M.Indie by Joseph Lieberman

Cities XL First Look    (June 29, 2009)

Sign up for the beta or get more information here.

Ever since the dawn of Sim City someone said "Wouldn't it be cool if this were a multiplayer game?" And then Sim City Network Edition was born... and it sucked. There was also a game, The Invisible Hand, which had some cool ideas but also sucked. Then there was Starpeace. Ah, Starpeace. This was from Monte Cristo and Oceanus Communications and was a short lived game, not because it sucked, but because the marketing and business development went so badly that the game tanked under its own myopic planning (They aimed too high and killed themselves with costs and low sell through).

Starpeace, for the record, has risen from the dead on the backs of several player fans that got rights to the code. You can google it and go play it; it's a flawed concept but was so close to greatness.

And now Monte Cristo returns to the scene of the crime. This means one of two things, either they didn't learn their lesson the first time and are hell bent on repeating the same mistakes over again, or they learned from the their last failure at this concept and are now ready to do it right.

Now that I have had a chance to play it, my verdict is leaning towards doing things right. For starters up until this game you have always had to build a city co-operatively (or competitively) with other players. This is conceptually flawed with the sim city concept, as crafting your own city is a balancing act and its very easy to unbalance it yourself. If you throw in people out to get you and you are certain to either make a game that is brutally hard or too forgiving so that you can't really influence things. All of the above mentioned games suffered severely from this, making them either ridiculously prone to griefing (Sim City Net) or so lax that hurting people was just nonsensical (Starpeace). Now in Cities XL you build your OWN city, the other guy builds his OWN city and never the twain shall meet.

So you ask, what the hell makes that an MMO then!? Right now, cities produce goods (called tokens) of various types. Some examples are water, electricity, fuel, tourism, agriculture, high tech products, and so on. You can trade these to other players via roadways or freighters in exchange for other goods or cash. After speaking with the community manager for the US they are said to be honing in on making the game persuade you to specialize your cities. This will, in turn, persuade you to get out and develop trade routes to get your missing resources rather than develop an "island" city.

Another near certain feature seems to be Blueprints. It is unclear how they will be awarded, but when you acquire a blueprint you embark on a very long project to construct a "mega" building. Again, no indication of what a mega building will do, but I am sure it will look good at the very least. These require large amounts of resources to build and at the end of the day will take days or weeks to construct.

What does work and is in place is the city building. It is not without its own problems due to the beta stage, but it looks fantastic and already plays very well. I especially appreciate being able to zoom from sky overhead view, where I spend most of my time when building) to ground level and watch my peasants wander around.

Funniest of all, Cities XL has the ugliest avatar system ever! It comes with a lot of robust feature changing mechanics to create the ultimate you imaginable; so long as the ultimate you imaginable is butt ugly. The features are actually very robust and in theory could look really slick. You can take your avatar, place him in funny spots in your town, or head to another player's town and have a business pow-wow in real time. Mind you, you could also do that from space view via the chat panel, but its interesting that they took time to create such a weird system.

In summary: Cities XL looks fantastic! Right now, its too easy, but they assure me things will get harder for us Sim City aficionados as the game is balanced and retooled for the trade system. Time will tell if they get the magic formula right that would make it a fun single player game and, after that, time will tell further if their trade system and features like Blueprints and global challenges will entice us enough to shell out for ongoing online service. There's also been chatter about forgoing monthly fees in favor of "item shops" like we see prevent in Asian MMOs (And now becoming popular in US MMOs).

We'll touch base again with Cities XL as we near launch and give our near-final verdict.

Sign up for the beta or get more information here.

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By: Joseph Lieberman
Posted: Saturday June 27, 2009