EA has revealed the list of eight Origin games that will be offered to owners of SimCity for free, by way of an apology for the game's teething issues.

Last week, the company apologised for the continuing connection and server issues players were experiencing and stated that everyone who registers the game before March 25 will be allowed to choose one Origin game from a list of eligible titles to download for free.

The eligible titles are:

Battlefield 3 (Standard Edition)
Bejeweled 3
Dead Space 3 (Standard Edition)
Mass Effect 3 (Standard Edition)
Medal of Honor Warfighter (Standard Edition)
Need For Speed Most Wanted (Standard Edition)
Plants vs. Zombies
SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition.

You'll have until March 30 to claim your free game.

The post also includes an explanation from developers Maxis, which reads, "At Maxis, our studio values dictate that we innovate and create something that is quirky, complex and challenging. Sometimes this bites us in the butt, but our servers are green and we’re seeing record numbers of players all online and having a great time.

"We’re getting great feedback from our fans and know that many of you are having fun and exploring this whole new expression of SimCity. We’re humbled by your patience and passion for the game. Thanks for building something very special with us, together."

It's true that most of the game's issues seem to be resolved; the company recently restored the non-essential features it disabled to ease the strain on the servers. Despite this, there are still no plans to introduce the offline mode many fans have asked for.

Is this gesture enough to compensate you for the troubles you experienced, or have you given up on SimCity? Let us know what you think and which game you'll be getting in the comments below.

SimCity review: One week later, time doesn’t heal all wounds

Wait for the game to go live, they said. We did. It didn’t.

by Kyle Orland and Peter Bright - Mar 15 2013, 8:00am CDT

When we got our limited review copies of SimCity, EA implored us to wait until the game went live so that we could authentically experience the full multiplayer experience and hence see everything that the game had to offer. Heeding the company’s advice, we wrote up our initial impressions but held off on a full review.

Then the game went live, causing the game servers to promptly collapse under the load. EA frantically brought new servers online, improved its server code, and disabled certain in-game features in a bid to make the software at least somewhat usable. All things considered, the launch was pretty disastrous. Customers demanded—though did not receive—refunds, and EA offered everyone who bought the game a free second game as compensation.

Despite those early concerns, we've now had sufficient opportunity to try the game in the live environment EA suggested, seeing how the regional and global trading markets work with a population of tens of thousands of other players. As you'll see, our thoughts on the game have changed somewhat since those early impressions, but not really enough to overcome our initial opinion on the game.

Kyle: It's kind of impossible to start this review without addressing the server concerns that are still affecting the game. Personally, I didn't run into as many problems as were reported by others. I had trouble getting the game to show up in my Origin library a couple of times, and I saw my server listed as “Full” once when I tried to log in. Otherwise, I was able to play as normal. Maybe I was just lucky with my play schedule.

That said, I was still impacted by the server issues thanks to the elimination of the Cheetah speed option, which is in its sixth day as I write this. It may sound like a minor thing, but the game is considerably less enjoyable to play without this speed option. A large part of playing the game, after you have a relatively stable city, is using Cheetah speed to move time forward quickly so you can gain more money and rapidly see if there are any developing problems about to pop up. At the next step down, Llama speed, the wait for these things is frustratingly slow, to the point where I found myself wanting to play the game less.

By EA's latest accounts, the server issues are almost completely fixed, so for the rest of the review I'd like to evaluate the game as if the servers will be working perfectly in the near future. But at this point, it still can’t be ignored.

Peter: Yo, Kyle. I'm really happy for you, and I’mma let you finish, but SimCity had one of the worst launches of all time. OF ALL TIME. And we owe it to the readers, and ourselves, to really highlight just how catastrophic this launch has been.

This broken server debacle couldn't have been more predictable. This is SimCity for crying out loud. It's one of the oldest non-console gaming franchises still around, if not the oldest. This is a game I remember playing and becoming hooked on almost 23 years ago in black and white on a friend's Macintosh Classic. Over the years, I've put literally thousands of hours into SimCity games, and that's excluding all those nights I left the game running (with disasters disabled, of course) to build up cash so that I could have abundant money by the time I woke up.

Of course this game was going to be tremendously popular right out of the gate. Given the swiftness with which the game servers collapsed once the game went live in the US, there must have been a substantial number of pre-orders. That should have given EA a good idea of how many people were going to want to start playing it at midnight. There is no sense in which the server loads should have caught them off guard. That it appears to have done so means they either weren't paying attention, didn't do any meaningful testing of their server infrastructure before launching the game, or knew that the servers would be slagged the instant the game went live and simply didn't care.

But thanks to all the pre-ordering suckers like me, why would EA care? They've got my money. They're laughing all the way to the bank. Diablo 3 made a compelling case that it just doesn't matter, and gamers will eagerly gobble down whatever scraps the game companies feed them. I know I'm part of the problem. But what can I do about it? I wanted the extra DLC from the Digital Deluxe pack.

It's been more than a week since the game launched in the US, and I still can't reliably join servers. Even servers listed as "available" when you start the game won't necessarily let you on, instead making you stand in line for 19 minutes or occasionally an hour. When you do get on, not only is Cheetah speed (practically the only one you need) missing, but so are many of the multiplayer features like leaderboards. There's still quite some way to go before this game is working properly as intended.

And I'm still having serious core gameplay issues related to the servers. Like SimCity 4, SimCity has large regions containing a number of discrete, semi-independent buildable plots. Various resources can be traded between plots within a region, and SimCitizens can also move between plots, commuting to work or going out of town to shop, for example. I've been trying to make this work for me. I really have. But I can't, because the different plots in my region are, for want of a better word, disconnected. Occasionally the game recognizes that both plots exist and that one can supply people, power, water, and so on to the other. But most of the time it's just plain broken: one plot just doesn't correctly recognize that the other is there.

I assume this is because the server I'm on is overburdened. I would be happy to move to a different, less crowded server, except for the fact that I couldn't take my cities with me. In what EA might actually call a “feature,” you can be on up to ten regions on any one server, and get ten more if you connect to a new server. Personally, I’d rather have a game-wide limit of ten regions with the ability to move my city between servers freely, just to be able to move my region to a server that's in better health than the one I’m on. But I'm not willing to sacrifice a dozen hours that I've invested into my main city just to switch to a server that's only marginally more reliable.

The experience has definitely improved over the last week, I won’t deny that. You can feel the servers getting faster—interactions between cities are taking much less time than they were—but it still has a way to go. We don’t yet have access to the full game.

Kyle: I can definitely see why EA decided to force cities to stay in place. Being able to move a fully developed and functioning city into a new region on a new server at any point could screw up the careful balance the developers were trying to create with the region system, leaving a gaping hole in one region and creating a too-easy source of wealth in another.

It only starts with the servers

As you noted, Peter, the problem is that the cities in each region seem largely disconnected from one another. The main issue seems to be in the single entry point to most cities, the highway on-ramp. In most of my cities, I'd say there was a constant traffic jam on that one on-ramp at least a good two-thirds of the time. I would have loved to give my Sims another roadway entry into my city, but that's utterly impossible. Instead, I have to watch powerlessly as a near endless row of cars queues up to enter my city well past midnight and into the morning rush hour. Adding other modes of entry like a ferry terminal or a train station later on seems to do little to fix this.

This one transportation problem severely limits the potential of the whole regional system. Every city you create feels like an island that only occasionally gets messages or freight from another far-flung rock in the middle of the ocean, rather than an integrated system of mega-cities, suburbs, manufacturing towns, shopping havens, and so on that make up a vibrant metropolitan area.

Peter: This touches on some of my biggest problems with the game. Creating transport infrastructure is in many regards the very essence of city design and planning. Transport can make or break your city. And yet in SimCity I feel hamstrung. In particular, the lack of both subways and urban highways is devastating. I want to extend those highway entry points into my city to have several exit points and free-flowing high-speed roads between them. I want subways so I can take some traffic off the road network entirely, without having to waste precious land. I'd even like exotica such as one-way streets, flyovers, and underpasses to provide express routes to alleviate some of the worst bottlenecks.

Past SimCity games have included highways and subways, and I expected the new game to build on this solid transport infrastructure foundation. But it didn't. It didn't even keep pace with its predecessors, and I just can't defend that by saying, "Oh it's a reboot." Yeah, OK, it's a reboot. That doesn't mean it can simply discard core elements of city-building gameplay.

I’ll say this, though; once you're in the game, it looks spectacular. It's taken Maxis a long time to reticulate those splines, but they're all reticulated now and they look glorious. Free rotation, smooth zooming from high in the sky down to street level. This is a good-looking game, and it's an intricately detailed one.

When you're zoomed in there's a cute tilt-shift effect where the plane of focus is manipulated to give the impression of the city being much bigger than it is, as if it were life-size. Sure, it's totally gimmicky, but it's gimmicky in a way that's fun and enjoyable (although to my annoyance, the highest tilt-shift setting seems to be broken, at least on my system, causing distracting blurring on the object that’s supposed to be in sharpest focus.)

Kyle: I also liked the ability to zoom in down to the Sim level, though I found it pretty odd to find, for example, Sims playing on my well-lit soccer field when it was "Closed," or watching a street car shuttle fruitlessly between two adjacent stops, rather than going further down the line to help waiting customers.

Peter: Oh definitely. The ability to zoom right in lets you see a lot of the bugs and oversights in the design of the game, and the behavior of vehicles is the biggest issue here. The number of vehicles I've seen pull back-to-back U-turns, or make three right turns instead of one left, or other weird stuff, is too high to count. My particular favorite bit of dumb vehicle behavior is watching a herd of fire trucks all rush to put out the fire nearest to them while ignoring the building burning down next door. And although the emergency services vehicles all have sirens, traffic never even moves out the way for them. They'll sit in a mile-long queue, inching forward, all with their sirens blazing. I'm pretty sure that doesn't happen in real life.

Compounding this issue, the pathfinding seems to be atrocious. Sims will ignore marginally longer—but faster—routes, favoring the shortest route no matter how slow it is. It's outright buggy. Occasionally it does do the right thing, but this seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

Kyle: The regional system also seems to have odd effects on the self-sufficiency of a city. In one of my cities, I was faced with a large employment problem late in the game, with tons of unfilled jobs and no lots to put new residential housing to fill them. Yet despite this, I got exactly zero people commuting in from other towns to fill some of those jobs, seemingly because nearby players didn't have any unemployed people who were free to commute in. That's all somewhat understandable, and it could have been fixed by converting some of my industrial base to even more residential areas. Except the game was also telling me there was an extreme demand for more industrial space. The conflicting advice made little to no sense.

Speaking of advice, the extremely janky alert system is a major hassle. I can't count the number of times my toolbar would light up with a yellow warning that my sewage treatment plant had clogged pipes, only to see the warning disappear a second later with no input from me. Well, is it a problem or isn't it? Citizens complain about crime even when my police tracker reads "zero crimes per day," which makes little sense (also, there were somehow dozens of criminals listed as committing those zero crimes per day. So... how are they criminals again?) The game would warn me frequently about hazmat fires even when I had a hazmat truck that efficiently took care of them automatically. Was that warning really necessary?

On the flipside, I would occasionally be dumbstruck by problems that the game didn't see fit to warn me about, like buildings that weren't getting enough water or businesses going abandoned because they lacked places to ship freight. And even when I did fix problems, the warnings would often take a good long while to realize they were actually fixed, leading to an odd temporal disconnect that took some getting used to. In a game that's primarily about discovering and responding to problems, these interface issues are extremely unwelcome.

Peter: The hazmat trucks you mentioned do introduce one of the things that I'm loving about the new game: the way city buildings work. In SimCity games of old, “ploppable” buildings had a fixed form and purpose. Now, they’re editable after being set down, with a number of extension modules that can be plopped down near or sometimes even on, the main building. You can add dormitories and specialized schools to a university, or hazmat trucks and fire helicopters to a fire station for instance.

I love the flexibility this gives you in tuning the way you build your city services. For example, do you put down a second grade school—taking more space, but spreading the traffic load—or just extend the one you already have, concentrating your resources but also the flow of Sims?

Kyle: The expandable buildings are nice, but I found it frustrating that I had to attach those new extensions on to very specific points. Even if there was room for a classroom behind the school, for instance, I'd instead have to put it next to the school and destroy some existing property at the same time.

Peter: Yeah, it's a bit odd. For some buildings you can plop the upgrades nearby. The university, in fact, lets you plop the upgrades quite a distance away. Others, however, have to be immediately adjacent. Sometimes that does make sense. Other times, it's just a peculiar limitation.

Kyle: While we're saying nice things, I will say that the new road system has grown on me, especially when I figured out that avenues are pretty much better in every way than plain old streets. While it would be nice to have more public transportation options, I have overcome the traffic problems I faced with my first few cities pretty handily. I also really like the curved roads that let you make much more freeform, less strictly grid-like cities if you want to. Sure, it's less efficient, but it allows for a lot more creativity and for more varied city layouts.

Peter: I have had a lot of difficulty with the roads. There seem to be a lot of small bugs. For example, it sometimes doesn't join road segments together, leaving them overlapping but with no way for traffic to pass between them. I can normally get the layout I want eventually, but it's not quite working how it should.

Kyle: The game is also quite good about giving you lots of information at a glance when you specifically request it. From land value to pollution to water tables, everything is easy to grok at a glance with a click of a specific map. Also, I could spend hours just watching blobs of water flow through pipes to all my buildings on the water map, or watching ambulances skittering around to pick up sick Sims on the health map.

Peter: The new visualizations look great, though I'm still sore that apart from the population graph, we don't have any real means of tracking trends over time. It was very handy to be able to see, for example, graphs of water consumption over time. Sure, looking at the water table gives you an idea of the current situation, and advisors do warn you shortly before you run out. Still, graphs in previous games gave a nice indication both of how water production was dropping off and consumption was growing, which let me plan replacements ahead of time.


Devil is in the details

I'm enjoying the detail, however. For example, even though my advisor annoyingly neglected to tell me that one of my schools was filled, I discovered the problem when examining why a nearby apartment complex was unhappy; one of the things it told me is that they used to be educated but weren't any more. That was neat. The game doesn't merely have a concept of being educated or not; Sims can actually lose their education if the city doesn't have the right resources to maintain it.
Detail is fundamental to the new SimCity concept. Past games used a statistical model. Although SimCity 4 let you create a handful of individual residents for your city, everything else was done using probabilities and statistics. The biggest single change of the new game is that it’s supposed to make this model more personal, modeling every citizen individually. Each Sim has a name. They live in a particular building, and they work in a particular location. They commute back and forth between these specific places. You can follow them around. They can be the victim of a crime, or fall ill, or break their leg.

Enlarge / When they wake up each morning, each Sim has a purpose. Usually it's going to school, going to work, or going shopping. Sometimes, however, it's being a jerk. This guy is one of those jerks.

Or at least, that's the theory. It turns out that that level of modeling was so hard to do that Maxis didn't do it. The publicity and promotion that the company has done, touting its "agent model" that simulates each citizen, would lead you to believe this is how it worked. But it turns out, that's only an approximation. Instead of being individuals with defined jobs and homes, the Sims are just dumb automata. Each morning, they wander the street until they hit a building with an open job. Each night, they drive until they find a home with an empty bed, then they move in.

Worse, Sims get confused incredibly easily. One might start out walking to a job, but if that job gets filled while he’s on the way, he’ll continue walking. He'll never decide "Gosh, I have to walk further now; I guess I'd better get on a bus." He'll just walk all day long and then complain he can't find a job. To top it all off, it appears that at some point the game even stops creating these dumb agents, inflating the population statistics to make it seem like there are more citizens than are actually modeled, leading to endless complaints from employers that they can't get enough staff in any large city.

Maxis' ambitions were high, but they were clearly too complex to actually deliver. Problem is, the marketing was never scaled back when the game was.

Kyle: Yeah, overall I’d say the game’s changes generally feel like great ideas on paper that simply fell apart when the developers tried to implement them. Rather than going back to the drawing board and eliminating all the things that were causing the numerous annoying conflicts we’ve been talking about, they seem to have tried to apply a coat of paint to the whole thing and patch it together to make the target launch date.

Some of these problems will be fixable by patches as the game continues to grow and mature. But some of them seem pretty inherent to the way the game has been designed. Things like intercity traffic and commerce and the true simulation of individual Sims seem like problems that will be tough if not impossible to fix. At this point, Maxis might be better off starting over and trying for a more manageable simulation next time around.

Peter: The simulation shortcuts are particularly punishing when you start playing with another one of the big new features: city specializations. The idea here is pretty cool: You pick one set of themed buildings in an area like casinos, mining, petrochemicals, or electronics. These all create jobs and resources that can be sold on the global market. But they can also have more direct effects, like mining for coal to burn in power plants.

Enlarge / Occasionally little speech bubbles will disclose things that are making the Sims happy or sad. Or in this case, just plain weird.

With enough time and money, you can work your way up the resource chain to refined products like metal, alloy, plastic, and fuel. These can be further refined into things like processors (made from plastic and alloy), which in turn can be turned into lucrative consumer products (TVs and computers).

The final step in the chain is a "great work" that can be set up on a specific point in a region; major projects like self-sufficient arcologies, giant solar power plants, international airports, or space centers. These projects are designed to take the pooled resources of several different cities and bring great benefits to the entire region in exchange for their high cost in money and resources.

This whole system brings a new kind of complexity to SimCity, and although there are some rough edges (there doesn't appear to be any good way to move resources instantly between specialized cities to set up automated workflows, aside from making manual gift transfers), it's a worthy addition.

Kyle: I liked the general idea of specializations, but I was pretty annoyed at just how much space the buildings they needed took up. To build an expo center or processor plant late in the game, for instance, I had to clear away four whole blocks of productive cityscape. That wouldn’t have been such a big deal, except that I had already reached the limits of the very small buildable area for my city, and I wouldn’t be able to find room to replace any of the things I was being forced to destroy. In a game where keeping a careful balance of building types is so important, being forced to destroy old ones just to build new ones, well before the “tech tree” is exhausted, is beyond frustrating.

Peter: And of course, if the multi-plot play were smoother—if there were no server issues, if there were rich transport options between plots, if the pathfinding weren’t so awful—this wouldn’t be such a big deal. It would be practical to spread your city between several plots within a region. But it isn’t. There’s a kind of negative synergy here: not only are the plots too small, the tools we get to deal with the plot size are themselves limited.

This also hampers multiplayer. I think that the multi-plot play is a great idea. In SimCity 4 people devised all sorts of unreliable hacks using Dropbox and similar software to share their regions and enable multiple players to develop adjoining plots, so there’s definitely genuine player demand. But you’re left with this situation of a weird mix of interdependence—there’s not enough room to make any one city do everything—and isolation, due to the poor connectivity.

Given this, one might almost think that the online, server-based requirement isn't in fact to support multiple players, but rather to combat piracy.

“I wanted to love this game”

Kyle: Reading this over just now, it’s pretty clear we’re in agreement on the current state of the new SimCity: some nice ideas, a few of which are even implemented well, but overall a case of too much promise and too little delivery. It might be worth revisiting the game when EA has inevitably had the chance to patch and DLC the hell out of it, but for now, it’s a hard game to recommend.

Peter: More than anything else, I wanted to love this game. I have loved SimCitys past, and I love the SimCity idea. But I do not love this game. I like specializations, the graphics are gorgeous, there are some great little details. These are offset by glaring flaws. The game is broken in ways that are important to me. I hope that, as with Diablo III—another game with a disastrous launch—EA/Maxis can patch the game to fix the things that have gone so wrong. They've made some promising noises. But I'm not holding my breath.

The Good

Beautiful, detailed, smooth zooming graphics that bring the cities to life
Effective at-a-glance statistical mapping and visualizations
Specializations add some interesting "end game" options
Multiplayer without Dropbox hacks

The Bad

Extremely limited transportation options
Major traffic and sim-level simulation glitches
Contradictory and confusing problem alert system
Tiny city size limits building options
Lack of graphing over time for many key statistics

The Ugly

Having problems logging into servers nine days after launch
Not being able to play when offline
No real savegames, making experimentation a costly, dangerous affair


The server is available. But logins are closed. We don't understand how these things can even occur simultaneously.


Some cities never sleep. SimCity cities snore loudly.


The visualizations of crime, pollution, health, and so on, are all attractively presented, combining heat maps with little bar graphs.


When they wake up each morning, each Sim has a purpose. Usually it's going to school, going to work, or going shopping. Sometimes, however, it's being a jerk. This guy is one of those jerks.

EA: SimCity server response time has improved 40-fold since launch

Studio pledges to “look into” offline mode as part of “earning back your trust.”

by Kyle Orland - Mar 10 2013, 2:05pm CDT

Say what you will about EA and Maxis' frustrating server issues or refund policies surrounding last week's botched SimCity launch, but the company has been working hard to communicate its efforts to fix the situation in recent days through Maxis General Manager Lucy Bradshaw.

In an update posted late Saturday to EA's official blog, Bradshaw said server response time has been improved 40-fold since launch. This allows for twice as many players to be in the game simultaneously (including "tens of thousands of new players... logging in every day"). She described the current situation as "good, but not good enough," and promised the team won't rest until they have "everyone online, playing together, and no hitches."

The Maxis team has added 12 new servers to the game since Thursday, including the pithily named "Antarctica 1" earlier this morning (servers are region-free, so this isn't as limited as it seems). Individual servers are still being taken down periodically to install patches that bring benefits like faster setup and traffic fixes.

Bradshaw also took to Twitter yesterday to address fans' concerns directly. Her answers included the first public indication that EA and Maxis may be considering loosening the game's always-online restrictions. Responding to a question about whether an offline mode patch would be distributed when servers were eventually taken down in a few years, or "perhaps before then," Bradshaw said that the company has "no intention of offlining SimCity any time soon, but we'll look into that as part of our earning back your trust efforts." That said, Bradshaw later tweeted, "the game was designed for [multiplayer], we sim the entire region on the server, so [adding offline modes] is just not possible." Talk about muddying the message a little bit.

During the 45-minute online Q&A session, Bradshaw also directly addressed how the team could have underestimated their server needs so drastically. "Metrics/beta was fairly conservative and live ops stressed our game server DB’s in ways that we did not experience in Beta or Load Test," she said. Adding later, "Load experience in beta and load test is different than live. We've adapted and put out servers with changes, already seeing improvements."

Bradshaw also cited unexpectedly high demand on servers in an interview with Polygon this weekend. "What we underestimated was a huge surge in pre-orders within the last week and the power of the great word-of-mouth created by the media and our community," she told Polygon. "We test and work out the capacity load of each server in load testing and through our beta events. We have seen play behavior and load in areas that have stressed our game server [databases] in ways that we did not experience in Beta or Load Test."

Not all of the server capacity problems were directly related to the amount of hardware, either. "We've identified that many of our issues were related to how [SimCity's] GlassBox [engine] managed the vast amount of simulation data through its database," Bradshaw told Polygon. "We've addressed that and we've seen an 80 percent decrease in connectivity or responsiveness issues. Still, 80 percent is not good enough and so we are continuing to aggressively address this area."

Regarding refunds, Bradshaw restated on Twitter that EA does not give money back on downloadable games. She clarified that the previously announced free game download will offer players a choice of which title they would like. The company is also "considering other ways to make it up to you," according to Bradshaw. She stated once again that players are not being banned for simply requesting refunds.

Bradshaw went on to promise that features like Cheetah speed and Achievements would be coming back once server stability issues were totally "nailed." She said that the team would be "absolutely looking at" increasing maximum city sizes in the future as well.

The supposedly "revolutionary AI" where each sim has their own personality, moods, jobs, homes, etc - was all bullshit. Sims are lemmings. They leave a house in the morning and walk until they find an open job (or get trapped in bad pathing and walk in circles forever) and then at night they walk to the first open house and sleep. Or not.

On top of that, the game only simulates a low number of the lemming sims and then extrapolates that data to give you a larger population.

Additionally: EA lied. They claimed the cloud was required as the simulation was running on it. They're full of shit. You can edit the jscript in glassbox to block the 20 minute keepalive and play offline forever.

It's the sort of dumpster fire that we've all come to expect from EA.

PS: their CEO resigned on Monday.

EA’s Simcity for Mac will arrive in June

By Dave Neal
Wed Apr 10 2013, 16:51

PREMATURELY PLAGUED build your own city game Simcity will come to the Apple Mac in June.

Electronic Arts (EA) bungled the release of Simcity on PCs. There were server problems and no end of complaints about the system and its performance. EA apologised for this and even offered gamers a free title as consolation.

That's presumably all water under the virtual bridge now as it is all systems go for a Mac rollout on 11 June.

Mac users must be held in high esteem at EA Maxis, as apparently this delay was to make sure that they will not have to suffer the indignity of earlier launch problems.

"Simcity is coming to Mac on June 11 and one purchase will give you both the Mac and PC versions. You only need to buy Simcity once to play together across the same servers, regardless of which version you're playing," said Lucy Bradshaw, senior VP and GM of EA's Maxis Label.

"We didn't want to make any compromises when it came to the Mac so we created a native version that is optimized for the hardware and OSX."

This should mean that the Mac version appears on your system and runs on EA's servers like honey. We'll have to wait until mid-June to find out.

EA will be hoping for some good news. It's had nothing but bad news for weeks, and lost a CEO over the Simcity fiasco.

This week the US consumer website Consumerist revealed its poll of what its readers thought was the worst corporation in America.

Electronic Arts came first for the second year in a row, ranking even lower than Bank of America.

When the Mac version of Simcity is released anyone that has bought a digital or hard copy PC version will automatically be offered a free digital download of it through EA's Origin.

The firm also turned one of its proposed launch features back on today. Cheetah speed was axed a month ago when EA tried to get on top of its servers problems, but as of today it is live again. µ

Maxis Insider Tells RPS: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

By John Walker on March 12th, 2013 at 9:00 pm.

In all the fuss and mess of the disastrous SimCity launch, one refrain has been repeated again and again. While legions may be begging for an offline mode, EA representatives have been abundantly clear that this simply isn’t possible. Maxis’ studio head, Lucy Bradshaw, has told both Polygon and Kotaku that they “offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers”, and that it would take “a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game” for single player.

A SimCity developer has got in touch with RPS to tell us that at least the first of these statements is not true. He claimed that the server is not handling calculations for non-social aspects of running the game, and that engineering a single-player mode would require minimal effort.

Our source, who we have verified worked directly on the project but obviously wishes to remain anonymous, has first-hand knowledge of how the game works. He has made it absolutely clear to us that this repeated claim of server-side calculations is at odds with the reality of the project he worked on. Our source explains:

People were already perplexed by EA’s explanation of the impossibility of offline play. Kotaku ran a series of tests today, seeing how the game could run without an internet connection, finding it was happy for around 20 minutes before it realised it wasn’t syncing to the servers. Something which would surely be impossible were the servers co-running the game itself. Markus “Notch” Persson just tweeted to his million followers that he managed to play offline too, despite EA’s claims. And now with the information from our source, it would seem the claims just don’t hold water.

So what are the servers doing? Well, alongside the obvious, of being involved in allowing players to share the same maps for their cities, and processing imports and exports between them, they’re really there to check that players aren’t cheating or hacking. However, these checks aren’t in real-time – in fact, they might take a few minutes, so couldn’t be directly involved in your game.

“Because of the way Glassbox was designed, simulation data had to go through a different pathway. The game would regularly pass updates to the server, and then the server would stick those messages in a huge queue along with the messages from everyone else playing. The server pulls messages off the queue, farms them out to other servers to be processed and then those servers send you a package of updates back. The amount of time it could take for you to get a server update responding to something you’ve just done in the game could be as long as a few minutes. This is why they disabled Cheetah mode, by the way, to reduce by half the number of updates coming into the queue.”

Clearly an offline game that included a single-player simulation of the region system derived from multiplayer would be more challenging to develop, but our source assured us that it was far from impossible.

So how difficult would it be for EA to create a single-player game that simply did away with the multiplayer-derived aspects and just let us build? It seems that lies somewhere between “easy peasy” and Bradshaw’s claims of “significant engineering”. According to our source:

“It wouldn’t take very much engineering to give you a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff.”

EA’s claims about the necessity of online play – claims that more people are seeing for themselves not to be true, just by running the game with the internet cable yanked out – seem inexplicable.

We’d obviously be very interested to hear a proper explanation.