Will you be buying Cities XL?

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[City Builder]

Will you be buying Cities XL, and why?

[RhiannOn]

Nope I won't be buying..unless they do a huge u turn.
Though it all started out sounding so promising with the devs asking players what they wanted etc in the game it has turned out to be such a huge disappointment.
There is no transport unless you coff out the money and this to me is a very big turnoff.  What is a city without buses etc even in singleplayer?
The graphics looked great but as i didn't tinker too much with the demo, I couldn't say too much about the gameplay to be critical or not.
Sure didn't get long even to have a play with the demo..very cheapstake AND I had to log into some planet to play ..omg what cr@#p is that?    AND I didn't even have a female avator thingy too choose from 
I'm saving my pennies on this one

[City Builder]

I won't be buying it either unless it makes that u turn as well.  But it needs so much more than just mass transport.  The game still boils down to the same thing that was in City Life, which is simply balancing residents to jobs.  To me this is the ultimate snooze fest.  You build 2 houses, you build a job facility, or you build a commerical building and you build 2 houses.

The city is very dead, it has no real life or growth which is number one in my book for a modern era city building game.  I mean come on what city actually stays the same in a 1st world country and never grows or changes.  Yes there are cars moving around on the streets and there are people walking along, there are even birds flying by, but when I place a house and so many houses just look the same, it provides a dead atmosphere.  Dead cities are fine for games like Caesar IV and for Grand Ages Rome, these are ancient cities that wouldn't change as often as a modern era city.  Modern Era cities in 1st world countries are constantly evolving, changing, and the game doesn't offer the ability to do that.  Sure I can rip out a house and put in a commercial building but so what, that's not evolving, that's not change, that's dullsville.

Even if they had included mass transportation in the game I think I'd have to pass.  I don't think that even mass transport can help this turkey to fly.  Curved roads but no homes or business's that can butt up against those curved roads leaves unsightly gaps everywhere and takes what was a good idea (curved roads) and makes me not want to use them.

All buildings being the same size (in footprint size) is another killer for me.

But the biggest thing is that once you've built a city, it's just more of the same when you start a new city.  There is no real strategy there, you simply build by formula so that you have enough residents to accomodate your workplaces, throw in a school over there, a fire department over here, and a police station somewhere else and you have your city.

Granted that SimCity 4 has outdated graphics, but with all the content available for it, you wouldn't have to use the same school twice in a large city if you didn't want to, and the way that the city grows only by your influence is superb.  I may be working on a section of town on the east side and when I return to the west, now there is a huge skyscraper where there was once Joes chicken shack, that's growth.

Had Monte Cristo been able to include a growth system so that the buildings that are zoned (and I use the term zoned lightly as it's pretty bad currently) actually change over time then the city would feel and look more alive.  Personally, I can't stand seeing all of my housing looking like suburban housing tracts where there are like 3 to 5 models and they simply repeat.  I don't recall how many models there are in the game but there are far too few unfortunately.

I don't suspect that they will make that u turn at any point in time, the way that I figure it, is that they own the server equipment, and when the game supscriptions dry up, they will simply take those servers and use them in thier offices for another purpose.

Theres only one real bit of advise that I can give with regards to Cities XL... Don't buy it on promises, Do buy it on what is there.  MC has made promises and what not else, and not kept them.  They've switched tacts in mid stream to something that the people in our genre didn't want.  If MC makes good and adds content to the game and it improves then buy it if you like what you see.  But I wouldn't trust MC on their promises of content as far as I could spit.

Another one of their big problems is the road system.  You can't upgrade a road, it isn't a feature, instead you have to rip out a road, and the building along side of it to make room for a wider avenue.  What the hell is that about?  And what about those curvey roads?  If you place a curvey road and need to upgrade it, forget about it.  You will never (rarely ever) be able to get the same exact road again, it will be different, buildings wont butt up against it, and it will not look right.  They really just didn't think through the road system at all.  I mean for peanuts sake, you should be able to convert a road into a larger avenue if traffic is too bad, but nope, not in Cities XL.  Their solution... Allow the gamer to turn a road into a one way street.  What kind of bull turd is that?


To demonstrate how dull the game is, people are already asking when to expect more game content.  I think that says a mouthful when people start asking for more content and the game hasn't even been out for more than 10 days or so.

[crowebird]

Uhh.... no
(p.s. Anno 1404 Poll? :P)

[City Builder]

It's still there, just not at the top of the page, it's in the Anno 1404 forum category area.

[Khalan]

No, for all the reasons CB mentioned.

[lynnk]

No I won't be buying it for all of the reasons mentioned already - plus after only two days I could not even force myself to play the demo even though I knew I only had seven days to try it out - I found it quite boring and I could not keep my cities profitable after I hit 1,500 - 1,800 population and I found the game boring and very difficult to grasp with no instructions... eg  I did not know what to do to make people work in the farms after I reached the 1,500 - 1,800 population amount everybody seemed to pack up working in the farms - so I never managed to get any tokens to trade apart from one which I sold very cheaply

[City Builder]

I think the farms are still bugged.  Even after putting down a fertilizer plant they still dont produce properly, atleast they didn't for me.  Lynnk's experience and mine seem to coincide in that after 2 days of the demo I couldn't even be bothered to try it out anymore, it was as lynnk said, boring.

It's all to formulaic for my liking.  I want a natural living breathing city (aka Simcity 4), not some city that is dead, never grows and just dullsville.

In a modern era city building game I expect the city to grow after I have placed it's roots, but Cities XL doesn't have that capabilities.  As was mentioned in another forum, Cities XL is rotten at the core (simulation level) and no matter how many addons they well... addon to it, it will still have a rotten core and that cant be overcome by adding more ontop of what is the base simulation (core).  It really is a shame as I had high hopes that this would be the next great city building game of a modern era.

If they had decided to make mass transportation be their Gems, I could live with that, having to pay a little extra to add rail, bus, and other mass transportation into the game, but the core is impossible to live with.  It feels stale to me after only a couple days.  Even in beta it felt stale to me after the first couple days, but I continued on with it since I agreed to beta test the product.  I sent them my input, the bugs I found, the suggestions I had, and all of it was ignored with a polite "thank you for your contact, we will look into it as soon as possible", and that's as far as it went and the demo rolled out with some of the same bugs that many people encountered in beta.

On top of which it's really not a very polished piece of work, and I think the UI shows that.  I wish I had saved the screenshot of what another user came up with for the UI, just using the basic elements they already had in the game made all the beta testers that saw it flip with joy at what it *might* look like if MC took a users advise.  But they didn't.  They tried to restructure the UI again about 3/4 through beta but it wasn't much better (if any better) than the original UI other than some elements were moved from one spot to another in an attempt to make it more intuitive but it didn't really work in my opinion.

I will actually buy the game but not until I see it for $5.00 on a sale somewhere, just to mess around with it.  For $5.00 if I get 2 hours out of it then that's okay, but at a price of $50.00, forget about it.

The problem with the tokens is that MC has included omnicorp which they had to do to make sure that people can continue to expand thier cities.  However since omnicorp trades at a static pricing point, that means that nobody can sell their tokens at a higher price than omnicorp else people will simply buy from omnicorp, which means the economy of this (what they call) MMO is maintained or artifically restricted by MonteCristo's Omni Corp.  Most MMO's that have any sort of trading have a free market trading economy, and without it, it's all rather dull and flavorless to me.

[Lengo]

Nope. I'm pretty much done with spending money on games. I still play what I have, but not very often. I'm into real-world stuff more now. Yes, my name is Lengo, and I've completed the 12 step program for gaming addiction. 

The games I still play ocassionally are

Stronghold Crusaders
Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 Platinum
Age of Empires II w/ The Conquerors Expansion
Unreal Tournament 2000
1701
Children of the Nile

I have others laying around, and am sorta considering a game of Sid Meier's Civilization IV, but that one takes FOREVER to play. I can't sit long anymore, so I'm as active as can be which isn't very active at all.

I've found something that is good for sitting on my butt. I used to play drums (have had three kits), and I still love music! So a couple of months ago, I put an old mousepad on a book, the put that on a box which sits on top of a ten gallon bucket. It works! I'm gonna get at least one more of these and possibly a foot pedal and bass kick practice pad made by Gibraltar. Drumming is fun, fun, FUN! If I had my way (and a place to play 'em), I'd have a five piece with mini tambales on the left (7 pieces total), then a set of Zildjian Custom K Dark cymbals (a total of 6 cymbals + hi-hats)! Woot! THAT would be fun! But the total price for all this is about $2700, so that isn't gonna happen.

At any rate, music is my passion now. It's the one I've kept coming back to all of my life. Knowing what I know now (at 59 years old), I would have stayed with music and f***ed the rest. You should do what you love, not what makes you the most money.

Here's a sample of the stuff I like to play (turn your sound on 'cause the site has music on it) --

http://norbertgoldberg.com/live/