I doubt it will ever get that as the AI can barely handle the current largest size. The AI is so ridiculously dumb it isn't funny.

Interesting news. I suppose the sales of "Cities of Tomorrow" were poor enough to finally warrant a policy change.

Here's hoping for a mod that will finally allow huge, sprawling single player cities.

The irony, of course, was that StarCraft 2 was the one modern game that still needed LAN support, and there Blizzard failed just as badly.

Now to find the official EA press release and see just how they've managed to give this a positive, EA-for-the-players spin XD

The headline of this thread is kinda misleading since the patch hasn't actually launched yet. So they haven't added offline mode yet- "Simcity 2013 will receive offline mode" would be a more apt thread title IMO. Still plenty of things that can go wrong... such as a badly functioning offline mode.

That's fine and all, but wake me when EA releases it without the client as well.

so what is the point of the smaller sizes and specializations in offline mode? are you going to have to play all your neighbours also?

Pedantry at eleven.

Particle Board!

Shhhhh! It can speak...

"Error: #753 - Cannot connect to offline servers"

Happy about this decision, contradictory as it may be. Still not going to buy the game, as I don't have an Origin account and I understand it's still a pretty bad game DRM aside. In ages past, I would probably pirate to check it out and give it a chance, but I have too much of a backlog to bother nowadays. So I don't see me playing this game anytime soon.

This is a surprising announcement but there's still the possibility of the implementation working in such a way that offline mode isn't an inherent function (like Steam's offline mode... which works, except when it doesn't).The console versions of Diablo III work offline; that combined with the cash shop closing certainly indicates such an update could happen.

Wonder what they'll do with the Simcity servers after this, probably not worth keeping them up. Sooner it's shutdown and the game's permanently offline the better, Simcity doesn't deserve to be always online.

Doesn't help that the game's max city size is like 1/8's of what Simcity 4 can do... Still sticking with Simcity 2000 and Simcity 4.

city size is a memory problem - if they went with 64bit only we would have bigger cities. That is why stardock is going 64bit only with galciv 3

their idea was great, but someone didnt calculate how it would scale up

Starcraft II, just like Spore - I saw the demo videos, heard the E3 marketing banter and was excited for it to come out so I could get it... but... with the online-only DRM crap etc. I opted to wait and see instead, and they never changed anything so I never bought either. Ditto with Diablo III.

When Blizzard starts putting out DRM-free games again, I might buy them though. If not, that's ok too as there are thousands of games out there to keep me busy though.