SimCity announces offline single-player mode, pretends this is an innovative new feature

I’ve always liked the SimCity series. So I was just as disappointed as everyone else by the utter debacle that was the launch of the new SimCity game last year. In case you were living under a rock, here’s a quick refresher: EA launched a SimCity game that had extremely small city limitations, had to be played online with other players, and was full of bugs. Oh, and at launch, many people couldn’t connect to the game’s servers at all, rendering the game totally unplayable. Players were not impressed.

This past Sunday, nearly a year after the game’s original release, the company has finally relented. Maxis GM Patrick Buechner announced on the official SimCity blog that SimCity offline is coming. Finally, some news about SimCity that gamers actually want! Or at least some news that we wanted a year ago.

The announcement is hilarious, though, because Buechner is using the same tone and phrasing most game companies might use to introduce innovative new features to announce a feature that is nearly two decades old, having first been introduced with the original SimCity in 1989. Here, take a look:

What’s new is the Single Player Mode, which allows you to play the game Offline by yourself. And because your saved games in this mode are stored locally, you can save and load to your heart’s content.

I didn’t add that emphasis, by the way, that’s in the original post. But stop and think about how insane this is for a minute. How fucked is your game design when single-player, loading and saving are the hot new features that your community has been clamoring for? This is a bit like Blizzard releasing a new WoW expansion with no NPCs, and then making a triumphant blog post a year later saying “Guess what, guys, we’re adding quests!”

Offline mode and single-player are unique selling points now? Is this the 1980s?

I mean, honestly, are we supposed to be excited about this? Hooray, you added basic features to your game that should’ve been there a year ago when it launched. Better late than never, I guess. But does anyone care at this point? And is this really the approach Maxis and EA should be taking?

Maybe this makes me a dick, but after all the bullshit we were fed by Maxis and EA about how the game couldn’t be offline, I don’t want to see Maxis pretending that saving and loading are innovative new features. I don’t want an announcement like this. I want a mea culpa and an apology. I want someone to admit that basic design decisions underlying the new SimCity were mistakes, and that the gaming community expressed its skepticism loudly and repeatedly before the game even launched.

What I want is irrelevant because I’m not going to get it, but let this be a warning to other developers out there: ignore your target market at your peril, and show some respect for the IP that you’re developing a game around. Don’t expect fans to get excited if you deviate from the series’s core appeal. And although you can always try to rectify your mistakes post-release, by that point it may be too late. I loved the SimCity series, but this latest game killed my enthusiasm, and a year-too-late implementation of the offline mode that should have been there on day one isn’t nearly enough to resurrect it.