I played Fifa on my friend's Xbox the other day. We had to wait for an active connection before we could play each other. Players were removed from the roster because of updates from the server. Once his game pass was verified, we still had to log out and log in a few times, navigate the strange menu hierarchy to actually play against one another. Same pattern when trying to play NHL, same with Madden.

I remember when you used to buy a sports game, and everything you needed just loaded from the disk. Menus were easy, and you were two clicks away from starting an offline game.

This is why FitGirl repack's are a god-send. Declutters the bullshit, repacks the parts you actually want, and let's you play the game like you're not renting it on the whims of a fussy game lord.

A lot of my problem there is a solid half the games I play and make mods for run through EAC, so I'd be losing outright hobbies, not just slop.

I recently started pc gaming again, I had played some switch and ds stuff but the last time I had gamed on pc was almost twenty years ago. Even given that I'm focusing on 2d games, I thought there would be a lot more hiccups trying to run windows games on a machine with intel integrated graphics. I like indie games much better in general nowadays, I'm not even going to worry about what I'm missing without buying a graphics card.