A wise man once said that any game with both single and multiplayer modes should be able to hold itself up entirely on either. Granted, this person I’m quoting said this like ten years ago, and since then, the wall between single and multiplayer gaming has deteriorated somewhat, but it is still a good point. For some games, it makes more sense to scrap one kind of gameplay if the remaining kind can be a better game for it. So what about Enlisted? Does Enlisted have single player?
Enlisted was designed, first and foremost, as a multiplayer experience. It’s intended to be a somewhat realistic wartime simulator, and contrary to what decades of action moves may have taught us, there’s no such thing as a one-man war. This is why, at least as of writing, Enlisted does not have any kind of single player mode, nor is any planned at the moment.
Does Enlisted have Single Player?
Unlike the poster children of World War II-era shooters like Call of Duty or Medal of Honor, Enlisted isn’t really trying to tell any kind of dramatic story. It’s just war simulation, which, in fairness, could be pretty dramatic on its own, but not in the same way. There’s no single player campaign featuring a soldier gunning down a bunch of enemy troops single-handedly Wolfenstein-style, and there’s no offline multiplayer modes either. A handful of players have raised the possibility of an offline practice mode with bots instead of players, but the development team has clarified that they don’t have any plans to implement such a thing any time soon.
As the Enlisted website explains, the goal of the game isn’t just to kill enemy troops, it’s to capture footholds, mount defenses, lead troops, and other such wartime objectives, all with a modicum of realism that can’t really be simulated with bot players. Enlisted’s multiplayer-only model is central to its identity as a game.
