Offline SimCity did not fit with Maxis' vision

It's been a rough couple of weeks for Maxis. Ire from SimCity players ebbed a bit when the game's servers caught up (for the most part) with consumer demand and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:downtime and disconnections abated. Since then, anger ha🥃s shifted to the root of the problem: SimCity's need to always be online.

Maxis General Manager Lucy Bradshaw who question the game's need fo🀅r constant internet access, those who berate it as thin justification for stricter anti-piracy measures.

"It didn’t come down as an order from corporate and it isn’t a clandestine strategy to control players," Bradshaw wrote. "It’s fundamen🌟tal to the vision we had for this SimCity. From the ground up, we designed this game with multiplayer in mind--using new technology to realize a vision of players connected in regions to create a SimCity that captured the dynamism of the world we live in; a global, ever-changing, social world."

She listed the game's features which require constant connection with servers: interactions between cities, gifts between players, a reactive market, worldwide goal𝐆s, and rౠegionwide Great Works, to name a few. All of the former are multiplayer aspects.

"The game we launched is only the beginning for us--it’s not final and it never will be. In many ways, we built an MMO," Bradshaw concluded. "So, could we have built a subset offline mode? Yes. But we rejected that idea because it didn’t fit with our vision. We did not focus on the 'single city in isolation' that we have delivered in past SimCities. We recognize that there are fans--people who love the original SimCity--who want that. But we’re also hearing from thousands of people who are playing across regions, trading, communicating and loving the Always-Co൩nnected functionality."

Bradshaw seemed to acknowledge what modders have already demonstrated--the core experience of building a city . She told last week that significant essential calculations offlo🍌aded to SimCity's server make an offline mode impractical. But it's simpler than that:

Maxis' vision does not include an offl♍ine mode, and it's not going to make one.

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern꧟ for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.