SimCity is a city-building and urban planning simulation massively multiplayer online game developed by Maxis Emeryville and published by Electronic Arts.

Players can create a settlement that can grow into a city by zoning land for residential, commercial, or industrial development, as well as building and maintaining public services, transport and utilities.

Throughout its development, SimCity received critical acclaim for its new engine and reimagined gameplay; however, publications cautioned the game's mandatory use of a persistent internet connection, which enables cloud saves and multiplayer functionality, allowing cities to trade and share resources.

"We try to build what you would expect to see, and that's the game," explains system architect Andrew Willmott, meaning that visual effects such as traffic, economic troubles, and pollution will be more obvious.

Cities can also pool their collective wealth and resources to build a "great work" to provide benefits for the entire region like a massive solar power plant or an international airport.

The user interface, which was inspired by Google Maps and infographics,[18] was designed to convey information to the player more clearly than in previous SimCity games.

At release, an active internet connection was required every time the game was launched, and had to be maintained throughout gameplay, until an offline single-player mode was added later via a patch.

[29] The connection is asynchronous,[29] so any brief network disturbance will not interrupt the gameplay[16] though outages of longer than 19 minutes, as an editor posted on Kotaku,[30] will cause loss of gamestate when playing online.

[39] After the release of the game, modders created mods that enabled offline play and access to debug developer tools.

The music tracks are also written with the population in mind, and the game exposes the full playlist as the player's city develops and grows.

The initial release of SimCity in North America suffered multiple severe issues, particularly regarding the game's requirement for a persistent Internet connection.

Players reported experiencing frequent problems during gameplay due to the outages such as long loading times, disconnections, crashing, and loss of saved game data.

[44][47][48] The issues caused online retailer Amazon.com to temporarily withdraw the downloadable version of SimCity from its marketplace, citing customer complaints.

... servers have gone toe-to-toe with day-one stampedes in much the same fashion as a turtle against an 18-wheeler: ... Then nature runs its course, and developers and publishers alike scramble to glue one billion bits of finely pulped turtle back together again," and added, "A strong service – the kind people latch onto and ultimately demand as the norm – doesn't just react.

[65] In addition, an article published by Rock, Paper, Shotgun highlighted ways in which "They could make an entire region single player offline with absolute ease.

These patches have addressed, though not entirely fixed, among many other things, issues such as traffic intelligence, game-save rollbacks, and emergency vehicle routing.

[69] Maxis released a 2.0 patch, purported to make significant improvements to gameplay and curb defects, that was distributed on April 22, 2013.

The Gamescom jury described the video game as having "fantastic graphics" and "struck the right balance between retaining the trademarks of the old parts and making it interesting for beginners".

[78][79] The video games-focused blog Kotaku also voiced concern over the issue, worrying that Electronic Arts could one day shut down their servers, rendering the game unplayable.

[78] This prompted a blog response from Bradshaw, in which she defended the always-online component with the comment that "real cities do not exist in a bubble; they share a region and affect one another."

[98] Josh Derocher of Destructoid gave a rating of 4/10, saying that despite his enjoyment of the game, "the online dependency, forced multiplayer, and DRM ruin it.

"[87] Other critics such as Rock, Paper, Shotgun also noted the launch issues with the always-online nature of the game, servers, and cloud save systems.

[47][53][54][107] Amazon customers and the press reported problems with path-finding and artificial intelligence,[99][108][109][110] broken economic simulation,[110] multiplayer aspect not working as advertised,[110][111] and iconic features missing compared to previous installments of the game.

Maxis responded to this criticism by stating that this was a deliberate compromise to ensure that the game would run smoothly on the majority of users' computers.

[114] In October 2013, Maxis stated that due to player feedback, they attempted to implement larger cities through "months of testing", but ultimately decided to abandon the concept as "the system performance challenges [Maxis] encountered would mean that the vast majority of [SimCity's] players wouldn't be able to load, much less play with bigger cities.

The Academy is a futuristic research center that provides a signal called "ControlNet" to power up structures and improvements developed there and the OmegaCo is composed of factories used to produce an elusive commodity from crude oil and ore only known as "Omega" to increase the profits from residential, commercial and industrial buildings alike and manufacture drones to further improve the coverage of healthcare, police, fire services or just be used by citizens to perform shopping in their places, thus reducing traffic.

Over time, it is revealed that Omega has several downsides including causing people to fall ill, creating excess garbage and making buildings spontaneously combust.

Brett Todd for GameSpot noted that "you're left with a game that hides the same dissatisfying experience under a more attractive surface," calling the expansion "more of the same.

"[120] Paul Dean for EuroGamer wrote the expansion pack was "heading in the right direction," but "it still doesn't make SimCity a particularly good game.

[125][126] The negative reception of SimCity also encouraged Paradox Interactive to green-light development of their city-building game Cities: Skylines, which released in 2015.