Maxis general manager Lucy Bradshaw admits there’s no offline mode patch planned, but says the team will “look into” it to earn back gamer trust.
The coverage of SimCity‘s launch failures is nothing short of discouraging: EA and Maxis have struggled to control the situation, from deactivating game features to improve stability to suspending SimCity marketing. Both companies are attempting to manage the fallout by offering a free PC download in return for the troubles experienced by players. But is there any indication that gamers will be able to run SimCity without needing to connect to EA’s servers? According to Maxis general manager Lucy Bradshaw, it looks like this won’t be happening in the foreseeable future.
In a Twitter Q&A session, someone posted a query asking whether an “offline mode” patch will be made available in the event that SimCity‘s servers are deactivated in the future. Bradshaw responded by saying there are currently no plans to do so:
We have no intention of offlining SimCity any time soon but we’ll look into that aspart of our earning back your trust efforts.— SimCity (@simcity) March 9, 2013
@azbiker72 The game was designed for MP, we sim the entire region on the server so this is just not possible— SimCity (@simcity) March 9, 2013
When a user called out that EA’s “bad business practices” have negatively impacted the game, Maxis responded by saying that the problem was its fault alone:
.@derekdonovan Hey, this is on Maxis. EA does not force design upon us. We own it, we are working 24/7 to fix it, and we are making progress— SimCity (@simcity) March 9, 2013
Bradshaw followed up the session with a blog update, saying that Maxis has made “huge progress” by improving server response times, reducing server down times, and doubling the number of concurrent players in the game.
She also indicated in the post that further updates are going to be carried out on the original servers to match the performance of new servers that are being rolled out, which means that players should expect some additional downtime while these changes are being made.
Source: Twitter, SimCity blog
