Its Finally Here! SimCity Is Getting An Offline Mode!
In a recent blog post from Patrick Buechner, Maxis General Manager, he said the words SimCity fans allll over wanted to hear. “We’re going offline!”
The upcoming Update 10 will give all SimCity players of the option of a “Single Player Mode”. This lets all players keep their city content locally on their machine and not on EA’s servers. What does this mean for you? Well you can play SimCity on a plane, on a train, in a car, near or far! The big feature is that the game is now open to the modding community, which has always been a huge part of the SimCity franchise; as Patrick said in his blog
Bringing the game Offline means big things for our wonderful community of Modders. They can now make modifications to the game and its components without compromising the integrity of the Online game. Modding is a big part of our studio’s legacy and we’re excited to see what you guys create. Check out this thread to learn about Oppie85’s Central Train Station, which you can put into your game right now, and if you’re interested in making your own content take a look at the Modding Policy. To get you started, we will be rolling out a series of tutorials from the studio that surfaces how we’ve created some of the content that you’ve seen so far in hopes of inspiring your creativity.
This update comes with mixed feelings, some are saying this should have been built in day one. When SimCity launched last August, it came with forced “Always On”. This meant that regardless of your interest in online content, you were forced to connect to EA’s servers to play. All of your cities and content was stored on their servers. What did this mean? Come launch day the servers were non existent, as EA did not anticipate the large volume of players. If you were able to actually log in and play, chances are when you came back all of your hard city planning was gone! Deleted to the cosmos.
No word yet on availability, as Update 10 is just getting pushed to the testing group. So any SimCity Geekscape Gamers out there, what are your thoughts on the offline mode?
