EA And Maxis Say ‘SimCity’ Would Need Significant Reengineering To Be Played Offline. They’re Lying.

The launch of the new SimCity has been, to put it mildly, a colossal bunglef–k. The problem lies with the game’s always-online requirement — fans are demanding it be dropped, but EA and Maxis insist it’s not that easy. According to SimCity’s developers the online requirement is about more than DRM. According to them, SimCity relies on cloud computing to run it’s simulation, and thus flipping off the Internet switch simply isn’t an option…

“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. It wouldn’t be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team.”

Riiiight. Couple problems with that…

First several people, including Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo and the creator of Minecraft, Notch, have tried disconnecting their Internet while playing the game. Shock of shocks, the simulation doesn’t go into immediate meltdown. In fact, the game remains perfectly playable for up to 20-minutes before it catches on and boots you back to the main menu. Other users have reported being able to play the game for hours offline through the use of certain tricks.

Also, take this with a grain of salt, but an “anonymous Maxis employee” has come forward to confirm EA’s servers aren’t handling any vital game processes, and that an offline version would not require significant retooling.

So yeah, they’ve finally killed me. If the launch of SimCity were merely botched, I could have forgiven and probably would have jumped aboard once the game was more stable, but evidence is mounting that EA and Maxis are being outright dishonest. It’s a shame, because the game really does look fun, but at this point I’d feel dirty if I supported this s–t.

via Polygon, Rock, Paper, Shotgun & Kotaku