Okay, I lied... One more post. But not to argue, just to make one very strong and very scathing point about the Keep.
This all ignores that 10 years from now the Keep will likely be gone and I'll never be able to do a full series play ever again at that point without needing to use the defaults. This is the flaw of online being needed, because that means a server is needed. If a server is needed, it won't last forever. Despite all the arguing about my points in this thread, no one has even tried to address this. And why would I want to? Because I don't just not play games because of some arbitrary idea that a game is too old. I still enjoy SNES games and Sega Genesis games for goodness sakes. I still play Jade Empire and the first Knights of the Old Republic. DAI and other DA are the kind of games I can see myself still wanting to play a decade from now. But because of forced online for the Keep, doing that will mean being forced to use the default pre-history info. THIS is the main reason I want an offline version, above all other reasons.
Okay, I'll tackle this a bit.
One thing people have to realize is that electronic media, which includes audio and video recordings and video games are not permanent. Books can last hundreds of years if preserved properly, but movies, tapes, etc, are in a much more accelerated state of decay. It's very unlikely most of this media original copies will last past your lifetime. Secondly, as new formats come out, old formats start dying out--video and cassette tapes are becoming more antiquated and it will be harder and harder to find media to play them. You mention having old console games--but if you hardware breaks, all those items are just bricks taking up space.
This is especially true since the rise of the microcomputer (and which I'll include all consoles from the 2600 onward), these things are not likely to last stable more than a decade. The PC user has been blessed with some stability--Windows/Intel really created a standard, enforced by business needs. But people from the Late 1980s - Early 1990s probably have had to go through the pain of an abandoned platform. Apple II, Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST--all fell by the wayside. Even if you have an IBM PC, older games used DOS or 5.25 inch media. You may feel comfortable since the PC Windows platform has been pretty stable, but with other elements creeping in--the rise of the Cloud, Linux, Android, Phones, Tablets, etc...it's entirely possible the PC platform may be replaced in a decade or two. So, at some point, your stuff will not likely work anymore on the new platforms.
But if the games are successful, they will be ported over to new platforms--there's a lot of legacy games out there that have been ported to work with Windows without a DOS emulate, ported to tablets, and even HD versions released. So I fully expect at this time they would probably include a local version of the Keep if it no longer existed online, just like I would expect a ported ME3 to exclude the multiplayer or have it exist in a different format, and just like Ubisoft converted the Vita version of AC: LIberation to a PC format.
The only drawback is that you'd have to purchase the game again--but likely at a bargain rate (10-15 dollars) unless it's a full remake. And if you are so dedicated to the game you expect to be playing it for over 10 years, that's a small price to pay. It's the same thing people have to do when they purchase an album they had on cassette either as a CD or digital download, or when they replace their DVD with a new Blu-Ray copy. This isn't everything new.
The other point is I think that people who keep the games and play them year after year are a minority--and I don't think Bioware should go out of their way to have an off-line version of the keep if the benefit isn't worth the development cost.
Also, games aren't really the same experience as books, movies, etc. People complain about multiplayer, co-op, etc, but games are meant to be played, and while there may be drawbacks with this in the future, I would not like game companies to stop experimenting with cool things like companion apps on phones, new forms of coop, cross-game saves, etc. Perhaps more and more some games (particularly MMOs) may become shared experiences that can only be had at a certain time in history, instead of being a movie they are like an event concert akin to Woodstock--and the only remnant will be the let's play videos. I don't expect all games to be like this, but I also don't expect them to be the same as passive media either.
In short--don't worry about whether your game is around or still playable 10-20 years from now. Enjoy the immediate experience and don't worry about that other stuff.
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