No. You can disable it. There is a character that sometimes spawns that'll hunt you down. If you have online play disabled, it'll always be a bot.

Very occasionally, on certain maps people or bots invade. It’s dark souls 1 style. It doesn’t impact that much until you are trying to beat it, then you get invaded once or twice.

is this more a fight between random internet strangers?

I think the traditional way of settling this is a meme duel.

"Kyle my way through a wall" is my new favorite saying for the next few days. Amazing

It's mario Kart you heathen!

YES! Thank you, finally someone else who sees it!

In my opinion, Deathloop is a spiritual successor to the OG System Shock as well. System Shock 2 and Prey (2017) both adopt RPG elements which is all well and fine, I adore both those games, but OG doesn't have them and leans more on the interplay of immersive systems, really giving credence to the immersive simulation labeling that feels a bit more obtuse these days.

In OG System Shock, I really do feel you're supposed to play with the Mission difficulty maxed so you have a time limit. It's fine if you don't, I've still never beaten it with the time limit on either Enhanced or Remake, but hear me out. System Shock (especially the REAL OG release) was an older game where you were meant to invest more time into it. You were supposed to do new game runs where you start from scratch, learn the world, learn the systems, and push further every time. It becomes more menacing when SHODAN is a real opponent that you can literally "lose" the game to.

Modern gamers don't really tolerate that kind of stuff because losing a good run to an 8 (or 10) hour time limit feels like a waste of your time, and I can sympathize with that. That's why Deathloop pulls the idea of runs into a metacontext where you're reliving the same day over and over again, learning the layout of the different areas at different times of day, making use of the tools available to you until you're ready for THE DAY when you do THE RUN and basically speedrun the game.

Part of me wonders what a Deathloop without Wenjie's preservation mechanic (I forget what it's called at the moment) would look like where you're forced to re-gather your favorite weapons from their specific locations each run would look like, too. But I get why it was included and I'm not ready to say it would 100% be a better game without.

Oh and Julianna obviously acts as the SHODAN antagonist stand-in even though I know their personalities and motivations are very different. You get how having an ever present, somewhat omniscient foe hunt you is kinda the same.

There's more but I won't ramble any further. I know they're very different games, but you see the outline, right?

EDIT: Of course there's copious amounts of Thief and Dishonoured DNA in there, but I've actually never played those so I have less to say about it. I promise, I'll get on it someday, I swear!