Simcity 5 no offline mode and no local gamesaves

Does anyone know if ea or maxxis has commented about this yet? Sim city 5 looks great but the maps are very small and the idea of me needing to be connected to online servers and saving my game to ea servers instead of my harddrive really pushes me away.I have also heard that there will be no mod support for this game and that because its online only that there will be no mods at all..but i am still hoping someone will do it so you can play offline and be able to build larger cities and where you want. I dont understand why maxxis would stop you from building large cities in this game its not even going to be on consoles so it cant be hardware limitations.