Be Excellent To Each Other

• Tuning: Residential-only cities have failure state.

SimCity players in revolt after 2.0 patch leaves cities overflowing with bugs and faeces

Just as EA and Maxis seemed ready to put launch issues to bed and march onwards with the development of their “MMO”, SimCity’s 2.0 patch has infused the game with a colourful array of shiny new bugs. Fans have taken to Reddit and official forums to decry the mess, which has left some cities literally overflowing with waste.

Human excrement is at the bottom (sorry) of one common issue encountered since yesterday's patch. A concerned Redditor reported a “sewage OVERLOAD” in a town with a relatively tiny population of 4,000 that saw their outflow pipe “MAXED”. Another player beginning a new town with a similarly-sized bevy of civvies found their terminally incontinent Sims had already put 55 in the clinic.

Not all of the bugs are so ripe for comedy. Some SimCity players have found themselves stuck on loading screens when attempting to resume cities created before the patch - though they've had no problems in creating new ones. Others lucky enough to access their saves have discovered that buildings wouldn’t complete construction, instead becoming perpetual building sites.

Meanwhile, while players are celebrating the end of traffic issues caused by “clumping” fire trucks and endlessly looping transit vehicles, more dramatic pile-ups are occurring as the result of new problems. One poor mayor saw their streets turned gold yesterday with hundreds of bright yellow and totally inexplicable taxi cabs:

Elsewhere, users on the official forums are reporting pollution from outside their city’s borders when surrounded by the uninterrupted greenery of an empty Region:

What's more, peculiar sound bugs have left some cities partially muted. Others now boast trees that honk and purr like streetcars:

The bugs really are too numerous to name - check the SimCity Subreddit and EA's forums for a cross-section. We've contacted EA to find out whether Maxis are working on another update to fix these latest issues, and will update this post with any answer we receive.

Did they fix the PC one yet?

But they fixed the traffic, and made people keep their jobs? That's probably worth a re-download for me.

Did they fix the PC one yet?

Yes, Offline is coming as a free download with Update 10 to all SimCity players. When we launch it, all of your previously downloaded content will be available to you anytime, anywhere, without the need for an internet connection. We are in the late phases of wrapping up its development and while we want to get it into your hands as soon as possible, our priority is to make sure that it’s as polished as possible before we release it. So, until then… testing, testing and more testing. As one of the final steps, we’re putting Offline into the hands of some of our most hardcore players, the DevTesters. This group of volunteers is going to put Offline through its paces before we release it.

In Update 10, you can still play solo in Regions on your own, or in Multiplayer with people from around the world. 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. Our team will be delivering a follow-up blog that will outline the full details in the near future so stay tuned.

So what does this mean for the Online game? All of the benefits of being connected will remain including access to Multiplayer, the Global Market and Leaderboards. And all of your pre-existing saved cities and regions will still be accessible should you log-in to the Online game.

Bringing the game Offline means big things for our wonderful community of Modders. They can now make modifications to the game and its components without compromising the integrity of the Online game. Modding is a big part of our studio’s legacy and we’re excited to see what you guys create. Check out this thread to learn about Oppie85’s Central Train Station, which you can put into your game right now, and if you’re interested in making your own content take a look at the Modding Policy. To get you started, we will be rolling out a series of tutorials from the studio that surfaces how we’ve created some of the content that you’ve seen so far in hopes of inspiring your creativity.

Why is there no enforced online mode? I heard it was a must have feature and requirement these days?

Thankfully advances in technology have enabled us to do all city management calculations locally on your PC. We don't have to do them in the cloud anymore, which you know, was the ONLY way to do it a few years ago.