I can't play my games offline?! (Epic)

The Game Room
1

So I’ve resigned myself to the fact that these days, every game requires some sort of launcher that in most cases seems to have been coded by an overworked intern on their lunchbreak while listening to Aqua’s Barbie Girl on an endless loop and fending off an attack of a dozen starving crazed weasels with one hand while subject to periodically administered random electroshocks. But right now I had a wifi outage, so I thought I’d just do some light gaming, tried to load up Sifu I’d gotten during the Christmas giveaways on Epic—a game that doesn’t really have any online features, that sits right there on my harddrive, all of its data ready to tide me over my woeful internetless minutes—and was met with this screen telling me my sign-in had failed. OK, I thought, annoying, but there was a nice, big button saying ‘Continue in offline mode’. So, I grumbled a little to be made to jump through this senseless hoop—what do you think I want to do, just stare at my blank monitor for a while? Just continue, dammit!—and clicked, only to be met with this:

What do you mean, haven’t been stored for offline use? You’re telling me you’re not letting me play the game that’s, like, right there, on my computer, because running on said computer, you’re not sure if I’m actually me? I’m right here, the game is right here, but you’re not willing to let me access it because you can’t phone home? What the hell kind of sense does that make?

Anyway, internet access eventually was restored, thankfully, so I googled around for a bit, and found that there’s apparently a setting in the launcher, ‘enable offline mode browsing’, that needs to be checked. Grumbling again for a bit because, why is that something that needs to be explicitly enabled? What sense does it make to allow playing local games only if there’s an internet connection?, I navigated to the appropriate setting, and found it checked.

So now my question: what do I have to do so I’m allowed to play my games, which are on my machine, without the Epic launcher needing to soothe its anxieties by phoning home to confirm that I, in my house, at my desk, in front of my computer, am actually me? I presume it’s got something to do with the fact that I just sign in via google (OAuth), or is it another issue entirely? Any way to bypass the Epic launcher? Or am I just screwed on that?

2

I believe that both Epic and Steam have an offline mode* but require you to first be online THEN set it to offline so it can confirm first that you have access to the installed games. I go through this now and then with my kid’s bedroom computer which doesn’t have internet access. Plug in the Wifi adapter, log into the service, install any new games, set to offline mode, THEN remove the adapter.

As you discovered, it doesn’t really do the trick during unexpected outages.

*Well, I KNOW they both have an offline mode but believe my sequence how to get it working is accurate

3

Behavior like this on the part of the video game industry is why I don’t care about piracy anymore. You want to make your product a big pain in the rear for everyone? Then I don’t care if someone pirates it. No, I don’t pirate games myself.

4

OK, it seems that first loading up the launcher, then killing the wifi and setting it to offline mode helps—even if I start the launcher fresh without a connection1, I can now start games I have installed. Thanks for the tip!

It does make sympathy kinda hard, yes. This sort of thing, ‘early access’ games where you essentially pay for the privilege of beta testing, then pushing out half-finished products with the rest of the content arriving as a trickle of updates, fixes, DLCs and ‘seasons’, ‘freemium’ games, lootboxes, microtransactions… The gaming industry at large acts as a laboratory for new ways of squeezing the customer.

That said, with Epic’s regular free giveaways and similar programs, I haven’t really paid full prize for a game in ages, and most of the content of my library hasn’t cost me anything.

1By the way, does anybody know whether there’s a possibility to just have the launcher close for good upon pressing the ‘x’ control button in the upper right? Standardly, that just minimizes to the tray, which I struggle to see why anybody would want it to do so.

5

You know, you could try an alternative Epic Games launcher

6

Interesting, I didn’t know that was a thing, I’ll look into it—thanks!

But if that’s available, I don’t suppose there’s also an option to do without a launcher entirely? Just have an icon I could click that does nothing but, you know, start the game?