Online not necessary for Sim City

Maxis employee: "Servers are not handling any computation to simulate the city."
Text: Bengt Lemne
Published 2013-03-13

Faltering servers and an online requirement has meant Sim City got a rocky start (to put it mildly). The position from EA and developer Maxis has been that the game requires server connection to run, however an unnamed Maxis employee revealed to Rock, Paper, Shotgun that this is not the case.

"The servers are not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing. They are still acting as servers, doing some amount of computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities. As well, they're doing cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that."

"But for the game itself? No, they're not doing anything. I have no idea why they're claiming otherwise. It's possible that Bradshaw misunderstood or was misinformed, but otherwise I'm clueless."

If true, the online requirement amounts the sort of heavy handed DRM most publishers have abandoned.

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