It has been several years now since the debut of city builder games SimCity 4 (by Electronic Arts/Maxis) and City Life (by Monte Cristo). This month, Electronic Arts announced that it was working on the next SimCity. Then, something unexpected popped up: Philippe Da Silva posted a screenshot of Cities Unlimited on his personal blog, From Will to Real. We, along with the rest of the community, were excited about the look of the new game. Hungry for more information, we got in touch with Philippe to ask a few questions. Because Cities Unlimited is so early in development, he understandably couldn’t respond to all the questions we had, but here are the ones he could answer.

Q: We know you’re just about as excited about this game as we are, so we want to thank you for answering our questions!

A: It is my pleasure, thanks for the invite.

What is the origin of Monte Cristo as the name of the company?

The company is a French based company created in 1995. The name comes mainly from the fact that founders liked the story of “The Count of Monte Cristo” novel by Alexandre Dumas and maybe, they confess, a bit by lack of imagination.

The game under development now will seek to capture some of the market previously enjoyed by the SimCity franchise. In what ways will this product appeal to players of that popular game?

To be honest we are only following our own path. We didn’t want to do a metoo product with City Life and we will not start doing so now.

You know, our teams just made their job by listening to how players felt with our games, analyzing the motivation of communities like yours and then factoring some of the input back into the pipeline of our next project…

I think we identified the areas we need to dig to comply with what city builder fans are looking for the “Next Generation City Builder”:
Graphical and economical realism,
Transport,
Variety through building numbers

Even if SimCity placed the foundations of what a City Builder game is, there is still a lot of space for improvement and innovation. SimCity 4 was released in 2003 and since then technologies made a significant step allowing brand new game related possibilities.

Building repetition was a bit of an issue in City Life. How will you change the system this time around to get rid of that problem?

The difficulty here for a game development studio in producing enough assets for such games is that it requires time and artists.
To avoid getting into the mentioned issue, we will commit far more resources before and after the release of Cities Unlimited to guarantee a huge variety of content.

In addition we have some secret cards in our sleeves that we can’t talk about yet.

The landscape a city is built on can be one of its defining characteristics. Will Cities Unlimited allow players to create their own custom terrains, or have pre-made/computer generated landscapes, or both?

I can’t answer this question at that point in time because we are too far from release. However, what is sure is that we will release with a number and variety of maps never seen before in the genre.

I actually just flew by some of them just before answering your questions and I can tell you these maps are awesome on their realism. ^^
I can’t wait this fall to share the first screenshots with you.

Here are the only two screenshots we have of Cities Unlimited so far; they’re from Philippe’s blog, From Will to Real, and an earlier Simtropolis interview.