Two different questions land on this page, and they have two different answers.
Can you play alone? Yes. Solo Mode was added in the 1.0 update. Can you play offline? No. Solo Mode still requires an internet connection. Do you need eight players? No. The game scales down to whoever is present.
The gap between "solo" and "offline" is where most of the confusion lives, and it is worth being exact about it.
What Solo Mode actually is
The studio describes Solo Mode as a place to learn each map, practise objectives or combat, or simply have fun with a Responder you have kitted out. Two properties define it:
- No traditional progression. Time spent in Solo Mode does not advance your character the way a co-op run does.
- Zero risk of permadeath. You cannot lose a Responder in it.
Those two go together deliberately. It is a practice sandbox: nothing to gain, nothing to lose. If you want to learn a map layout or drill objective mechanics without costing your squad a run, this is the mode for it.
Solo Mode is not offline mode
The official 1.0 announcement never uses the word offline anywhere. That absence is not an oversight, and three independent things confirm it:
- The Steam feature tags are Online Co-op, Cross-Platform Multiplayer, Steam Achievements and Steam Cloud. There is no Single-player tag.
- Both the minimum and recommended system requirements list
NETWORK: Broadband Internet connection. - Players have tested it and confirmed you cannot play without a connection.
This matters because it is a change from what was communicated before release. Community members have pointed out that a pre-launch developer post described an offline component that would not connect to servers and would need neither an internet connection nor a subscription. That is not how the shipped game behaves. The studio has not responded to repeated community questions about it.
There is a plausible community explanation — that Solo uses the same Responder as online play, with level and perk data held server-side, so it has to check in — but the studio has not confirmed this, so treat it as a theory rather than a reason.
The one piece of forward-looking news: the developer blog says they are researching extending Solo Mode beyond a single match, while keeping co-op as the focus. No timeline attached.
Do you need eight players?
No. Eight is the maximum squad size, not a requirement, and the game actively adjusts for smaller groups.
- Objectives scale to the number of players remaining when they start. A short squad is not asked to do an eight-player amount of work.
- Respawns do not require a full squad. On Beginner, respawns run on a timer, roughly once a minute. On Normal, completing a main objective opens respawns for anyone waiting.
What does not change is the design intent. This is a game built around a squad — covering each other during carries, one person holding while another works an objective, someone with medical supplies when you get bitten. A duo can complete maps. A duo will find some sections meaningfully harder than a full squad will, not because the numbers punish them but because two people cannot be in three places.
The practical recommendation
If you are two or three friends, queue with fill squad enabled and take the randoms. If you specifically want a closed group, be aware that the private lobby side of matchmaking is currently unreliable.
Known Solo Mode issue
On PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, Solo Mode supply drops do not spawn on Beginner difficulty. This is officially acknowledged and was listed for repair in the second hotfix. If you are practising on console and wondering where the supply drop went, it is not you.