Those who may have been eagerly awaiting news as to when EA and Maxis' sim city builder would finally be available in offline mode will be glad to hear that update 10, the patch that will include the ability to play offline, is currently in "final testing”. “Almost there Mayors,” the Twitter post said yesterday.

Originally launching as a completely online-only title, SimCity had some very large launch issues that left many fans quite soured of the series. Ranging from the inability to actually play the game through to progress being lost and some features not even being implemented, the online-only launch was definitely a disaster. Luckily, EA and Maxis have decided to remedy that with the ability to play the game completely offline.

Our game routes pieces of data from one city to another as data flows through the regions. All of that code exists on the server, and now we’ve brought all of that down into the client. The client processes the region box, which is what all of the cities pushes their data into. We’ve brought that down into the client as well.

And now, all of the regional simulation needs to be done locally. The algorithms governing trading between cities needed to be retuned in order to make the behavior between cities more responsive for this type of play. This in itself required major optimizations in order to run the simulation locally. We have an obligation to make the game fun and functional on all specs of machines. We wouldn’t want someone who was enjoying the Multiplayer game to find the Single Player game crippled due to poor optimization.

Currently there is no ETA on when the patch will be out, but with the recent Twitter comment it is definitely getting closer.