Yesterday my main internet went down. It was towards the end of the day, I was ready for a break from Unreal Engine hacking and thought a round of PS5 gaming was in order. It would be a perfect opportunity to see how the console copes when the ubiquitous internet isn’t available. Turns out none of my games were working without internet!
I had expected offline mode to work seamlessly, but as it turns out it’s not such an easy or intuitive feat to achieve, so in this article I’ll show you how to use your Playstation 5 without an internet connection.
If you’re reading this, you will have undoubtedly seen many articles that explain how to enable offline mode, and that it’s enabled by default if you have a single PS5 console. While that is true, you can only enable this mode if you actually have a working internet connection. If that’s not the case, you can’t even check if your PS5 is offline enabled (it’s under Settings – Users – other).
Thankfully I had a backup LTE connection so I could check this, and as it turns out my offline capabilities were indeed enabled. However, any game I tried to play just wouldn’t start, seemingly hanging forever on the loading screen while waiting for a server response to be established. Seems that’s not how offline mode works.
Instead, you have to manually disable your internet connection for said offline mode to kick in properly. We can do that under Settings – Network. No matter if you’re connecting via LAN or WiFi, flick that little switch into the “off” position. This seems to tell the console (and any games you start) that no internet connection is available, and as such apparently bypasses any unsuccessful trials of connecting to game servers.
That’s it, another gaming mystery has been solved!