Maxis is 'exploring' offline mode for SimCity

SimCity may yet receive an offline mode. The latest iteration of the city management series was slammed for requiring users to play online when it launched in March, but Maxis maintained that an offline mode didn't fit with its vision for the game (after abandoning the argument that server-side calculations made it infeasible).

Maxis Emeryville GM Patrick Buechner says the studio has been looking into the possibility in a post on SimCity's official blog.

"Right now we have a team specifically focused on exploring the possibility of an offline mode," Buechner said. "I can’t make any promises on when we will have more information, but we know this is something that many of our players have been asking for. While the server connectivity issues are behind us, we would like to give our players the ability to play even if they choose not to connect."

Whether the offline mode is implemented or not, former fans may want to check out the game's state after seven months and seven major updates. Unfortunately, it looks like they can stop waiting for larger city sizes, one of the other most-requested changes.

"After months of testing, I confirm that we will not be providing bigger city sizes. The system performance challenges we encountered would mean that the vast majority of our players wouldn’t be able to load, much less play with bigger cities. Some of the experiments we conducted to improve performance on bigger cities will be rolled into future updates to improve overall game performance."

SimCity's first expansion pack, Cities of Tomorrow, will hit PC and Mac on Nov. 12.