The so-called "SimCity-gate" scandal continues, as a modder announces that he's successfully circumvented the game's "always on" DRM requirements.
Modder UKAzzer revealed in a YouTube video that once he disabled the game's disconnection prompts, the game continued to run offline without a hiccup for 20 more minutes. He was able to accomplish this with SimCity's debug mode, which also allowed him to create highways outside of the game's smaller city boundaries.
"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," wrote UKAzzer. "This shows that highway editing will be easily possible, AND that editing outside of the artificially small city boundaries should be very viable too."
Additionally, UKAzzer was able to stop the game from inflating his city's population count, showing that in actuality, "My large cities have a population of about 15k now, not 100k." This "fluffed" population count is another feature that has proved to be quite unpopular with SimCity players.
As for downsides, UKAzzer states that disconnecting from the game's servers results in "no saves/syncs or region related stuff," but adds that the "simulation can carry on with no connection indefinitely."
This seems to indicate that Maxis and EA's always on requirements are not in fact vital to the game's performance, but are simply DRM measures to dissuade piracy. This wouldn't be so alarming if the two companies hadn't been saying the exact opposite for almost a year now. If their statements prove to have been misleading, it's likely that gamer confidence in both of their brands will drop even more significantly.
UKAzzer concludes that all of the work he did to get the game to run offline, work outside of the small city sizes, and disable the fluffed population counts were "very minor/easy tweaks."
Maxis and its publisher have yet to comment.
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