Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

"With the way that the game works, we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud. It wouldn't be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team."<p>I'm going to point a finger and say that this is clearly untrue, and very easy to disprove just from basic network monitoring over 5 minutes of playing the game. I would immediately fire a systems architect that designed a single player game to compute significant calculations on our expensive [buzz word] cloud servers. Unless we use different definitions of the word <i>significant</i>...<p>It's a little ridiculous to suggest that?... plus, for zero benefit (above DRM), it would have a non-negligible affect on their bottom line if they are computing time cycles for SimCity on their own servers...<p>Anonymous source or not, conjecturally, it's hard to not agree with what the insider has said.

The thing I don't understand about all this is why they were unable to new servers online. After everything hit the fan, they announced they were working on it and had gotten two new servers up the day before.<p>Two servers?<p>It just seems unbelievable to me that the backend was designed in a way that it couldn't be scaled out any faster than that. Since each region is a discrete unit, you'd think they should be able to move them between servers.<p>Was it all intertwined? Did the regions, stats, achievements, and DRM all run out of the same database? Were they not separate services?<p>They had to know this game would be popular, they've been pushing it for months (to great effect). It's a major property and the first release in about a decade.<p>Then there is EA. Even if Maxis couldn't figure this out (and I doubt that), EA has online experience. They're the publisher for Mass Effect, Madden, Fifa, NCAA, and more. They should have the resources, the people, and the experience to have prevented this.<p>If you completely ignore the DRM or the seemingly unimportant always-online requirement, it this whole thing still seems botched. There were multiple groups who should have known better and prevented this. My understanding is that they got some warning signs during the beta.<p>I would kill for a postmortem blog or article on Gamasutra explaining why they couldn't scale out faster; to know what decision was the lynchpin that held them back.

A friend of mine put it this way: let people run disconnected, offline, and in the UI show a big glass dome over their city cutting them off Simpsons Movie style[1]. Over time, gas, food, and water run out, necessitating a reconnection.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kPUGLt1DWQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kPUGLt1DWQ</a>

In respect to the graphics, it looks awesome and I was expecting to be just as great as previous iterations. I actually wanted to play the game until I found out it was social multiplayer with cloud-based saves.<p>That just killed it. I have since bought a copy of SimCity 4 and plan to be quite happy with it for another decade or so.

I'm not sure how fun "a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff" would be, considering how small each city is. A lot of the fun is playing at the region level.

Patiently waiting for the re-implemented game server and attendant crack that will let us point SimCity to our own networks.

I could be wrong here, but if Bradshaw's claims were true--that a significant amount of calculation is offloaded on their servers--wouldn't the game be unplayable for people who have shitty internet connections anyway? It's easy for me to imagine SimCity making so many computations to simulate the game, but for those data to be sent back and forth from the gamer's PC to their servers? It has got to strain the player somehow.

Wow people must want to play this game so bad seeing the amount of aggro it's generated. Makes me want to go out and buy a copy!

So, if it's not much engineering effort for EA to make the game single player it shouldn't be too much engineering effort for people who are not EA..

Given that Sims 3 runs on my old Windows machine (on low graphics settings), it's not that surprising that servers are not actually needed to run SimCity. I don't know if they really use the same simulation engine, but I'd say the scale is on the same order of magnitude.

Anyone notice the interesting old-school-text-adventure error page? It wasn't 404 but some other 4xx page (forgot which) -- it seems to be resolved and gone now though.

People are complaining as if DRM was the reason they made it like this, EA is evil, yada-yada. It isn't. It's pretty clear they had a vision for this game to be a MMO/social game from day one.<p>The problem stems more from their failure at scaling than not supporting an offline mode. Diablo was the same crap on launch week.<p>There's an apparent pressure from publishers to create always-online games, but something tells me the teams are not having the experience/schedule/man-power to create scalable architectures to back it. Massive multiplayer gaming is certainly a hard problem.

Duh?<p>The top comment here is more elegant, but EA is clearly lying. Their "apology" was a joke and amounted to "Sorry we've had so much success, it's your fault for assaulting our servers."

Although I'm not thrilled with the launch experience and DRM of SimCity, I don't think that this article adds any validity due to everything coming from an anonymous source.

As usual with 'anonymous sources/insiders' it's all complete conjecture. The only people that truly know are EA/Maxis.<p>EDIT: Seems people disagree that this isn't complete guesswork. Yes the game runs for a while without a connection, but that doesn't prove that servers aren't necessary as the headline claims. There is no hard, undeniable evidence. It's the same story that has been rehashed since the game was released.<p>And since the Xbox 720 'leak' fiasco I take these 'sources' with a pinch of salt, regardless of how reputable the site is.<p><a href="http://www.gamefront.com/tech-sites-fall-for-fake-xbox-720-leak/" rel="nofollow">http://www.gamefront.com/tech-sites-fall-for-fake-xbox-720-l...</a>