I've nothing against a cloud-connected future, but I would vigorously dispute the logic that enabling an offline mode for our technological devices is somehow an "antiquated" feature now. It's not, it makes the device more versatile and therefore more useful. If all our future tech is going to rely on a constant, dedicated, stable connection to the cloud to function in any worthwhile capacity, that's not a strength, that's a weakness. A strength would be the ability to work under diverse conditions, not extremely narrowly defined criteria.
I've never considered it a "strength" of a cable box that it really only does anything worth a damn when it's connected to a cable network. But that's been the basic nature of broadcast media since it's inception. And of course there's been work to compensate for that underlying dependency with cached, offline content that's durable enough to withstand lengthy disconnects from the broadcast/network. So it'd be a shame to see gaming hardware go in the opposite direction, reducing capabilities rather than increasing them.
I've never considered it a "strength" of a cable box that it really only does anything worth a damn when it's connected to a cable network. But that's been the basic nature of broadcast media since it's inception. And of course there's been work to compensate for that underlying dependency with cached, offline content that's durable enough to withstand lengthy disconnects from the broadcast/network. So it'd be a shame to see gaming hardware go in the opposite direction, reducing capabilities rather than increasing them.