The highly anticipated Update 10 for SimCity arrives today and with it comes the long-awaited offline mode for the game. This articles covers everything you need to know about the latest update.
Patch Notes
• New: SimCity Single-Player Mode.
o Enables Offline Play.
o Single-Player Mode includes multi-city play, regional interdependence, and city specialization. Regions are saved locally and there is no limit on number of save games.
o Autosave can be disabled in Single-Player Mode in order for players to experiment and load their regions at a previous save point.
o Save As a copy feature. Players can make copies of their regions at multiple save points.
o See FAQ on Single-Player Mode for full details.
• Performance: Optimizations in the simulator to improve performance of both Multiplayer and Single-Player Mode.
• Friends: Friends Search now uses the Origin friend search.
Offline Mode
Yes! You heard right, SimCity now has an offline mode. When you first purchase the game you still have to initially activate the game via. Origin but if you don’t have an internet connection, have an unstable connection or just want to play offline then you can now do that. This opens up the gateway to modders who can mod to their hearts content in the single-player, offline environment.
Is Multiplayer Still Available?
Do keep in mind that the game servers are still available and they will be supported for several years yet, according to Maxis. If you look at other games such as Spore, which launched in 2008, and Darkspore, which launched in 2011, the game servers are still available so don’t expect SimCity to go completely offline any time soon.
Local Game Saves
Going offline also allows you to save your games locally and load them to your hearts content. While it’s not the easiest thing to do, you can also share your saved games with others or copy them over to another computer that you want to play on.
What’s next for SimCity?
I assume that there’s still much to come from the latest installation in the SimCity franchise. We will not be getting bigger maps from Maxis themselves, as their General Manager has confirmed on Twitter on many occasions. However, modders are more than welcome to create bigger maps. Keep in mind that if Maxis create bigger maps then it must work with the system requirements for everyone – especially in the online environment where you can load friends’ cities – which could be a reason why they stopped looking into making them.
Here’s to the future of SimCity; one year ago it had a shaky start however with the launch behind it, many amazing updates with free content and now an offline mode, I can honestly recommend this game more than ever.
See you in-game!