SimCity Getting Offline Play

Still hungry to play EA’s latest SimCity, but have been angrily holding your ground, refusing to buy it, after learning that it required you to be always online? Well, after some big promises and a lot of lies about what the cloud was doing in the background, the publisher has announced that SimCity will soon be playable offline. 

After a poor launch and a lot of frustrated day one buyers, EA made a lot of claims about why SimCity needed to always be online. Yes, it was a form of DRM, but it had always been a big part of the games infrastructure and there was no way – NO way – that they’d ever be able to take it offline. Cities would shrink, traffic would come to a stand still, your Sims would stop going about their business… Hackers proved this untrue after about a week, but EA stuck to their guns.

It appears they’ve finally given in, although a lot of people are saying it’s too little, too late.

From the SimCity blog:

Yes, Offline is coming as a free download with Update 10 to all SimCity players. When we launch it, all of your previously downloaded content will be available to you anytime, anywhere, without the need for an internet connection. We are in the late phases of wrapping up its development and while we want to get it into your hands as soon as possible, our priority is to make sure that it’s as polished as possible before we release it. So, until then… testing, testing and more testing. As one of the final steps, we’re putting Offline into the hands of some of our most hardcore players, the DevTesters. This group of volunteers is going to put Offline through its paces before we release it.

In Update 10, you can still play solo in Regions on your own, or in Multiplayer with people from around the world. What’s new is the Single Player Mode, which allows you to play the game Offline by yourself. And because your saved games in this mode are stored locally, you can save and load to your heart’s content. Our team will be delivering a follow-up blog that will outline the full details in the near future so stay tuned.