SimCity will be offline for about two hours tonight while EA works in a hefty pile of updates and bug fixes.
I’ve stayed as far as humanly possible away from the whole SimCity fiasco (except to point and laugh) so I have no idea what the state of the game is currently, but I suspect that the best approximation remains something close to “not good.” It will therefore likely be welcome news that Electronic Arts will implement a host of updates to the game tonight at 5 pm EDT.
New to the game will be the addition of a Mayor’s Mansion, from which the big Simcheese will drive or fly to work, HUD color correction in color-blind mode and a change to data maps that shows the filtered color when a color filter is enabled. Exciting stuff!
The list of fixes and updates is much beefier, covering technical issues that were causing cities not to process (and which EA is “continuing to work on and improve,” presumably even beyond this update), fixes to region filters and invites, tourism, casinos, education, water, air pollution, recycling, disasters, trade, transit and other features. “Everything” might be an unfortunately appropriate term for it.
The bad news is that the servers will have to be taken offline to make the magic happen and that means, given the always-on demands of SimCity, that you won’t be able to play the game while it’s happening. “Choosing a time to issue a major Update is never easy, but after looking our peak player time, we’ve concluded 9pm GMT is the best window for us to make these improvements,” Community Manager Michael Donahoe explained on the SimCity blog. The update is expected to take roughly two hours to complete.
The full list of bug fixes and updates is available at simcity.com.
