But no! cry EA and their more loyal defenders. The online is there for the players! It’s not DRM, it’s about enhancing the game, it’s designed that way, it’s it’s it’s… It’s all bollocks. Yes, SimCity offers some multiplayer options that sound a lot of fun. Being able to build cities near your chums, create trade routes with them, share resources, be affected both positively and negatively by your neighbours. Ranked leaderboards, cloud-saved cities, perhaps even world-wide events at a later stage? And of course everything is always up-to-date, latest patch, etc. This is all brilliant stuff. If I want it.
What EA and Maxis have done with SimCity is attempt a year-long PR assault to suggest that the online-only nature of SimCity is designed to offer enhancements for gamers. This is simply not true. It’s utter rubbish. It’s a backward step for a format that seemed to be managing for years to offer single player and multiplayer options for games without the universe cracking in two. The idea that multiplayer-only is an enhancement is such an obvious piece of newspeak, such a ridiculous untruth, that we can only loudly and furiously react against it if we’re to not see it incredulously accepted as fact. I do worry it’s maybe already too late.
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A SimCity developer has got in touch with RPS to tell us that at least the first of these statements is not true. He claimed that the server is not handling calculations for non-social aspects of running the game, and that engineering a single-player mode would require minimal effort.
