Rockstar Games Launcher Offline Mode (Code: 7002.1)

[Yujah]

Getting "GTAIV: The Complete Edition" to run in Offline Mode has been a thing ever since it released. Specifically it didn't work at all for some two to three years after release back in 2020, and given that "always-on" is a form of third-party DRM which I as a Steam-customer of GTAIV from long before there ever was a TCE and/or RGL (Rockstar Games Launcher, which the TCE now requires) never agreed to, I consider this a consumer-rights issue.

Then after a february 2023 update offline mode in fact started to work: if you set Steam itself to Offline Mode before starting the game, the game (better, the RGL) starts in its own offline mode.

Then it at some point stopped working again, and I've been posting updates to this thread:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/12210/discussions/0/3763355849150865396/

with the status from 2023-08-11 being that things worked. Noticing more TCE/RGL updates I thought I'd again test but now had things bomb out again, with the message being

Offline Mode: Could not establish connection.

Error
Game launch error. Please try again later. Code: 7002.1

So as to not just keep bumping the above thread and to perhaps make this issue better discoverable I thought I'd create a new thread, and most specifically to note that it seems that the RGL is at least for now "just racy" with respect to this.

That is: I this time, 2023-08-19, first started the game in regular online mode, quit and restarted in offline mode which failed with the above message. When I then however in fact did "try again" it worked (with a third attempt crashing the RGL outright and a fourth one working again).

Rockstar's support page for error 7002.1 is at

https://support.rockstargames.com/articles/15713675595539/Social-Club-Error-Code-7002-1

and one of the things it mentions is that it may be the case that "Offline play is only available if the game has been launched recently while online on this computer." The word "recently" is rather ill-specified and, yes, is still a form of third-party DRM I never agreed to when I bought the game, but it's also in a practical sense less dire than "always-on" ("recently-on") and the error might then in any case just be a momentary matter of a buggy RGL such as in my above case.

That is: if you have this error, first of all just try again a few times, and if it's the case that you didn't run it in online mode for a long time, try doing that once if possible.

And/or please post updates to the status of offline mode to this thread.

[Yujah]

NOTE: Offline mode did repeatably not work on 2023-09-09 with the above 7002.1 error until I started in online mode once, which would then seem to say that "recently" means something less than 3 weeks certainly (and, note, possibly much less: did not test again until today).

The joys of Rockstar DRM...

EDIT: Remained (somewhat...) working 24 hours later -- after failing 4 times, two of which with the explicit 7002.1 error, and the other two with a crashing RGL.