Tornadoes and earthquakes are no longer the worst disasters associated with SimCity: the latest game in Maxis’ long running city management series was rendered unplayable when the game’s servers couldn’t handle the flood of players trying to log-in upon game’s launch. SimCity requires players to be connected to the server at all times, so the game is impossible to play when the servers are down. Despite a flood of complaints from irate customers, Maxis says there’s no plans to change the game’s always-online requirement anytime soon.
Maxis General Manager Lucy Bradshaw took to Twitter today to directly address consumers’ complaints about the game. When asked if Maxis would ever consider adding an offline mode to the game, Bradshaw answered with the following:
“We have no intention of offlining SimCity any time soon but we’ll look into that as part of our earning back your trust efforts.”
In an interview with Polygon regarding the game’s situation, Bradshaw further reiterated Maxis’ commitment to keeping the game online-only. “An online interconnected world has been part of our design philosophy since day one,” Bradshaw said, adding, “”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.”
EA has announced that while they won’t be issuing refunds for SimCity, they will offer a free game from their Origin download service to any customers effected by SimCity’s downtime. According to Bradshaw, customers will have multiple choices as to which free game they’ll be able to get.
Chris Hernandez
Diablo III all over again.
temotodochi
You do realize that this is referring to shutting down the game a few years from now. The question the person asked was “what happens when EA pulls the plug on simcity 5 servers?” Twitter gives you one snippet of a full conversation, do some research next time before spreading misinformation please.