Maxis has announced it has an entire development team "exploring" an offline mode for SimCity

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“ Right now we have a team specifically focused on exploring the possibility of an offline mode.

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In a new blog post detailing the state of the game, general manager Patrick Buechner explained that an offline mode is a more realistic prospect than ever before, though stopped short of promising it'd become a reality."Right now we have a team specifically focused on exploring the possibility of an offline mode," he wrote. "I can’t make any promises on when we will have more information, but we know this is something that many of our players have been asking for. While the server connectivity issues are behind us, we would like to give our players the ability to play even if they choose not to connect. An offline mode would have the additional benefit of providing room to the modding community to experiment without interfering or breaking the multiplayer experience.""We’ve put months of investigation into making larger city sizes, reworking the terrain maps, changing the routing algorithms of our agent-based system and altering the way that GlassBox processes the data in a larger space," he revealed."After months of testing, I confirm that we will not be providing bigger city sizes. The system performance challenges we encountered would mean that the vast majority of our players wouldn’t be able to load, much less play with bigger cities. We’ve tried a number of different approaches to bring performance into an acceptable range, but we just couldn’t achieve it within the confines of the engine. We’ve chosen to cease work on bigger city sizes and put that effort into continuing to evolve the core game and explore an offline mode. Some of the experiments we conducted to improve performance on bigger cities will be rolled into future updates to improve overall game performance."There've been mutterings about an offline mode for SimCity for some time. Way back in July, a survey was doing the rounds asking players of the game what features they'd like to see in future patches. One of the proposed additions was an offline mode. Despite this, it's pretty interesting that the decision's been made to make the whole game playable offline, seeing as EA once said that such a thing was not part of its "vision" If you're one of those who said you'd happily play SimCity if it didn't require an internet connection, it looks like you may not have an excuse at some stage in the future. What we really want to know though is when, if ever, we'll get our hands on the long-awaited offline mode. For the time being, it looks like we'll have to remain hooked up and keep ourselves amused with the imminent release of the SimCity: Cities of Tomorrow expansion on November 12.

Luke Karmali is IGN's UK Junior Editor. You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on IGN and on Twitter