Maxis Employee Apparently Claims That SimCity Servers Aren’t Vital

After Lucy Bradshaw claimed that creating an offline mode for SimCity would require a “significant amount of engineering work by our team”, a Maxis employee has come out saying that it would be far easier to do than Bradshaw let on.

Speaking with RockPaperShotgun, one of the developer’s on SimCity debunked many of the things that Maxis and EA have been telling players since the game’s launch;

“The servers are not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing. They are still acting as servers, doing some amount of computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities. As well, they’re doing cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that. But for the game itself? No, they’re not doing anything. I have no idea why they’re claiming otherwise. It’s possible that Bradshaw misunderstood or was misinformed, but otherwise I’m clueless…It wouldn’t take very much engineering to give you a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff.”

The source also stated that the servers are transferring data, but not in real-time. Apparently, it can take “as long as a few minutes”.

Kotaku and Markus “Notch” Persson have both claimed that the game can be played offline for a certain amount of time, with Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo running the game for about 20 minutes without an Internet connection.

If this is in fact true, after EA botched the launch of SimCity, Lucy Bradshaw lied to everyone about the difficulty of giving the players what they want – an offline mode. The disgrace that follows the game’s release continues day after day.

SimCity is available now for Windows PC. The game will be released at a later date for Mac