Maxis Insider Tells RPS: SimCity Servers Not Necessary
Found on Rock Paper Shotgun on Wednesday, 13 March 2013
Maxis’ studio head, Lucy Bradshaw, has told both Polygon and Kotaku that they “offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers”, and that it would take “a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game” for single player.
People were already perplexed by EA’s explanation of the impossibility of offline play. Kotaku ran a series of tests today, seeing how the game could run without an internet connection, finding it was happy for around 20 minutes before it realised it wasn’t syncing to the servers.
It's just DRM and EA has been caught with its pants down. Soon a patch will be released which enables a real offline mode; and it won't come from EA.