The single-player campaign is ready to go, but Firefly wants multiplayer ready at launch As the holiday season wrapped up, Stronghold: Warlords developer Firefly Studios faced a difficult decision: launch day was rapidly approaching, and the RTS game’s multiplayer mode still wasn’t performing the way it ought to. One option was to launch the single-player campaign on the scheduled release date, with the multiplayer mode to be added later. “We were really, really considering that because we could have just released single-player, and that would have been a perfectly viable option in terms of what was actually ready at the time,” marketing director Nick Tannahill says. Other games have taken this approach recently: Iron Harvest added ranked multiplayer a few weeks after launch, but saw a wave of unfavourable Steam reviews over what users saw as ‘missing features’ thanks to that decision.