14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at Maxis and publisher Electronic Arts are finally ready to deploy Update 10 for their city builder SimCity, which is designed to allow all those who have bought it to play the experience entirely offline.
The official announcement says that servers for the game were brought down at 6 AM Pacific Daylight Time and the patch has been deployed and that gamers might still experience some outage as the company checks if the entire process went well.
The official patch notes state that:
- Single-Player Mode includes multi-city play, regional interdependence, and city specialization. Regions are saved locally and there is no limit on number of save games. - Autosave can be disabled in Single-Player Mode in order for players to experiment and load their regions at a previous save point. - Save As a copy feature. Players can make copies of their regions at multiple save points.
Maxis also promises that the overall performance of SimCity has been improved and is now allowing gamers to use the Origin system to search for friends.
When the title was first launched, the studio explained that the online infrastructure was required by the core gameplay and that it would be impossible for an offline patch to be created.
A mod was quickly released to enable it and the company then announce that it would make the change official in the future.