Electronic Arts doesn't exactly have the best track record with gamers. But a new SimCity mod shows that in one controversial case, EA might have the right of things.

When it launched last year, SimCity was fraught with disaster. At the core of the problem was the game's online-only requirement. Not only did it enrage players that felt an Internet connection shouldn't be necessary to play the game's single-player mode, it resulted in crippling server instability, locking pretty much everyone—single-player or not—out of the game entirely when it launched.

EA and developer Maxis claimed that playing the game offline was "impossible," at least at launch, and later spent more than six months developing that very feature. But another large issue many players had with the game—another thing EA said it wouldn't or couldn't change—was the maximum size players' cities were limited to.

"City sizes have been a constant point of conversation among our players since we released the game," Maxis Emeryville General Manager Patrick Buechner said in a blog post last year. "The game’s original design focused on the density of an intimate urban environment. It was about intercity connectivity and the challenge of managing a region of cities instead of one metropolis in isolation. However, we recognize that many players have expressed the desire to build up one big city rather than manage the interrelationship of multiple smaller cities."

Buechner said that after months of testing, the company had no plans to implement larger city sizes, citing performance issues as the primary limitation. "The system performance challenges we encountered would mean that the vast majority of our players wouldn’t be able to load, much less play with bigger cities," he said.

Never to be told what they couldn't do, modders took matters into their own hands: Project Orion mods the game so that cities may extend over significantly larger areas than originally limited.

However, the mod may have inadvertently proven EA right on this issue. Making the cities larger generates a swath of performance problems and weird bugs.

As demonstrated in the above video, actual performance varies depending on the power of the machine running the modded software. But even taking that into account, a slew of issues crop up, such as property values and pollution levels being displayed incorrectly, and roads and zoning not functioning properly outside of the original city limits.

In other words, yes, SimCity can be modded to allow cities larger than originally restricted, but not in a way you'd really want to play anyway. In doing so, the game becomes a weird, buggy shell of its former self at best, and unplayable at worst.

Perhaps EA should have designed SimCity in the first place to handle cities on the scale of the ones you were able to construct in its predecessors. But it seems to be the case that just patching them in is not an option.