Even before its disastrous launch in March of last year, it was obvious to Maxis that many SimCity fans weren’t going to be happy with its online-only design, even once the servers were stabilized. “In hindsight, it wasn’t the right decision,” says Maxis General Manager Patrick Buechner. “We should have allowed for local saves and offline play.” Now, nearly a full year later, Maxis is preparing to release Update 10 to correct that mistake (“very soon,” he says). Getting to this point, Buechner says, has been a huge challenge due to fundamental engineering problems stemming from the initial “creative choice” that committed the design team to the unpopular online system.

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“Heading into launch it was clear from community feedback, from fans and press, that the community wanted a way to play offline,” Buechner admits. But the response took longer than Maxis would've liked. For the first several months, the team had to focus its updates on stabilizing the online servers so that people were no longer being denied access to the game they’d paid for when they tried to play it. The next round was aimed at fixing the traffic flow problems that paralyzed cities over a certain size and other simulation upgrades. It wasn’t until August of 2013 that Maxis was able to turn its efforts to implementing offline mode.During the intervening months, then-General Manager Lucy Bradshaw (Buechner’s predecessor, now an EA senior vice president) made several statements implying that Maxis could not take SimCity offline, including once going so far as to say it was “not possible” to do . Maxis has since clarified that she intended to qualify that with statement “without a significant amount of engineering work,” as she did elsewhere on the same day . Those claims added fuel to the fire of angry customers, as a home-made offline-mode hack was already making the rounds.The engineering work Bradshaw referred to, according to Buechner, was largely that Maxis had to completely rewrite much of the server code. Originally done in the Java programming language, it had to be redone in C++ in order to make it run locally on our PCs. In addition, more work had to be done to prevent those offline games from impacting and damaging the online experience for those who do wish to continue playing multiplayer. The end result, though, is one that Beuchner proudly claims will be all but indistinguishable from the online game. “You’re giving up playing with other players. That’s really all you’re giving up.”The chief remaining criticism of SimCity is its very limited city sizes. That, unfortunately, Maxis has said it is unable to expand without severely impacting performance on its users’ PCs. However, the addition of offline mode also promises to bring relatively unfettered mod support, which means that enterprising PC gamers might soon work their way around those limitations. While Buechner says he’d be surprised to see a fully functional large-city mod out in the first week due to the work involved, he’s optimistic about the possibilities. “I’m hopeful we’ll see all sorts of amazing things out of the modding community. I’m glad that we can support them by giving them the offline mode.”In response to concerns that EA planned to use the offline mode as an excuse to pull the plug on SimCity’s servers, Buechner insists that this won’t affect the lifespan of the servers. How long that will be exactly was left vague, but he did agree with a non-specific “at least several years” of life, and pointed out that the servers for Maxis’ 2007 Spore are still alive and well, more than six years after release.Maxis also intends to produce some type of trial version of SimCity, but in the meantime, EA’s Origin store confirms that it will honor its seven-day money-back satisfaction guarantee, even if you’ve already purchased and returned it in the past. “We hope they will come back to try SimCity once more, and if they still aren’t 100% satisfied with the experience, the Origin Great Game Guarantee policy is available to them again,” says Origin PR.

Dan Stapleton is IGN's Reviews Editor. You can follow him on Twitter to hear all about how awesome PC gaming is, plus a healthy dose of random Simpsons references.