The ultimate solution is to allow for P2P online with official servers as the default, and just warn people that you might encounter cheaters if you use P2P. Can even go a step further and separate the player pools between unmodded and modded clients. So you can play online with mods, but run the risk of encountering cheaters. P2P should mean you can ban certain people from invading you due to hacks or high ping similar to DSCM back in the day, but in-game.
I’m talking about offline/online generically here, not whether it’s using the official servers. I know it’s not using the official servers which is why you can play with mods
One of the reason why seamless coop is so good is you can play with mods without having to go offline and disable anti-cheat. I fully expect their implementation of this won’t allow for that.
The fact that I can’t do something as simple as turning off that god-awful chromatic aberration without anti-cheat banning me for cheating is so ridiculous. It’s so bad that I only play offline and at the moment, Seamless Coop is the only way I can play multiplayer.
It depends how long between sessions. The game is a lot like a book - you can read (play) for an hour at a time and put the book (game) down anytime then pickup where you left off. It might be a problem if you haven’t played for a few weeks as you might forget where you are in the story.