In a bit of good news, those of you playing SimCity looking to avoid queues or issues have an official server status page to reference before you try to login. The server status page can be found here.
Meanwhile, a Maxis insider spoke to Rock, Paper, Shotgun and revealed that the servers aren’t quite as necessary as Maxis and EA like to claim.
The insider claims that the servers don’t handle any of the computation necessary for the city simulation itself, and that it “wouldn’t take very much engineering” to provide players with a single-player experience without the region connectivity added to this iteration of the series.
This bit of information paired with Kotaku’s test to see how long the game could play while offline makes us wonder: How possible would it really be just to get a single-player mode?
Does this settle that SimCity‘s always-online is simply there as DRM and not to “enhance the user experience”? Not without doubt, but it comes pretty close to completely dismissing EA and Maxis’ words on the game requiring a massive amount of work to take offline.
