Modder makes SimCity playable offline

SimCity has been causing problems for gamers since release. Whether it's the always-on DRM, the restrictive city sizes, the god awful AI, or the fact that for days players weren't even able to connect to the main servers. Some of these issues have been fixed, but you can still only play offline for around 20 minutes, before the game boots you out and suggests you reconnect. That is, unless you're running UKAzzer's mod.

Along with a few other changes, UKAzzer was able to disable the game's disconnect timer, so that you can play offline indefinitely. You will however, still need to reconnect when you get to a point that you want to save, but at least you don't need to be online the whole time if you don't want to be. On top of that, he also made it possible to tweak highways outside of your small city boundaries and changed the population count to make it more accurately reflect how many people are actually living within your city limits.

How EA and Maxis respond to this will be very telling. Either they'll be the good guys for once and make a big splash about UKAzzer helping them out, perhaps legitimising the mod or adding it to the game's features, or more likely, they'll find a way to block his mod from being used online and thereby cementing them as the DRM fans that they so far appear to be.

KitGuru Says: Good to see this feature finally enabled for those that bought the game not realising it was an always-on setup. Of course most people have internet that functions most of the time, but that's not everyone and if you don't want to play online for whatever reason, you should be able to do so. Hell if Ubisoft can drop it because it realises always-on doesn't make it look good, EA should really pay attention.

[Thanks Eurogamer]

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