Maxis’ reboot for their long running, classic franchise SimCity launched earlier this year amidst a storm of controversy, which came about mostly because of the game’s mandatory online requirement (sound familiar?), and its excising of several features that have come to be seen as the core part of the SimCity experience over the year.
Now, eight months later, in a refreshingly candid blog post, Maxis has decided to address all the issues with SimCity head on, the most important of which is, of course, an offline mode for the game.
“First, I want you to know that we are listening to your feedback. We dig deep into the forums, Facebook posts, and Twitter feeds every day to see what players are talking about. There is a lot of feedback and there is a clear passion for SimCity. That’s great to see. And while we appreciate positive feedback, we take very seriously the players who have criticisms. Players have high expectations of what goes into our games and we have an obligation to deliver,” the blog post read.
“Right now we have a team specifically focused on exploring the possibility of an offline mode. I can’t make any promises on when we will have more information, but we know this is something that many of our players have been asking for. While the server connectivity issues are behind us, we would like to give our players the ability to play even if they choose not to connect. An offline mode would have the additional benefit of providing room to the modding community to experiment without interfering or breaking the multiplayer experience,” it concluded.
The blog post talks about a whole lot of other stuff (including the possibility of larger cities than SimCity currently allows), so be sure to hit it up.