Maxis has done the impossible. In an official blog post, the EA-owned developers announced that an offline mode will come to the massively-multiplayer simulation game nearly a year after launch.
“In Update 10, you can still play solo in Regions on your own, or in Multiplayer with people from around the world,” Patrick Buechner, General Manager of Maxis Emeryville explained. “What’s new is the Single Player Mode, which allows you to play the game Offline by yourself. And because your saved games in this mode are stored locally, you can save and load to your heart’s content.”
Maxis also assures players that all the benefits of the game’s always-online play will remain (such as multiplayer, leaderboards, and the market) should players choose to sign back in. With the offline mode, Maxis says that modders can now create without “compromising the integrity of the Online game.” Earlier in the week, the studio announced the official rules for modders to abide, which includes a non-commercial policy.
Last year, SimCity‘s always-online DRM helped EA win the “Worst Company in America” title for the second consecutive year. The title was earned shortly after it was shown that the game could be played (mostly) offline despite Maxis’ claims to Polygon that “a significant amount of the calculations” for the game were done within the cloud servers. Fortunately for players, it seems Maxis has now put in the “significant amount of engineering” required to get the game running offline.
SimCity holds the dubious honor of being the winner of our award for 2013′s Disaster of the Year - an award that it won by a landslide. Hopefully, 2014 will see EA rectifying some of their previous mistakes.
