14 DAY TRIAL // Simon Fox, the leading engineer working at Maxis, says that his team needed six full months to create an offline version of SimCity because it was harder than expected to eliminate the Internet requirements of the core game experience.
He writes in an official blog that, “I wish it were as simple as flipping a switch and telling the game to communicate with a dummy client rather than our server, but it’s more than that. Entire calculations had to be rewritten in order to make the game function correctly.”
The engineer says that one of the simplest elements of the game, the saving and loading of a certain city state, required a complete overhaul in order to work offline.
Fox adds, “We’ve had to knock out the internet pipe stuff. There’s lots of code that hits the servers looking for information. We’ve had to write a lot of code to produce that data locally, specifically for region information.”
Maxis says that it also needed to remove elements like trading, social features, the Global Market, achievements and leaderboards for the offline incarnation of SimCity.
The developer and Electronic Arts have announced that the new mode will be introduced alongside Update 10, which currently does not have an official launch date.
At the moment, all the features are in alpha state and a large group of volunteer players are making sure that all the core gameplay is working fine before it is released to the general public.
SimCity was launched last year and disappointed most fans of the long-running city building franchise, who were unwilling to deal with the smaller cities, the multiplayer elements and the need to constantly collaborate with other gamers.
At the moment, the game also allows mods to be used and that, coupled with the Offline mode, might revive interest in the title.