Released little over a year ago now, SimCity was set to reinvigorate the City building genre it had so successfully dominated a decade earlier. However, the game was marred with a myriad of problems, one of which proved particularly devastating to the game’s success. SimCity was an online only game, and the developers went as far as to say that an offline mode was simply “not possible”.
@Azbiker72 The game was designed for MP, we sim the entire region on the server so this is just not possible
— SimCity (@simcity) March 9, 2013
Now, after a year of backlash over the game’s need to always be online, players are finally getting the offline mode they feel should have been in place since day 1. According to the official SimCity Twitter account, the offline mode will be introduced in Update 10, which they say is in “final testing”. While no release date has been announced as of yet, fans of the game can probably expect to see the update within a few weeks, but there are no guarantees.
While virtual mayors around the world will no doubt be happy to receive the long overdue update, the question remains whether or not it will be enough to save the game. While verdicts and reviews have long since passed, the game has, and will continue to, suffer from the lack of an offline mode, amidst various other issues. With fans growing ever more frustrated with the developers’ responses; such as the one below, provided by Maxis’ Lucy Bradshaw in an interview with Polygon, it remains to be seen whether this will be enough to save the game, and the hopes for any potential sequels.
“With the way that the game works, we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud. It wouldn’t be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team.”
All that is certain at this time is that SimCity will finally, after a year of struggles with its fans, have an offline mode. If this turns things around for the game, then EA/Maxis will have pulled off a major victory despite all of their early setbacks. However, if it fails, it will go down as yet another case in video games of too little too late.
What are your thoughts? Are you still an avid SimCity player who plays the game regardless of online/offline modes? Are you someone who was let down by the game initially, but will give it another chance to redeem itself? Let us know in the comments.