14 DAY TRIAL // When SimCity was first revealed by developer Maxis and publisher Electronic Arts, the two companies insisted that the always-on connected multiplayer would enhance the single-player side of the game, but now one leading developer is saying that the title was created with multiplayer at its core.
Jason Haber, the producer working on the rebooted SimCity, told games.on.net that, “This was built from the ground-up to be multiplayer. I think by having it be a multiplayer game, it allows you to specialise your city in a region and really have your influences affect other people who are playing in the region with you.”
The developer also highlighted other possible benefits of the always-on connected nature of SimCity, adding, “We can save your game in the cloud so you can go and play it anywhere wherever you want. If your machine blows up, your game won’t be gone and you won’t have to start over.
“In this day and age everyone’s connected all the time, so we felt like it was the perfect time and it would be fine to do that.”
The PC crowd has always been critical of games who require them to always be connected to the Internet because they tend to lead to lost gaming time when the service goes down.
Publishers like the same structure because it allows them to effectively ban pirates from playing the game and developers see it as a way of creating gaming experiences that involve groups rather than individuals.
The new SimCity will heavily emphasize interactions between the various cities that sit in one region, allowing players to chat with one another, share resources and compete.
SimCity will be launched exclusively on the PC during the first quarter of 2013 and a trademark for SimOcean has suggested that Electronic Arts has already been thinking about how it can expand the series.