About a month ago, Electronics Arts offered the press a look at Maxis’ upcoming SimCity franchise sequel-slash-reboot titled, simply, SimCity. In the weeks since then, I’ve been tumbling a single remark by one of the game’s creative leads around in my head, trying to nail down exactly what I think of it: “It doesn’t make sense for this game not to always be online.”
SimCity belongs to a growing set of PC games designed to be connected to the Internet in order to launch. While SimCity incorporates some exceptionally interesting and ambitious networked play mechanics, it is not a multiplayer game per se. You don’t race friends to build the coolest city or have tiny Sim deathmatches. Rather, your city interacts with those built by others as part of a larger economy and environment: Cities connected within a region affect one another in terms of both pollution and trade. It’s a brilliant and engrossing concept, but it’s also entirely optional; should you choose to play solo, you have that freedom. Functionally, I see no reason SimCIty couldn’t work as well offline for a single player as it would connected to a group of friends.
