EA and Maxis have announced today that SimCity can now be played offline.
GM of Maxis Emeryville, Patrick Buechner has said, “We’ve listened to our players and today we are delivering against their most direct feedback with the release of the new Single-Player Mode”.
“Player feedback has helped us deliver 10 major gameplay Updates that have improved the experience with better tuning, new features and free content. This is the most definitive SimCity experience whether you choose to play Online or Offline.”
Single-Player Mode will appear in the latest update when players log in to SimCity. From there the options to play in Single-Player Mode (offline) and Multiplayer Mode (online) will appear. Aside from playing offline, EA have mentioned that a key benefit to Single-Player Mode is having control over when and how the game saves. Multiplayer Mode remains the same with leaderboards, achievements, Global Market resources and cloud saves.
More information on Single-Player Mode can be found on the official SimCity blog. EA have also provided an offline gameplay tutorial on their YouTube channel.