SimCity 5 Gameplay Suffers From Traffic Pathfinding Problems, Not Just Server Issues

Maxis is continuing to have problems with SimCity. According to a post on the game's official blog, players are experiencing issues with traffic congestion and pathfinding when using the streetcar system.

Lead Gameplay Scripter Guillaume Pierre pointed towards problems with traffic "clumping," and also streetcars and other vehicles taking too long to reach their destinations. This is due to the fact that vehicles that are heading to the same destination are trying to follow the same path, which leads to more traffic.

Maxis is currently working on a fix.

Somehow, the SimCity debacle continues. An anonymous source who worked on the game is now rekindling the fires, telling the press that the game's extremely controversial "always on" DRM is not in fact very vital to the game.

The Maxis source spoke with Rock Paper Shotgun, where he told them that the company's insistence that a constant connection with a server is necessary is simply untrue.

"The servers are not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing," the source claimed. "They are still acting as servers, doing some amount of computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities. As well, they're doing cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that. But for the game itself? No, they're not doing anything. I have no idea why they're claiming otherwise."

That's pretty damning testimony if true; and while the source's identity is unconfirmed, RPS is generally very reliable when it comes to this sort of thing.

Maxis in fact, has previously claimed the exact opposite of this, with General Manager Lucy Bradshaw stating, that "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."

In reference to this, the source says, "it's possible that Bradshaw misunderstood or was misinformed, but otherwise I'm clueless."

The source also explains that the disabling of "Cheetah" mode was done because the SimCity servers take so long to process the information.

Top it all off, the source concludes that a SimCity offline mode, which gamers have been clamoring for, wouldn't actually be that hard to implement, despite what Maxis and EA have been saying. "It wouldn't take very much engineering to give you a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff."

Again, none of this information is confirmed, but it does corroborate a number of gamers' suspicions. If it does turn out to be true, I'd imagine that consumer confidence in the EA and Maxis brands would somehow drop even farther.