offline-editions/

 

I appreciate the online nature of the game from the very beginning but surely an offline mode is possible for those that don't care about multiplayer, competitions, leaderboards and player stats? Looking at the numbers playing online and taking part in competitions (i.e. not many), surely these people are the majority.

Piracy and hacking is another concern but there must be a way around this?

 

If you ask me (which nobody does, I know) online checks are OK in these cases:

1. Once when you start the game to check your copy of the game for piracy
2. Once every time you enter an online race or any kind of official competition/leaderboard challenge to check if you hacked your copy.
   
3. As long as STEAM is in offline mode: none of the above. No online functionality available of course.

What RRRE does, is it pulls you out of an offline practice or even out of watching a replay when it detects that your internet connection is down. For a legit customer this looks completely unacceptable.

But I can also understand that piracy is a major concern, especially when most customers like to play offline anyway and there aren't that many customers to start with. We all know the stats. Maybe they had more customers if the online checks were less interruptive, but this only speculation. And we should also not forget that this is most probably a publishers decision, not a developers. So don't be too harsh with the S3S guys.

 

still no word from developers though....

 

Yes, but if they answered everything we ask, they'd get no developing done

 

I believe online also keeps content from being stolen and ported to other games and also multiplayer cheating, thats my thought, but lets wait and see what the Devs have to say

 

Surely that's the encryption of the files in your hard drive, not the always online side of things?

 

Absolutely, and I have no kind words for pirates myssedlf, have gone after posters of pirated content repeatedly. They are thieves, plain and simple.

But if a company "solves" this annoyance for itself by completely and totally putting all disadvantages and all costs on the customer'S side exclusively - that is not acceptable.

To be honest, I missed the need to always be online when I checked R3E for the first time. I thought it would be like with so many other games at Steam: that you need to be online for installation and registration, but could run in offline mode. If I would have been fully aware of what really is the matter here, I would have immediately jumpstarted and left R3E behind. Its a good game, yes. But in the very beginning, you are not aware of the full quality. And the quality also is no afterwards-excuse for enforcing this constant online connection.

Statistics could be saved offline, and synchronised with online database whenever the player chooses to play online - either for synchronisation only, or for MP.

P.S. Yesterday late night local time it was like this: the servers could not be reached (forum site as well, everything S3 related was done for some time). I wanted to play, but was not allowed to. Me, a paying customer who have spend three times as much for this racing game than for any other ordinary full price game.

Unacceptable, even if it happens rarely only. Even more so since there is no good and solid reason for doing like this.

 

No one wants to , but an open word about it would end endless speculations and if it is like you said it might prevent confronting the devs with upset customers who naturally are targeting them in a first rush of anger .....(conspiracy theory syndrome)....transparency is the key here...we customers are not mad animals throwing death threats or something, specially the ppl of this forum...
https://forum.sector3studios.com/in...-internal-server-error.1741/page-3#post-17928

 

Absolutely agree with Skybird!

 

Hi guys,

I think I can speak for everyone at the Studio when I say we completely understand the frustration and the wishes to have an offline mode. Short answer is that we are definitely looking into having offline options and easing the online dependencies but it will take some work.

To be completely transparent I'll just comment on some of the recent events and explain why things are the way they are.

Regarding issues that started yesterday. Players started getting timeout errors yesterday when the server provider started having DNS issues. While in this instance it was out of our hands it is still unacceptable as we are still the ones providing the service.

The timeout issues we had immediately after the patch were unfortunately (and very ironically) due to the new optimized caching system using too much memory to get going. While the issue has been resolved, it is still unacceptable that this wasn't caught in the simulated test environment.

I personally feel bad for requiring Always Online when things fail on the server side. If we can't provide a solid service that keeps having issues then I don't feel right in demanding players to be Online.

Both the game and us as the developer team have changed a lot over the years. What was planned during SimBin times are not necessarily the case anymore. The team is not as big as it was. Some of the plans that were set in motion back in the day are now just over-engineered complex systems we have to optimize and trim down.

But as I mentioned in the beginning this is quite complex as certain things are already out in live. A lot of dependencies are already hooked in way too deep and has been there for a while with various features added on top.

Until we are at that point however, we are trying our best at fixing and optimizing things while hoping you guys will endure these crappy periods with us and stick around.

 

Thanks for the explanation Sonat.

 

So I take from this ^ that it is being intended and slowly worked on to implement a default offline mode/Steam offline mode. That is good to hear, I thank you for the explanation, and strongly encourage your development team to continue advancing on that trail.

 

I'm sure the majority of us here aren't going anywhere and I wish you good luck in resolving these issues.

It's the people 'on the fence' about this product that I'm concerned for. R3E is seen as expensive and the sales model isn't popular. When these people cannot play the game at all, that's potentially fatal for customer retention.

 

Thanx a bunch Sonat *phew*.....I know there always ppl who have something to complain about (with and without cause) but I'm confident the majority here has enough common sense to appreciate your statement

@James Cook
Lol, same thoughts posted the same moment

 

excellent response Sonat! Where else in this genre do you get to chat with the developers like this? Awesome!