Apparently, the "SimCity" dependence on server-side calculations may not by as integral to the overall functionality of the game as EA representives have lead the public to believe. An anonymous Maxis employee reached out to Rock, Paper, Shotgun on Tuesday to express his concern over EA's insistence that the game absolutely must be played with a constant internet connection. The game's launch struggles are directly tied to server overload. Players are required to sign in to EA's servers in order to play the game.
"He has made it absolutely clear to us that this repeated claim of server-side calculations is at odds with the reality of the project he worked on," Rock, Paper Shotgun writes. In the source's own words:
"It wouldn't take very much engineering to give you a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff." The source goes on to explain that the game's servers pretty much act as a space for cloud saves, aside from some "computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities," and that most of the game's calculations are done on a player's computer.
Kotaku ran a test on Tuesday as well, the reporter was able to play SimCity for a solid 19 mintues before the game kicked him out. The fact that he was able to do it for more than one second kind of disputes what the EA and Maxis official people are putting out there.
Maxis General Manager Lucy Bradshaw spoke with Polygon on Saturday, pretty much expressing the opposite conclusion the source espouses.
"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," she said.
Now, Rock, Paper Shotgun claims to have verified the source but, naturally, the source does not want to be named. This is the kind of thing people lose there jobs over. We'll wait until EA responds, even though it plays so heavily into the beliefs of so many disgruntled SimCity buyers.
In a bit of an ironic twist, EA just put up a new web page informing players of the current "SimCity" server status in their region. You know how Microsoft has that one page for when the entirety of Xbox and its services go out of wack? Now EA has a similar deal going on with SimCity, for one game. Head over to EA's "SimCity" hub to check it out.
It only makes sense, considering the massive failure the game's launch turned out to be. SimCity's always-on digital rights management and crippling dependence on EA servers for game storage frustrated many players by locking them out of the game, or queuing them up for ridiulous waiting periods before playing. Ironically, the page may just be a useful tool for gamers looking to buy "SimCity", not just for those who've already bought it. It's always nice to know the game you're about to buy is actually working.
"SimCity" released on March 5 and is just now becomming a game you can acutally play after paying for it.
