Maxis Insider Claims That SimCity Can, Indeed, Run Without A Server
It’s been a week since SimCity came out and started crashing servers all over the place, and what a week it has been! But you can’t blame EA for making the game online-only, right? After all, according to EA representatives the game offloads a “significant amount of the calculations” of the game to EA’s servers, implying that this game is too big with too many variables for the average home PC to handle. But is that really true?
According to an anonymous source close to Rock Paper Shotgun the game does not need the servers after all. As most people have assumed, the servers are there really for the multiplayer aspect, and DRM purposes. And really, if you want to prove this to yourself, it’s quite easy: when you’re in the middle of the game just go ahead and turn off the internet to that computer, and you’ll notice real quick that the game will in fact keep chugging along. Indeed, this will go on for about 20 minutes, at which point the game will finally kick you off.
Really, this isn’t surprising news at all. But with that information known, it really shouldn’t take too long for somebody to go ahead and make a patch or something to make the game with an offline single player mode. The question now is, will EA and Maxis cave in to the pressure and make such a patch, or will it have to be the modding community? I’ll tell you one thing for sure, my bet isn’t on EA/Maxis.
