Sim City ‘could have run in offline mode’ says Maxis

Sim City could have run perfectly fine offline. But no-one (Maxis or EA) wanted that. And Maxis says “offline mode would have spoilt our vision.” Of what, less screwing around with the paying customer?

Lucy Bradshaw, head of Maxis spills the beans in a tell-all blog post:

So, could we have built a subset offline mode? Yes. But we rejected that idea because it didn’t fit with our vision. We did not focus on the “single city in isolation” that we have delivered in past SimCities. We recognize that there are fans — people who love the original Sim City — who want that.

There’s a “but” coming.

But we’re also hearing from thousands of people who are playing across regions, trading, communicating and loving the Always-Connected functionality. The SimCity we delivered captures the magic of its heritage but catches up with ever-improving technology.

This is fan-tastic. “ever-improving technology”, “heritage”, “magic”, “we”. Love it. It’s as if EA and Maxis really give a damn. Thanks guys. Bradshaw also goes into great detail regarding the social and multiplayer features of Sim City that would only be made possible with an always-on connection.

We’ve played Sim City, and the greatest issue (as the DRM problems have mostly been ironed out), is that the game itself is incredibly buggy. This is what EA and Maxis should be hard at work on, right now. It’s not as if the modding community has been sitting with its hands in its pants. Playing offline means removing two lines of code. Two lines, that’s it. It’s fairly innocuous to the game itself and only adds to the general fun factor. Anyway, Maxis and EA have admitted it, but no official change will happen. This is the future of Sim City, and single-player games in general. Shoed-in “social” modes. We look forward to the day when gamers can share Tetris pieces on a massively connected board. Or not.