It Would Take 'Significant Engineering' to Make SimCity an Offline Game

Later this afternoon, Lucy Bradshaw, the general manager of SimCity maker Maxis, is going to take over the studio's official account to answer questions from gamers who, four days after the game's release, are still unable to play the thing they purchased. She's already given a preview answer to the question most of them likely have: Why can't this game simply be played offline?

The question has been answered before, but Bradshaw reiterated the reason overnight to Polygon: "With the way that the game works, we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud," she said. "It wouldn't be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team."

In an internal memo sent to Maxis employees, and made public Thursday, Bradshaw claimed that while "thousands of players across the world are playing and having a good experience," many others were unable to connect to the game, so "the rollout in North America has been challenging." She promised Maxis would be adding capacity to its SimCity cadre of servers and stabilizing the existing ones. "We're working as hard as possible to make sure everyone gets to experience the amazing game we built in SimCity," she wrote. SimCity, as of publication time, is still crippled for most who want to play it.

Maxis explains what went wrong with SimCity and what the developer is doing to fix it [Polygon]