Just over a year after it’s initial release, Maxis’ revamped urban planning playbox SimCity is finally able to be played offline. The update launched at 6am PDT, according to a post from a Maxis dev on Electronic Arts’ official forum (spotted by Joystiq). The update apparently requires “a few hours” of server downtime. They appear to be down at the time of this writing (check out the server status here), but hey… this is what Offline Mode is for, right?
The so-called “Update 10” has been the subject of much discussion since it was announced in January 2014. The game arrived in March 2013 on a wave of controversy over the revelation that the game would carry an “always-online” requirement, due to the nature of its design. That didn’t sit well with players, especially when the game’s launch was hobbled by extensive server issues.
The team at Maxis heard the feedback and responded, though re-engineering the game to support offline play was an extensive process that took several months. The product of their efforts is Update 10. You can read more about SimCity‘s offline play in EA’s FAQ on the matter, and you can check out a rundown of the update’s patch notes right here. Note that you’ll still need to launch EA’s Origin client in order to play the game, though you can set that client to offline mode as well.
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