EA considering offline mode for SimCity

EA may be looking at the possibility of adding offline play and other features to SimCity as part of its future updates for its world-building series, according to a customer survey that has surfaced on Reddit.

The survey, which can be seen here in screenshots, seeks player feedback on potential upcoming features. These include: farms, faster rebuilding after disasters, overpass and underpass roads, cities twice the size of current land plots, terraforming, cooperative city building with friends, and Classic mode. The latter is described as allowing players to, “In offline or online mode, play a single, fully functioning city using cheats and unlocks that allow you to create your perfect city.”

Among other possible changes are four new additions to an upcoming expansion pack. Simulate to the Sky is described as adding the ability to build up instead of out to create SuperScrapers. Players will also be able to zone the new building type residential, commercial, and industrial concurrently, as well as create multi-layered transportation, and improve overall city density to raise populations.

Greed cities add a resource-consuming mega corporation that boosts profits--a robotics augmentation business--and increases the total amount of trash and pollution produced. Conversely, green cities add an academy to research advanced technology and generate wealthy, highly skilled workers, and your city will better collaborate with others on research.

The last component of the new expansion pack is called Transform Tomorrow. It will allow players to watch their cities change as future technologies are added, or see your region become affected by the actions of your future cities.

Launching to low review scores and server troubles, Maxis co-founder Will Wright described the game's initial release as being "inexcusable" for consumers, saying that both EA and Maxis failed to adequately communicate with players.

GameSpot contacted EA seeking clarification regarding the customer survey. A spokesperson from the publisher was unavailable at time of publication.