With the recent renege of offline capability of Elite Dangerous - is CIG still committed to providing offline Private Servers and Squadron 42 for backers?asked by Icinix
TL;DRChris Roberts says Squadron 42 will be playable offline without co-op, and smaller private servers for friends are still planned, though with less scale and slower content updates than the main universe.
Yes, as far as offline goes as long as you've downloaded the game through our downloader and thus have a legitimate copy you can play Squadron 42 and single player stuff without an internet connection, like on your laptop while travelling or something. Obviously you won't be able to do the co-op or multiplayer segments there, but we've said that. As far as hosting your own offline servers that's definitely still going to happen, just not to the same level of fidelity as our own servers, given that we have hundreds and hundreds or even thousands of servers spinning up dynamically to handle things like the economy simulation, different player instances, matchmaking stuff, PU databases etc etc as well. The offline or Private servers will be more like the freelancer servers are now, where you have a server that can handle a fixed number of players, and all you and your friends can run around together. No one will be able to run a moddable server with say a million players it's just impossible, you'd need a server base at the same scale as we'll have. But you'll certainly have these smaller servers available for you and your friends if you don't want to play in our PU. These smaller servers won't be updated as quickly as our PU, like we'll drop content and other game-master events in ours first as it's the priority and it would be an extra level of work bring it down to work on smaller level servers. So we're still going to deliver on all of our promises with that caveat which I've said from the beginning, the PU is just going to be able to support more players and be far more dynamic in a way that the moddable private servers won't be. I kind of understand why the Elite: Dangerous guys made that choice, because their game does revolve around some of that dynamic stuff that they provide, just like our PU will, but we're still allowing single player in the form of SQ42 and you'll still be able to run your own scaled down private servers.