The state of gaming offline in 2022

[Niku-Sama]

it sucks

and I'll tell you how i figured this out

I'm currently living in formerly farming extra white privilege town Oregon. Lots of hipsters that don't realize they are old yet, old farts and raisins roaming the streets and a bunch of shops that sell crap that would make Martha Stewart second guess her spending habits. With this sort clientele infrastructure is kind of a back of the mind sort of thing and well its at least 30 minutes from any other decently populated area too.

So the internet goes down a lot for a long amount of time.
Not a big, Its not like the thing i need to live. if my water were shut off for a week then yea kinda worrying but internet, nah.

so interwebs goes offline for hours. I do things, repack my stuff because hopefully i can move soon (please!), work on the car, clean up around the house, bug the cat, pester the dog. i get to a point where i have some time so i want to try and play a game. ok I have games. maybe too many. so i try Hot Wheels Unleashed for PS4, close to 100% on that one just have time trials to do. Start up the system pop the disc in and when i go to start the game it tells me it needs an update, well that clearly isn't going to happen with no internuts, so i tell it to run any way and it wont. it gets to the splash screen and tries to communicate with the server for about 10 minutes.

eff that

so i try some PC games, i have some games that were free on the Epic store downloaded that i haven't tried yet so i figured I'd give em a whack. Mind you these aren't AAA games, most of them are smaller some indy some not. None of them work.
Demons Tilt
Black Widow Recharged
Centipede Recharged
any Atari recharged game

just sits there trying to communicate with the overlord some where out on the http webs. WHY!?!?
These aren't games that need to communicate for any thing other than an update that is most likely never coming. I can play them on my own i find out after the intern is back 8 hours later. so what gives?

i thought well lets see if something with a little more umpf works. I start up PREY a uh... game in a whole different league (and was also free). Starts up no problem... so what gives?
Then the epic launcher decides to shit it self out of the blue and wont work in off line mode despite having that option selected since day one. it refuses to work at all. I said screw it and went to bed, it was 2am at this point and i can only look up so many work arounds on my phone with out downloading any thing.

the next day i get up and think i should pre load some other games so i start with Bioshock Infinite, i have a physical copy of this game i bought for PC on day one but its packed (like the rest of my life, i mean stuff) and it didn't need to communicate with the mothership every time i tried to fart and since i had it in the epic store too i figured I'd just load that version. couldn't be any different right? well no apparently not. i get it downloaded and i try to test it.

first epic gets involved by reopening their launcher, and then it hangs for a minute, then suddenly a 2K launcher starts loading out of no where. I didn't install this! Exactly! I didn't install it, and it isn't installed, its running stand alone buried in the bioshock directory.

i mean what is this. I have legitimate access to these games, why do you have to pummel us to death with launchers, logins and trackers just to play a game that's frankly not worth being connected online at all for?
It makes no sense, its almost as if where at a time where we still need NO CD patches for games only instead of CDs we need NO Launcher or NO interwebs patches.

the fact that bioshock has to check in with big brother and big sister to even begin to run is crazy. The fact that they are treating the internet like its a constant is kinda lame. Sure i am from an area where it rarely went down but this happens no matter what. Its not a utility like water, electricity or gas. people can live with out it, like a telephone, without it life goes on. sure people are able to live with out water, electricity or gas but less people are, I'd like to see grandma out digging a well or chopping wood to heat and cook. regardless...

this is getting worse and worse, and the industry wonders why people want to hang onto their physical copies for so long, its shit like this.

most games are not a hive mind that need to cease to function if they cant communicate with the mothership. sure some things wont work like leader boards or other internet specific features but the core of the game should just work in the end because theirs no reason it shouldn't. i obtained your game legitimately let me fucking play it when and where and how i want and stop making me jump through hoops in order to do so!

i legit think we need community created patches for this, not every game would be worthy but a lot would be