Maxis is exploring the possibility of adding an offline mode to SimCity more than six months after the game was first released for PC. In a recent blog post on the subject, the company said they would like to give players the ability to play even if a connection isn’t present.
What’s more, an offline mode would give the modding community a platform to experiment on without interfering of breaking the multiplayer experience. Unfortunately, the post also said they aren’t making any promises on when they will have more information but they are aware it is something that many players have been asking for.
Earlier this year there was a lot of controversy surrounding Maxis’ decision to force users to connect to the Internet to play SimCity – even in single-player mode. The company initially said it was impossible to play offline as the title offloads a large amount of calculations to their servers but that was quickly debunked by modders.
Maxis changed their tune shortly after, noting that an offline mode would have been possible from the get-go but it simply didn’t fit with their vision of the game. It had nothing to do with an order from corporate to control players – it’s just how they wanted this version of SimCity to work.
Elsewhere, the post discusses the possibility of user generated content and the fact that Maxis will not be introducing bigger city sizes. What is coming up, however, is a new expansion called Cities of Tomorrow. As the title suggests, the expansion will allow users to transform their existing cities into future cities of tomorrow. The expansion will be available starting November 12.
