When Microsoft announced the Xbox One in 2013, it was going to require an always-on internet connection to function. After backlash from gamers and Sony’s gloating proclamation that the PlayStation 4 would play games just fine without the help of the internet, Microsoft backed down and dropped the requirement (except for a one-time console activation). As it turns out, Microsoft’s initial approach was more realistic about the modern reality of how games are made, and what’s effectively required in order to have a reasonably stable experience with a physical copy of a game you buy off the shelf today. Your console will indeed run without a connection, but your disc-based games may not give it much to work with.

“ Publishers have a "ship it now and patch it later" attitude.

“ Critical issues turned the first days into buggy disappointments for many eager day-one buyers.

“ The standard for when a game is ready to slap on a disc has dipped frighteningly low.

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Last year’s spotty launches showed what can happen when problems aren’t as easy to fix as developers anticipated, and critical issues turned the first days of games like Assassin’s Creed Unity Even when that last-minute patching strategy pays off, and connected gamers who download the patch as soon as they put the disc in the drive or get it with their digital purchase have a smooth day-one experience (after a potentially lengthy download delay, that is), where does that leave everyone else? The people who bought their new-generation consoles based on the promise that they’d work without internet connections capable of downloading gigabytes’ worth of patches?Up a creek, that’s where. If you thought Sony’s LittleBigPlanet 3, Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Unity, or Microsoft’s Halo: The Master Chief Collection were buggy with their launch-day patches, just imagine the condition they’d be in without them. There’ve been reports of major performance problems, crashes, corrupted save files, and frequent glitches like falling through the environment and failing to respawn cropping up regularly. Let’s not even get into the online multiplayer issues of Halo TMMC or Driveclub – we can assume that if you can’t download patches, you probably aren’t buying games to play online anyway.As an additional side effect of these patches, review copies now typically arrive much later than they used to; instead of sending them out as soon as a game goes gold, developers wait until the patches are ready. That’s drastically shortened the amount of time we have to play for review.Though we recently updated our reviews of both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 and noted how they’re more recommendable than they were a year ago, that’s assuming you’re online. I still would not advise buying one at all if you don’t expect to be able to regularly download patches. Unless Microsoft and Sony learn from the disastrous, confidence-shaking lessons of 2014 and change their testing standards, the age of the offline console is effectively over.

Dan Stapleton is IGN's Reviews Editor. You can follow him on Twitter to hear gaming rants and lots of random Simpsons references.