Now that SimCity's initial server problems are almost completely fixed, players and press are taking a deep dive into the game's much-vaunted simulation features and are reporting some major problems with the game as it had been promoted before and after launch.

The controversy started yesterday when Kotaku noticed that its SimCity game managed to run just fine for nearly 20 minutes after the Internet connection was cut, before eventually complaining about a bad connection to the servers and quitting. Markus "Notch" Persson later reported the same offline play. EA and Maxis have claimed that the game's GlassBox engine requires an Internet connection to offload complex calculations to the cloud in order to improve local performance. Such lengthy offline play flies in the face of the main public justification for the game's always-online requirement.

As if that weren't enough, Rock Paper Shotgun managed to snag an anonymous EA employee who they verified "worked directly on the [SimCity] project." That employee confirmed to the site that the SimCity servers don't do anything more than a normal multiplayer server in any other game and don't aid directly in the local simulation within a city. "They are still acting as servers, doing some amount of computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities... but for the game itself? No, they’re not doing anything," the source said, in part.

Together, these reports poke quite a few holes in EA's official story that it would take "significant engineering work" to make a single-player version of the new SimCity. It also suggests that the game's forced online requirement may have indeed been driven more by concerns about piracy rather than concerns about gameplay.

Meanwhile, players going over SimCity's low-level simulation with a fine-toothed comb have found some distressing simplifications in the game's much-vaunted "Sim level" simulation. A player in EA's help forums lays out in detail how Sims basically act as memory-free "agents" that will simply travel to the nearest job/home/shopping option as needed, rather than actually acting as individuals with distinct jobs, homes, needs, and desires. If you don't want to wade through all that text, take a look at this short video of commuting Sims filtering into every home on a block one by one as they march down the street.

That's actually not that different from the way EA described the game's simulation nearly a year ago when Lead Designer Stone Librande told Rock Paper Shotgun, “it’s not like each Sim has a specific job that’s his, and a specific house that’s his." That said, residences named after specific families and job sites with specific industries and responsibilities certainly suggest a level of specificity that the simulation itself lacks.

It also seems that SimCity may be taking shortcuts in reporting how many actual Sims it's modeling inside a city. One Reddit poster has laid out a detailed experiment that seems to show EA increasing the density of each house as a city gets larger but failing to add actual simulated citizens for each new member of the population count. A SimCity interface Javascript file (originally posted on Reddit and explained in detail here) purportedly ripped from the game is even more damning, showing how a "GetFudgedPopulation" function appears to deliberately inflate the actual simulated population by up to eight times in reporting a population number to a player.

Other videos posted online show how easily the game's AI can be broken. One timelapse video shows a city thriving with 200,000 residents, despite those people having no places to shop or work in the entire region (at least they have nice parks and low taxes...). Another shows Sims clogging a small street despite having access to a large empty avenue travelling the same route (here's another take on the same problem). Still others show Sims getting caught walking back and forth over a single crosswalk for hours, cities full of recycling trucks that still leave recycling uncollected, and commuters who take ridiculously circuitous routes through their day.

Altogether, these significant gameplay and simulation issues, combined with the early server woes, seem to point to a game that was rushed out to meet an announced release date despite numerous unaddressed problems. We will be updating our initial impressions of the game with a comprehensive review of the post-release version soon.

Listing image by Reddit / ZamboniApocalypse