EA And Maxis Could Make ‘SimCity’ Playable Offline By Removing A Single Line Of Code

If this keeps up I’m going to run out of SimCity disaster screenshots.

So, as we detailed last week, EA and Maxis claim nixing SimCity’s always-online requirement would require major reengineering. This is bulls–t. As numerous players have discovered, you can shut off your Internet and the game’s simulation will continue to run just fine for around 20-minutes, at which point the game becomes unplayable.

But, but uhhh…maybe the game can save up to 20-minutes worth of Internets in reserve! Yeah, and then it shuts down once it’s burned up all its cloud fuel! At this point I wouldn’t be shocked if Maxis threw something along those lines out as an explanation.

Of course the real explanation for the 20-minute limit is much more simple…

Modders have found a few short lines of code that force SimCity to shut down after 20-minutes without an Internet connection.

You can check out SimCity’s code right here. Removal of a single line of code (line 22) would let you play the game offline indefinitely. This is the “significant engineering” that would be required for EA and Maxis to offer an offline single-player mode for SimCity.

What can even be said anymore?

via Kotaku

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