I admittedly don’t buy many games lately, especially not from the big budget crowd. BG3 seems to run fine without internet, as do Sea of Stars and Noita.
This is what steam is: a lesser form of ownership in exchange for the perks of the platform. I’ve come to prefer physical media first, DRM free second, and steam third. It’s just not as good of a value proposition to me compared to outright ownership (of the license to use the software, I know we don’t own “the game”).
Billy Basso is a protean talent. He built his own game engine and did AFAIK all the work on Animal Well, which on release was closer to its vision than any of the critically acclaimed games I’ve played from this decade.
I wish I could cloister myself for three weeks just to play AW. It is rich.
If you want it to be good, it will still take hard work. Your own training data, your own ideas, your own work. There’s no way to do anything worthwhile with an LLM that takes no work or thought.