Trying to Play SimCity Offline? You're Doing It Wrong, Says EA

The latest incarnation of was never meant to be an offline experience, the game's general manager said Friday afternoon.

"In many ways, we built an MMO [Massively Multiplayer Online game]," Lucy Bradsaw said in an EA blog post.

"Could we have built a subset offline mode? Yes. But we rejected that idea because it didn’t fit with our vision."

The post came after fans on social media and EA message boards criticized the game's always-online element. Players have been beset with server troubles and couldn't play for much of the first week of SimCity's launch

While publisher EA has been responding to the server problems, players have raised the question of why the game needed to be online only at all.