It doesn't, but to leave it off, you have to put steam in offline mode. It's fairly simple to do, though. I left my steam in offline mode for quite a long time but now that I've adjusted to it, I've grown to use it more and more, so it's just left in the normal online mode now.
You won't have any problems.

I second the steam suggestion, unless you want a copy of the disk on hand. It all requires steam still, but, at least you'd have that.
Edit: With the above, I had it left in offline mode for several months without any issues. So, YMMV. I've had no gripes besides not being able to occasionally roll back an update if a patch broke something.