EA has revealed a list of games being offered free of charge to SimCity players as compensation for the title’s disaster launch.

Any consumer who purchases and authenticates SimCity by March 25, 2013 at 11:59pm PST will receive a token to download a digital PC version of one of the following games:

• Battlefield 3 (Standard Edition)
• Bejeweled 3
• Dead Space 3 (Standard Edition)
• Mass Effect 3 (Standard Edition)
• MOHW (Standard Edition)
• NFS Most Wanted (Standard Edition)
• Plants vs. Zombies
• SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition

SimCity owners will be granted access to a free game portal in waves beginning this Wednesday, March 20. All users will have until March 30 at 11:59PM PST to redeem their free title. Check out this EA FAQ for information on how to do so.

EA said last week that it was nearing the “all clear” on the crippling server issues that have ruined the SimCity experience for many users.

We said in our SimCity review: “SimCity’s a mess of moving parts, occasionally clicking into place and allowing for brilliant experiences before coming undone and tearing everything down. With updates to both server stability and the game itself, SimCity’s wonderful moments may be able to overtake the bad ones to create the best game in the series. But if those don’t come, EA’s bustling metropolis may end up a ghost town.”

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It’s been a rough couple of weeks for Maxis. Ire from SimCity players ebbed a bit when the game’s servers caught up (for the most part) with consumer demand and downtime and disconnections abated. Since then, anger has shifted to the root of the problem: SimCity’s need to always be online.

Maxis General Manager Lucy Bradshaw responded to players who question the game’s need for constant internet access, those who berate it as thin justification for stricter anti-piracy measures.

“It didn’t come down as an order from corporate and it isn’t a clandestine strategy to control players,” Bradshaw wrote. “It’s fundamental to the vision we had for this SimCity. From the ground up, we designed this game with multiplayer in mind–using new technology to realize a vision of players connected in regions to create a SimCity that captured the dynamism of the world we live in; a global, ever-changing, social world.”

She listed the game’s features which require constant connection with servers: interactions between cities, gifts between players, a reactive market, worldwide goals, and regionwide Great Works, to name a few. All of the former are multiplayer aspects.

“The game we launched is only the beginning for us–it’s not final and it never will be. In many ways, we built an MMO,” Bradshaw concluded. “So, could we have built a subset offline mode? Yes. But we rejected that idea because it didn’t fit with our vision. We did not focus on the ‘single city in isolation’ that we have delivered in past SimCities. We recognize that there are fans–people who love the original SimCity–who want that. But we’re also hearing from thousands of people who are playing across regions, trading, communicating and loving the Always-Connected functionality.”

Bradshaw seemed to acknowledge what modders have already demonstrated–the core experience of building a city can function offline with minor changes to the game. She told Polygon last week that significant essential calculations offloaded to SimCity’s server make an offline mode impractical. But it’s simpler than that:

Maxis’ vision does not include an offline mode, and it’s not going to make one.

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