SimCity servers ‘not doing anything’ says Maxis insider

Has EA lied to us? The SimCity DRM debacle is another fresh wound for the average gamer. Millions purchased SimCity, only to discover that a brutal “always-on” connection was required in order to play the game, much like with Diablo III. According to a source from Maxis, the company that developed SimCity, implanting an offline, single-player version of the game would be easy, as the servers “are not doing anything” to support the single-player mode. Rockpapershotgun spoke to the Maxis insider, who happily spills the beans:

 The servers are not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing. They are still acting as servers, doing some amount of computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities. As well, they’re doing cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that. But for the game itself? No, they’re not doing anything. I have no idea why they’re claiming otherwise. It’s possible that Bradshaw misunderstood or was misinformed, but otherwise I’m clueless.

Always-online DRM is a plague for gamers, and Maxis remains instant that this anti-piracy mode is needed. In an article posted by Joystiq, Maxis says (in a tweet) that:

.@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

So what’s the story then and why are troops within Maxis sharing a different tale with us? Even Minecraft creator Markus Persson explains in a tweet that offline play is possible in Sim City.

I like how you can keep playing Sim City even when it notifies you that the servers are down. (But I thought it REALLY needed them?)

— Markus Persson (@notch) March 12, 2013

Who do we believe then, the community of pissed-off gamers or Maxis? It’s easy to blame publisher EA, which apparently “does not force design upon us”, says a developer at Maxis in regards to the inclusion of the DRM. The insider source at Maxis continues to explain how cutting out the servers would speed up the game by “minutes”.

Because of the way Glassbox was designed, simulation data had to go through a different pathway. The game would regularly pass updates to the server, and then the server would stick those messages in a huge queue along with the messages from everyone else playing. The server pulls messages off the queue, farms them out to other servers to be processed and then those servers send you a package of updates back. The online issues has even hit the sales of Sim City, with Amazon even suspending sales of the game for the time being.

The amount of time it could take for you to get a server update responding to something you’ve just done in the game could be as long as a few minutes. This is why they disabled Cheetah mode, by the way, to reduce by half the number of updates coming into the queue. It wouldn’t take very much engineering to give you a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff.

It wouldn’t take much engineering at all. A simple fix then, to alleviate the sting Sim City gamers are feeling. Although Maxis continues to ensure us that servers are continually being improved, it did deliver some reprieve, saying that “we’ll look into that (the DRM issue) as part of our earning back your trust efforts.” EA and Maxis have a long way to go then.