Taking SimCity offline: 'We’ve had to knock out the internet pipe stuff'

"We’ve had to knock out the internet pipe stuff."

- SimCity single player lead engineer Simon Fox on taking the controversially online-only game offline. When SimCity debuted in March of last year, it suffered catastrophic issues with its online-only play -- from server failures to a fan base drastically unhappy with the decision in concept as well as execution. The game's next patch will enable offline play. In a new blog post on its official website, lead engineer Simon Fox outlines the complexity of getting the game to run offline at all. "SimCity was written to rely on the servers," Fox writes. "I wish it were as simple as flipping a switch and telling the game to communicate with a dummy client rather than our server, but it’s more than that. Entire calculations had to be rewritten in order to make the game function correctly." In fact, the team has been working on this update since last August, Fox reveals. For the rest, see the original blog.