We have more information about SimCity and its always online requirement. A source of RPS has mentioned that EA can in fact patch the game to be played offline since the servers aren’t really needed.
It’s a known fact that even if the server disconnects you can still be able to play for a few minutes before it reconnects. So in a way it gave a hint to people that it was indeed possible to play offline.
“Because of the way Glassbox was designed, simulation data had to go through a different pathway. The game would regularly pass updates to the server, and then the server would stick those messages in a huge queue along with the messages from everyone else playing,” the source said.
“The server pulls messages off the queue, farms them out to other servers to be processed and then those servers send you a package of updates back. The amount of time it could take for you to get a server update responding to something you’ve just done in the game could be as long as a few minutes. This is why they disabled Cheetah mode, by the way, to reduce by half the number of updates coming into the queue.”
He also revealed the reason why EA disabled the Cheetah mode saying that it was to reduce the number of updates coming to the server.
“Because of the way Glassbox was designed, simulation data had to go through a different pathway. The game would regularly pass updates to the server, and then the server would stick those messages in a huge queue along with the messages from everyone else playing.
“The server pulls messages off the queue, farms them out to other servers to be processed and then those servers send you a package of updates back. The amount of time it could take for you to get a server update responding to something you’ve just done in the game could be as long as a few minutes. This is why they disabled Cheetah mode, by the way, to reduce by half the number of updates coming into the queue.”
He then adds that it won’t take a lot of engineering effort to make the game playable offline.
“It wouldn’t take very much engineering to give you a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff.”
We will update you once EA comments on this.
