This past week EA Maxis revealed that the studio is currently “exploring the possibility” of making an offline mode for the notoriously always online SimCity.
Patrick Buechner, the General Manager of the Maxis Emeryville studio, made the somewhat surprising announcement in a “We’re Listening” post on SimCity‘s website, saying in part:
“Right now we have a team specifically focused on exploring the possibility of an offline mode. I can’t make any promises on when we will have more information, but we know this is something that many of our players have been asking for. While the server connectivity issues are behind us, we would like to give our players the ability to play even if they choose not to connect. An offline mode would have the additional benefit of providing room to the modding community to experiment without interfering or breaking the multiplayer experience. “
The lack of an offline mode in the traditional single-player only franchise was a huge issue when SimCity launched earlier this year, because EA’s inadequate server capacity had the unfortunate result of not letting customers play the game they had just purchased.
Maxis originally stated that an offline mode in SimCity “wouldn’t be possible” due to the “significant” number of in-game calculations that had to be run on EA’s servers, however, that position was quickly debunked after a YouTube user managed to accomplish the impossible.
We will keep an eye out for any news on the potential offline mode addition to SimCity, and let you as soon as Maxis makes any further announcements.