Cities XL launch day roundup

by Shawn Schuster Oct 8th 2009 at 3:00PM

Filed under: At a glance, Launches, New titles, Cities XL

Today is the European launch of Cities XL, while tomorrow is the North American launch of the game. We've enjoyed playing the game throughout beta, and have given some hefty coverage along the way. Check out our best Cities XL posts and articles below, preparing you for getting started easily.

	Massively hands-on with Cities XL As the Cities XL closed beta continues to run strong, we got word that the beta's NDA has lifted [Edit: for press] and we can spill the beans on our first impressions of the game so far. Now, two very important points to be made here include the fact that this is not a review (MMO reviews are bad, mmkay), and this is still in early closed beta stage.
	E3 2009: A chat with Cities XL's Alexandre Zambeaux Last week at E3, we had a chance to sit down with Alexandre Zambeaux, Marketing Director for Cities XL developer Monte Cristo Games, for some more info on the current state of the game, and what MMO gamers can expect from such a project. You may remember a pre-beta Q&A we did with the Monte Cristo team a few months ago, and as the game hasn't hit an open beta just yet, it will later this year.
	Cities XL closed beta Q&A Monte Cristo was founded in 1995, and has mostly been very focused on simulation games. In recent years we have shifted our efforts to the city builder genre, especially with our latest game City Life. We currently employ over 80 people in two studios in Paris and Kiev, and we have been increasing in size a lot (and still are) for Cities XL.
	Cities XL Limited Edition box contents revealed Monte Cristo and Namco-Bandai have recently announced the contents of their Limited Edition box for the upcoming city-builder MMO, Cities XL. These Limited Edition boxes, as well as the Standard Edition boxes, are available in Europe on October 8th.

Cities XL trailer offers glimpse of empires to build
As the days of fall tick by, many people who just can't wait to get their massive city-building sim on are looking for more details on Monte Cristo's upcoming game, Cities XL. This ambitious project will offer players the ability to build their very own detailed cities (or slap together cities, if you're more interested in seeing what kind of havoc you can wreak by doing it wrong on purpose) and attract residents. With a variety of tools and some interesting twists, this title is raising the bar by adding MMO elements and making city building on persistent worlds an option.

Cities XL releases new trailer in preparation for demo
The Monte Cristo team has just released a new sample video depicting some of the major choices you can make in their city-building MMO, set to release on October 8th (EU) and 9th (US). This trailer is out now to prepare us for the new demo version of the game. While the German and French versions have released this week, the English version will release on September 8th.

Tags: cities-xl, city-builder, launch-day, monte-cristo, round-up

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

wjc9191438 said on 3:07PM 10-08-2009

Good, now that the NDA is lifted we can tell the world how big a piece of trash this game is.

SicJake said on 5:25PM 10-08-2009

It made me go back and install Sim City 4 :p

I played during the summer beta for a few weeks, so I'm sure my issues from the game would of changed by now. Trade is the main thing that killed it for me. I was cursed with a city type that had water as it's resource, during beta nobody wanted water, ever. lol everyone wanted fuel, and fuel went for insane amounts. All I could manage was either a town of middle class factory workers, or farmville usa, with fields of wheat as far as you could see. Agriculture was a pretty good trade item, but one single unit of fuel was still absurd. Without fuel I couldn't move up with better industry, without better industry I couldn't attract the better people etc etc

I like how zones for buildings are built, took some time to get used to diagonals, but cool, I didn't like how there were so few things to building. Seems like everything was a gimmick item with no real value or affect in game.

It's a decent idea, I'd never pay monthly for it, but I'd certainly buy a box. I like the trading and econ ideas they have, but again I just wouldn't pay monthly for this.

I'm sure the econ thing was fixed, and the game is certainly worth a demo try to see if it's for you, this one is just not for me.

Evi said on 5:53PM 10-08-2009

I'm looking forward to seeing what people think of the release version. I was in the beta. My impression was not favorable. The idea is great, the execution... not so good.

Scarecrowe said on 6:31PM 10-08-2009

Thanks for your opinions -- my wife was considering this. I'll point her here.

ahac said on 5:59AM 10-09-2009

I was in the beta too.

Before the beta I was really excited from what I've seen and read.
The way I understood building was something between Sim city and plotting buildings. They said you will choose what style of buildings you want in each zone, etc. It is nothing like I expected.
You have low, medium and high density buildings for poor and rich people. The core of the game if juggling with different classed (workers, managers, etc.) which each have their own needs (which is just not much fun for me). Don't have enough executives because you don't have enough services for them? Sorry, your industry will not run. So most of the time you need to check what caste you need and build housing and industry to balance that.
Once you build a part of town for workers, there is no way it will change unless you pull down every house and rebuild it for rich people.
The city just doesn't live like it does in Sim City. Everything you build here will stay that way until you decide to change it.

Every house is also the same size which is kinda lame (but makes it easy to replace them).

Then there are roads. The way you build them is great. There is no grid, you can make curves, etc...
But then you build part of the city and realize you need to upgrade the road to an avenue (the traffic gets really bad really fast). The problem is that you can't upgrade (at least in the beta). You need to destroy the old road and (since you need more space for the avenue) you also need to destroy all the houses on one side. But all the houses are the same size so you can't really put anything useful in the new space.

There was also no public transport. I would expect buses, trains, subway, etc.. None of that was in the beta (and I've heard there are still no trains in release version).

I'll might the demo just to see if they changed anything since I quit the beta but Cities XL is really not what I hoped it would be.

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