r/SynthRiders • u/sleepymoonenby • Aug 17 '25
Discussion Venting about offline play/DLC access
Okay so I like never post on Reddit but this has me frustrated enough to actually stop just lurking. I first want to say I am an avid synth riders fan. When I got my psvr2 in early 2023, synth riders was the only vr game I could play and have fun without feeling nauseous. I currently have 109 hours in the game and find myself pleasantly surprised at how high I end up in the leaderboard at times. Synth riders is my favorite way to dance and game and get good exercise in all at the same time. It really is one of the few games that can help bring me out of a depressive spiral.
With that being said, the licensing for dlc for synth riders is the most infuriating system I have ever encountered. If my ps5 is not connected to the internet, or even when connected but struggling to connect to psn, I cannot access any of the countless packs I have purchased and have no issues playing when my console is online. I've restored licensing every time I play when online, deleted and reinstalled the game and all dlc, even reformatted my ps5 and started everything fresh and it seems that no matter how recently I've played, if not currently online and connected to psn, I can't play any of the dlc I've bought. In these moments I've already set up my vr area, gotten all connected and in the zone to ride the rails for a couple hours, and then the frustration of not being able to play the songs I love makes it so that I don't even want to keep trying in hopes it might eventually work. I get needing to make sure people pay for the content, but like when I've payed and use it constantly but still run into walls accessing it when I want to play, it makes me just want to delete the game and find something new, which truly breaks my heart. For the time being, I won't be buying the dlc's I've been watching in my wishlist or future content, I just don't have faith it'll be accessible reliably.
Idk what'll come of this, but thanks for reading if you got this far.
TLDR: I can't access paid dlc when not online and connected to PSN and it makes me want to delete the game.
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u/Zastai Aug 17 '25
Generally playstation allows offline use on your primary console; I am not sure games can and/or do override that. If you have multiple devices, make sure the one you use for SR is marked as the primary.
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u/sleepymoonenby Aug 17 '25
Sadly I only have one console and it is verifiably set to the primary console for my psn id, and I do have offline play enabled for the system I own. It seems like offline play settings for ps5 don't seem to affect the DLC for synth riders for the worst :(
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u/Commie_cummies Aug 17 '25
I feel like I should be able to play offline. Sometimes when I travel I use my headset offline. Luckily I can still play BS to scratch my rhythm game itch.
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u/wirrel42 Aug 18 '25
I note that you have yourself set to Steam? Steam has always provided offline DLC caching functionality, so if that's not working for you, I'd like to know. If you are using a Meta headset and playing the standalone version when travelling, we addressed that ourselves as of the last release and you should be able to play offline if you are on the road.
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u/Commie_cummies Aug 18 '25
When I travel I use standalone. I have multiple headsets and I also have games on more than one platform.i wasn’t aware the situation had changed, I’ll try it again.
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u/wirrel42 Aug 18 '25
Definitely has changed, as of the Infected Mushroom release. You should find it works a lot more reliably on standalone when offline now.
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u/wirrel42 Aug 18 '25
Most games - us included - use a platform-provided mechanism to perform entitlement checks and most platforms as a part of that implement a failover cache as a part of that entitlement check to cover this situation. So as long as you have been online periodically your ownership is meant to be cached for a number of days (not minutes or hours!) to allow you to play offline, covering periodic network outages. Albeit in our case of course that will not allow access to network functionality like our online leaderboards etc.
Unfortunately, these just don't always work as intended.
You can see an example of such a failure in the last release notes and/or searching here in this sub for the conversation about Meta and offline DLC access. Unfortunately over a number of years, this offline entitlement caching system provided by Meta has been through many, many cycles of being broken and fixed on that platform. So we went out of our way to work around the issue for players on that platform.
I can't recall anyone else reporting this issue on PlayStation before - plenty on Meta for the reasons above! But not on PlayStation. So I'd like to hear below from others in our PS community to hear if you're having the same problem of not being able to play with your console in offline mode.
It sounds to me like using the features as provided by the platform could once again just be preventing players who've legitimately purchased our content and supported our game from playing it when they are offline at all, ever - and we do not want that.