Through all the trials and tribulations that SimCity has gone through with its required online play, Maxis and Electronic Arts have held firm that taking the game offline would require substantial reprogramming. According to an anonymous employee from Maxis who claims to be familiar with the programming of the game, this is not the case.

According to this anonymous employee who spoke to Rock, Paper, Shotgun, the servers that have been required to play the game, are not doing any significant computation. They are doing work like interacting with Origin, holding onto cloud saves, and sending messages to players and between cities, but they aren't doing the heavy lifting that has been implied from assorted Maxis and EA representatives. Apparently, what this means is that taking the game offline wouldn't be the difficult task that Maxis claims it to be.

This is all, of course, based on the remarks of a Maxis employee who understandably wants to remain anonymous. We don't know who he or she is, or what they do at Maxis, but they claim to have, "first-hand knowledge of how the game works." Rock, Paper, Shotgun has more quotes from its source who also explains why cheetah mode was disabled, how the Glassbox engine works, and says “It wouldn’t take very much engineering to give you a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff.”

How has your SimCity experience been? Have you been able to dive into the game? Do you think this anonymous source is to be believed? Would you prefer SimCity if it did not have an online component.