Maxis has a team exploring offline mode for SimCity

SimCity developer Maxis is exploring an offline mode for the always online simulation game, according to a post on the game's official site.

In a lengthy post called "State of SimCity," Maxis Emeryville general manager Patrick Buechner outlined the story of the game's first seven months, which included seven major updates and the reveal of its first major expansion, Cities of Tomorrow.

As part of Maxis' continuing effort to refine the game and listen to player feedback, the developer is also exploring an offline mode for SimCity.

"Right now we have a team specifically focused on exploring the possibility of an offline mode," Buechner wrote. "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. An offline mode would have the additional benefit of providing room to the modding community to experiment without interfering or breaking the multiplayer experience."

SimCity and its connected worlds launched March 3 with an always online requirement, but its servers buckled under the weight of the launch and the game staggered through various states of playability. Maxis general manager Lucy Bradshaw told Polygon at the time that the game offloads "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."

My mid-March, modders demonstrated that the game could run in limited form offline.

Bradshaw tweeted in March that the developer had "no intention of offlining SimCity" but left open the possibility of doing so "as part of our earning back your trust."