Permutations of environments are the bane of quality. Designing for offline is easy. Designing for online is easy. Designing for both isn’t impossible, but it’s certainly harder than designing for one or the other.

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Rohansi 10 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It's not at all harder on a technical level. Offline is the same as online with only one player. Many games boot up a server automatically when you play singleplayer.

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jjulius 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And yet, also for a couple of decades or so, we could play video games that would function just fine offline and could online in multiplayer mode.

This take, and OP's, both feel like they're ignoring nearly half a century of how games have functioned in favor of the over-engineered industry of the past ~15 years. Again, as I said in my first response I'm maybe speaking out of ignorance here, but why are we acting like it's incredibly difficult to do something we were very capable of doing for a very long time, and for less effort than what we put in now?

	▲	Terr_ an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, it's not that companies "forgot" how to design for offline use. They deliberately chose to design against it, because they discovered they can extract a lot more money by offering paid Progression Boosts so that players can more-quickly acquire Artificially Scarce Reward, or selling additional draws of a virtual lottery. So it's a business thing. In terms of technology, it's the opposite: Offline play is more feasible for more kinds of games than ever before, since local AI (of various types) has improved, reducing the need to recruit a human counterpart over the internet.