When SimCity launched earlier this year, it became the ideal example yet of why always-online DRM doesn’t work. The sport suffered from inconsistent performance and random log outs via the game’s requirement to always be online. On the time, EA insisted that the always online requirement was portion of the game’s design, however the now the developers at Maxis are backing faraway from that claim.

In an update at the official SimCity blog, Maxis General Manager Patrick Buechner provided players with an update at the game. He first thanks the players and assures them that the team is being attentive to their complaints and recommendations. That statement would appear rather superfluous if it wasn’t for Buechner noting that Maxis is finally looking into adding an offline mode:

Right we have now a team specifically interested by exploring the opportunity of an offline mode. I can’t make any promises on once we may have additional info, but we all know this is often something that lots of our players were inquiring for. While the server connectivity issues are behind us, we want to provide our players the power to play no matter if they choose to not connect. An offline mode would have the additional advantage of providing room to the modding community to experiment without interfering or breaking the multiplayer experience.

Speaking of mods, Maxis announced that mod support is at the way. Unfortunately, the one variety of modding support Maxis is adding in the mean time is the facility to swap colors. The rest would “jeopardize the integrity of the gameplay or harm the experience of others.” That’s perfectly reasonable as mods do have the capability to damage a web game like SimCity. If an offline mode is available, however, EA should open the floodgates on modding to let players do whatever they wish.

Oh, and for people who want bigger cities – it’s not happening. The team at Maxis says that increasing the dimensions of cities anymore would negatively impact performance for everyone. That doesn’t mean their experiments with larger cities goes to waste though. The developers say that the result of their work may be put into future performance improvement updates.

So, there you’ve gotten it. SimCity might finally give players what they’ve been soliciting for since launch. It certainly took them long enough, but it’s definitely appreciated. Now if only lets get another game to drop its asinine always online DRM.

[Image: SimCity Blog]