I play Offline by default. I live in a country with slow connection speeds. I think I know what your problem is. A few things to keep in mind. 1- You need to be online in order to select the offline option, so you cant quit Steam in an online state and then start it without internet connectivity. You need to connect to the steam servers and then select offline for it to work. After that you can start up in offline mode until the next time you choose start an online session of steam. 2- By default an online session of steam will start downloading updates for any games you have. If an update has been started, the game will not be available in offline until the download is complete. So what I think happened in your case is that you connected to the steam servers, but an update started before you went into offline mode. At this point trying to launch Skyrim in offline mode will give you the error "the game is not ready to be played in offline mode." For future trips I would advise: 1. Switch to offline mode before traveling and keep steam in offline mode during the trip. 2. While in online mode, right click on Skyrim in your steam library and select "Properties" from the pop-up menu, go to the "Updates" tab and change the option "Always keep this game up to date" to "Do not automatically update this game". That way an update should not start when you are looking to switch to offline mode and make the game unavailable to you. 3. Optional: For a better gaming experience, I also suggest you select Steam >Settings and go to the "In-Game" tab and disable the "Enable Steam community in-game" option. I hate the steam community pop-ups in the game and this will disable it I hope that helps!