Does your game need to be connected to the internet?

I recently booted up my brother's Nintendo 3DS from a drawer. I just popped in one of my old Mario Kart DS cartridges and it was off to the races. After pulling it out of a drawer in which it had sat for many years, I could just charge it, turn it on, and start playing my games. If you exclude charge time, the time from cold boot to gameplay was less than what most modern games need to load from when I double-click them on my desktop. That is excluding updates.

Updates are not bad. In fact, one of the best acts of love a game can receive is active updates. Nothing compares to basically getting a whole bunch of improvements and additions to a game for literally no extra cost. But are updates a crutch?

In recent years, it seems that when games come out, they have major issues, and most of the time it is brushed away with, "Wait till it gets a couple of updates, then play." That felt like the slogan for Cyberpunk 2077. The game plays incredibly well now, but when it first came out, it was such a disaster I feel like it left a large stain on a game that is otherwise beloved. This is possibly why GTA VI keeps getting more and more delays in order to avoid this embarrassment (which honestly is worth it to me).

Cyberpunk isn't the only game, but it was one of the biggest with the most amount of issues in recent memory. If you are old enough to remember going to a store, getting a game, and immediately playing it, there is a certain kind of bliss to it. Now, even if you buy the physical disc of a game, you almost always have to update it and/or download extra content not on the disc. Meaning you can't even play the physical version from the jump; you have to have it catch up to the updates. This entire process seems backwards. Especially how nowadays I can be instantly gratified by almost any video on the internet within seconds, but if I want to play my game, I have to wait a couple of minutes or hours while it updates.

That Nintendo 3DS, or really any old cartridge or physical-media-first game console, doesn't have these concerns. You just put the game in and you play. Now, you don't get online play, the game you buy is the game you have forever, and you aren't getting the most "advanced" gameplay or textures in the world. But for a lot of games, I would take that tradeoff. Sometimes I just want a fun game where it's just me and the game. Heck, even local co-op doesn't need an internet connection. There is a bliss to not worrying about slow online lobbies, massive updates that must happen before you play, and other little internet-connected annoyances. Especially when everything is now connected, playing Mario Kart DS almost seemed tranquil (of course, nostalgia helps with that feeling as well).

Another important factor? No online connection keeps the games alive. Mario Kart DS is a 20-year-old game. I didn't do a thing and I could play it instantly. With semi-modern games being sunset by studios and becoming harder to keep alive than ever before, having a game that will work even if the internet disappeared is amazing. In this world, there is no "Stop Killing Games" movement because the games can't be killed in the first place.

This isn't a hit piece on the gaming industry. This isn't a "EVERYTHING SHOULD BE THIS WAY AND THE CURRENT WAY IS WRONG!" No, not at all. Almost all esports games thrive because of regular updates and online play. GTA V wouldn't be as much of a monster financial success without its online game. But for some things, I think no updates would be a way to keep games simple and allow them to be kept alive far longer than their online counterparts.