Despite the myriad of promises to the contrary, it seems that SimCity might be getting an offline mode after all. A Redditor recently posted a screen capture of an EA survey that featured a number of questions regarding potential features.
Most of these additions are fairly interesting, such as various terraforming tools, social features, and cross-play with the Sims games, but one in particular really stands out. Listed as a potential feature is the simply named "Classic Mode."
It's described as such: "In offline or online mode, play a single fully functioning city using cheats and unlocks that allow you to create your perfect city."
Offline mode has been something that EA and Maxis has been vehemently opposed to, despite the massive online problems the game had went it launched. SimCity's connection problems are the stuff of legend, with many users having found themselves locked out of their games entirely for up to weeks at a time.
EA in particular said such an option was not part of its "vision" for the game (with many assuming that vision is lots and lots of microtransactions), while Maxis remarked that the game could not run properly without offloading some of the processing to the cloud servers. This latter factoid was proven false when a modder revealed that SimCity could indeed run without a connection to EA's servers.
An offline option is not mentioned anywhere else in the survey, but this seems to show that EA and Maxis are at least considering the option. If true, it seems like an odd bit of timing. Patching in an offline mode now can't retroactively solve the launch window problems, and will seemingly only weaken their case that an always-on connection was necessary in the first place.
Neither the publisher nor the developer have officially commented on this survey, but hopefully we will hear some information from them soon.
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