Well, this doesn’t make EA look good.
SimCity, the game that reportedly requires “substantial engineering” to be playable offline, has been modded to, well, be playable offline.
A Reddit user named UKAzzer recently published a video that shows him playing the game offline, as well as building and editing highways outside the cities in a region. Don’t believe me? Here’s a video .
In it, UKAzzer gains access to the game’s debug mode, which allows him to edit roads outside a region, as well as disable the automatic disconnect timer for when you lose network connection.
Here’s some quick commentary about his video upload:
“So with a little bit of package editing within SimCity, and a little playing about in the code, it’s possible to enable debug mode. I linked the activation to the ‘Help Center’ button in the main menu for ease. Most debug features are disabled without having an actual developer’s build (they have terraforming tools etc. available in the full developer build!), but a few things do still work – including editing the main highways.
Not only that – but you can edit the highways ANYWHERE – even outside of your city boundary… and even if you quit the game and log back in later, it’s all saved safely on the server.
This shows that highway editing will be easily possible, AND that editing outside of the artificially small city boundaries should be very viable too.
Other things I have modded out with a quick change: Unlimited time to remain disconnected (won’t get booted at 20 minutes, can now be disconnected “forever”). Population count now shows REAL figure, not the “artificially inflated” figure. My large cities have a population of about 15k now, not 100k :P”
Now, this will undoubtedly cause a lot of quick reactions from gamers. EA and Maxis have already come under fire regarding the need to be always online when all some people want to do is just have one giant editable region without the need to venture online. At the same time, both EA and Maxis wanted to make a game that has players focusing on smaller, specialized cities that work together. Why we can’t find a compromise between the two completely boggles my mind. I understand that people want something more akin to SimCity 4, but SimCity was never meant to be a direct follow-up. Still, EA and Maxis could have at least thrown fans a bone and given them the offline mode and full region editing. It would have been nice to have completely rural areas along the highway outside the gridded regions.
Perhaps one day this will come true, modders willing.