SimCity hasn’t had the best launch in the world. Though issues have been clearing up in the past few days, the initial launch period plagued users with dropped connections and infinite loading times. It’s just a sad side-effect of an always-online game. However, new information reveals that this could have all been avoided since the online components of SimCity aren’t even necessary!

Rock, Paper, Shotgun got the chance to sit down with a SimCity developer who supposedly asked to remain anonymous to talk about the game. RPS has apparently verified that this developer worked on the project, but no further information about his identity was given. This is what he had to say:

The servers are not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing. They are still acting as servers, doing some amount of computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities. As well, they’re doing cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that. But for the game itself? No, they’re not doing anything. I have no idea why they’re claiming otherwise. It’s possible that Bradshaw misunderstood or was misinformed, but otherwise I’m clueless.

The Bradshaw the source mentions is Lucy Bradshaw, Maxis studio head. Bradshaw has told both Polygon and Kotaku in the past that SimCity “offloads a significant amount of the [game’s] calculations to [the] servers” and that it would take “a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game [for single-player].”

However, RPS’s source begs to differ. “It wouldn’t take very much engineering to give you a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff,” the source said.

Granted, you should take all of this with a grain of salt, as you should with any anonymous source. However, if this turns out to be true, Maxis and EA will have a lot of angry gamers on their hands.

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