One Year Too Late, EA Finally Rolls Out Offline Play For SimCity

Part of the reason that video game goliath Electronic Arts won its second Worst Company In America title in 2013 was its disastrous launch of the highly awaited new SimCity game, a title that forced users to be online in order to play (but for which the company failed to provide enough server support, meaning no one could play because everyone was trying to play). Now, a full year and another WCIA nomination later, EA is finally letting users play the game without going online.

Polygon reports that EA took the SimCity servers down for maintenance this morning so that its developer, Maxis, could launch the offline mode that it has been promising for months now and which should have been part of the game to begin with.

After the patch is rolled out to users, they will be able to store their game-saves offline, meaning they no longer need to rely on connecting to EA’s servers.

While users pelted EA’s offices with virtual tomatoes for not only requiring the online connection, but for also failing to foresee that the millions of people who paid a substantial amount of money for the game might actually want to play it, the then-GM of Maxis explained that the developer had considered but rejected offline play because “it didn’t fit with our vision.” She also claimed that it would take a lot of work and time to make the changes necessary to allow for offline play.

In other EA/WCIA news, it looks like the game publisher isn’t too thrilled with users trying to discuss the company’s inclusion in yet another Worst Company tournament.

An attempt by one user to bring up the topic on an official Battlefield forum was shut down within minutes by an admin who deemed talk of WCIA as “non constructive” and warned that “Further threads on this will also be closed.”

by Chris Morran via Consumerist