Despite what Maxis and EA have claimed earlier this year when SimCity had its disastrous release, Maxis is now looking into creating an offline mode for the currently always-online SimCity.
The news comes from a blog post written by Patrick Buechner, General Manager of the Maxis Emeryville studio. Within, he makes announcements regarding things the Maxis team is working on to improve SimCity, such as DLC, the Cities of Tomorrow expansion pack, the possibility of allowing for bigger cities (not happening), and guidelines for user-generated content. Then he drops a bomb that Maxis is "exploring" creating an offline mode for the game.
"Right now we have a team specifically focused on exploring the possibility of an offline mode," Buechner wrote. "I can’t make any promises on when we will have more information, but we know this is something that many of our players have been asking for. While the server connectivity issues are behind us, we would like to give our players the ability to play even if they choose not to connect. An offline mode would have the additional benefit of providing room to the modding community to experiment without interfering or breaking the multiplayer experience."
So even though vice president Lucy Bradshaw said that SimCity wouldn't be possible without the always-online technology, it turns out that may not exactly be true after all. Question is, if Maxis is able to build an offline mode for Sim City, then will anyone still be interested in playing, or have the majority of players been too burned by their early experiences?
