SimCity Offline IS Possible

Maxis and EA have made it pretty clear that “just making SimCity offline” is not going to happen. Not only would this negate all of the cloud features and DRM, but they also claim that it’s actually completely impossible, that from the very beginning always-on was planned to be a part of the base code. That meant the only option was for people to wait for them to deal with server issues and hope that everything eventually works out for the best. However, an insider claims it may be easier to ditch the DRM than the PR people are letting on.

RockPaperShotgun spoke with an insider who confirmed today that your system is 100% for all the computation and that nothing is handled server-side.

“The servers are not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing,” they said. “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.”