Lucy Bradshaw Says SimCity’s Always Online DRM Isn’t Going Away, Offering Free Game to Fans

The SimCity story rages on. In an interview with Polygon, Maxis GM Lucy Bradshaw spoke on the launch debacle and how the developer – and EA themselves – are apparently working tirelessly to get things to an acceptable level;

“We have teams producing new servers, but we’ve identified that many of our issues were related to how [SimCity‘s] GlassBox [engine] managed the vast amount of simulation data through its database. We’ve addressed that and we’ve seen an 80% decrease in connectivity or responsiveness issues. Still, 80% is not good enough and so we are continuing to aggressively address this area.”

Bradshaw stated that they’re hopeful they’ll see a stable product, this weekend. Many people have their own ideas on how this all went belly up, and Bradshaw confirmed that, “A lot more people logged on than we expected. More people played and played in ways we never saw in the beta.”

The amount of servers needed was determined by the amount of players that played the beta and over demand parameters that weren’t mentioned. Wasn’t that a closed a beta that was also very limited in terms of time? Regardless, Bradshaw said that they underestimated a “surge in pre-orders within the last week”.

If you’re one of those that are hoping to see the always online element of SimCity removed because of the server issues, Bradshaw confirmed that, that won’t be happening anytime soon;

“An online interconnected world has been part of our design philosophy since day one. It’s the game that we’ve been wanting to create since SimCity 4 as we’ve wanted to explore the dynamics between cities as they exist within regions. Real cities don’t exist in bubbles; they specialize and trade resources, workers and more.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. It wouldn’t be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team.”

Bradshaw asked fans of the game to “Stick with us”, as the developer and publisher try to work through these issues. This is also after Bradshaw took to EA’s The Beat and said that those who have bought the game during this tumultuous time, will receive a free game from Origin on March 18.

“I know that’s a little contrived — kind of like buying a present for a friend after you did something crummy. But we feel bad about what happened. We’re hoping you won’t stay mad and that we’ll be friends again when SimCity is running at 100 percent.”

The whole thing has been a clusterjam of a launch and one that should have been anticipated by EA and Maxis, particularly when we’ve been through this before. Personally, I just hope all of those people that have went out and bought the game – either online, or from a physical retailer – will have a seamless playing experience, very soon.