Early March I visited Monte Cristo in Paris to see how CitiesXL is shaping up and to give them feedback about the game. They allowed and even asked me to write about my experience. My apologies that it took so long to start writing, I’ve been very busy the past two weeks and caught a cold a couple of days ago. This is the first post about my visit and more will follow. Questions can be asked in the comments, forums, by PM or by mail to gil[at]simphoni[dot]net.

I arrived after a couple of hours by train at 10:30 am. After a short walk and subway ride to the Monte Cristo offices in the center of Paris, Philippe da Silva gave me a tour. The building is quite old, and very very Parisian. The office space resembles a maze of large lofts with a lot of desks and large computer screens. The walls are covered with large CitiesXL screenshots printed on canvas. After the tour Philippe gave a presentation about the game, and then it was time to try the single player mode.

I was very impressed by the size and ambition of the whole project and by the current look of it. It looks like Monte Cristo is pulling off something that no other developer has done before. CitiesXL will be really XL. With CitiesXL, Monte Cristo is creating a platform to build on in the future. CitiesXL is a large and long termed plan that involves a lot of online gameplay, extension modules of different sizes, formats, gamestyles, a costing plan for the so-called GEMs, and of course a very good looking and nice city builder, creator and simulation.

I’ll kick off this series of posts about CitiesXL with the citybuilder part, the core of the game.

I played a while with the (alpha version of the) single player citybuilder. The first thing you notice is the 3D engine, you can move around as much as you like. The graphics are very good, trees look nice, water looks realistic enough; in short the landscape is great. When you start a city you first need to build a city hall, this is the governmental center of your city. When building things you don’t have to build them along a grid, because there isn’t any. Instead you can build roads in any direction you want, including curved. This makes it possible to create realistic looking small villages, European looking city centers etc. Curved roads bring another dimension to the look your creations. After you’ve built your cityhall, you zone some residential areas, either by placing them lot by lot (like in City Life) or using one of the two mass placement tools. One of them creates 6×2 lot rectangles surrounded by roads, the other one lets you click and draw as much corner points as you like and fills this area with roads and lots. Residential comes in 4 different wealth levels with 4 size settings.You can also place zones with mixed wealth levels. Now that your citizens can live somewhere they also need a place to work. You can build factories, offices, retail, hotels, farms, and leisure facilities. Factories produce things, offices are needed to manage that process and retail sells end products to your citizens and tourists. Your citizens will even demand to be able to shop nearby. Lower classes aren’t as demanding as the rich people about this though. If you don’t like zoning you can also select specific buildings and plop them; you’ll be able to do that with all unlocked buildings.

The interface is familiar, with on the left of the screen the menus with different things you can build, in the bottom left corner a map etc. But there are new things as well. On the right of the screen are quick links to different information views like traffic, shopping, happiness, etc. At the top of the screen are even more buttons, which lead you to detailed information panels about your income, stats about your citizens, production buildings and tokenproduction (I’ll write about that in a later blog). A great addition to this part of the GUI is that MC implemented both buttons for detailed and simple statistics. In the simple mode there is a red-orange-green indicatorfor every wealth level and industry type; red is unhappy, green is happy. When you hover over the indicator a list appears with the problems that type of industry or class of workers is having. This gives you an easy overview of the problems in the city.

I had quite a lot of fun playing with the city builder, even with this as yet totally unbalanced and therefore unchallenging version of the game.
(Note that I am still awaiting some screenshots from dasilva to accompany these articles, so stay tuned for those)