Planned obsolescence & value extraction in videogames has become horrible. Any good offline games recommendations?
I barely play videogames these days but damn that industry is so broken across the board, the level of planned obsolescence and value extraction has really gone way too far, makes it legit impossible to casually enjoy games. I used to enjoy playing the completely offline career modes in NBA 2K and FIFA while listening to a podcast or watching something, but today although the gameplay is all offline you must have an active internet connection. This means that every 2-3 years once they shut down the servers you can't actually play those offline modes anymore. Sounds absurd but this has already happened for several of the games I'm talking about. In the case of the NBA games you end up paying $80 for the new game, then they highly incentivize spending $50-$100 to save yourself hundreds of hours of progression and make it unplayable without those hours or $ spent, then tack on all sorts of microtransactions for even more value extraction. This results in 50-100GB updates literally any time I try to boot up any of the games I own, and by the time I decide to boot up the game next time, there is ALWAYS an update of that size, which essentially makes all the games I've owned in the past 2-3 years just unplayable.

Any recommendations around fully offline games with some type of progression system? Something that doesn't require an internet connection to play offline, and doesn't come with gigantic updates when booted up after a couple months of not playing.