14 DAY TRIAL // Lucy Bradshaw, the general manager of developer Maxis, says that the recently launched SimCity would require significant engineering work in order to be playable completely offline, something that her team cannot handle at the moment.
Speaking to Polygon, the developer states that, “With the way that the game works, we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud.”
The structure of the game was clear ever since SimCity was first announced and longtime fans of the franchise warned that it would cause significant issues on launch.
Maxis always said that it had enough servers to handle the load and has tested its own infrastructure via a number of beta weekends.
Some players have asked developer Maxis and publisher Electronic Arts to make the entire experience offline so that all those who have bought the game can enjoy it.
“It wouldn't be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team,” Bradshaw adds.
It’s unclear whether the company might be persuaded to make that investment in the near future or whether the game will always be dependent on servers from Maxis.
The new SimCity is an impressive game when it actually runs, with solid city building mechanics and a lot of information for players to base their decisions on.
The game is somewhat limited by the small size of cities, but players can always play an entire region to get around them.
SimCity was launched last week and Maxis says that more than 90 percent of gamers should now have no problems accessing the game.
A patch has recently been released in order to fix some problems and Electronic Arts has also announced that those who register the game before March 18 will get a free PC game as compensation.