SimCity can be engineered to play offline, says developer

Apparently, Maxis’ studio head Lucy Bradshaw was lying when she said when gamers play SimCity, “they offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers.” A developer of the game who wished to stay anonymous revealed to RockPaperShotgun that the statement is false. He said that the server is not handling any calculations of the game that doesn’t have to do with its social aspects.

According to the developer, “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.”

Kotaku had earlier proven that the game can indeed run without an Internet connection. A report from the website states that the game can run while offline for at least 19 minutes.

The cloud doesn't handle any calculations that aren't related to the social features of the game

Recently, Bradshaw had announced that many of the problems plaguing the game have been fixed. The major problem of players not being able to connect to the game's server "is behind us," said Bradshaw.

The company has released a new patch for SimCity that mostly eradicated the connection problems and added a new, rather strange, server: “Antarctica 1”. According to Bradshaw, this is "getting virtually everyone into the game and, once in, having a great time building cities and sharing regions."

She has pointed out, however, that not all of the problems have been solved yet. The company needs a few days of data before it can claim that the problem has been solved completely and the game is running at "100 percent".

Last week, Electronic Arts had announced that it is giving a free game to everyone who has activated SimCity on their Origin accounts while the developers work on getting the server issues fixed. People who have bought and activated the game on Origin will get an email on March 18 telling them how to redeem the free game. The company hasn’t mentioned which game we'll be getting, but it will be from EA’s line-up.

Many gamers have been facing issues with SimCity since its North American launch earlier last week. EA blamed "server instability" caused by too many players. The company has since been in damage-control mode and is scrambling to bring additional servers online.

Check out our review of SimCity.