1-Nov-2008 Interview: Monte Cristo has grand designs for the city building genre... Ahead of the release of its second modern city building sim next year, Cities XL developer Monte Cristo has been telling us how it hopes to surpass genre benchmark Sim City 4.
Here the developer's technical director, Patrick Marchal, tells us how Cities XL's multiple online functionalities will revolutionise the genre, about the challenge of making the title both accessible to a wide audience and yet still a deep experience for core gamers, and why the company hasn't thought about taking the game to consoles.
Arguably the city building genre hasn't evolved much since Sim City established the basic rules. What's fresh and innovative about the direction you're taking with Cities XL?
Marchal: The basis follows the genre to generate a believable simulation and a huge set of realistic building and structures, but today's technical progress has a tremendous impact in terms of what we can now deliver from a satellite view to an amazingly detailed, alive street level view.
However you might say that these are just logical evolutions of the genre. The real revolution for the genre comes from Cities XL's online functionalities and services.
Cities XL seems to comprise of three games in one - single player offline city building, mission-based management modes and a persistent world MMO. Can you tell us a little about each of these?
Marchal: I don't much like the expression "three games in one" - I would rather say Cities XL aims to offer a full scope city building simulation both solo and multiplayer.
While you will face classic Sim City style gameplay when playing on your own, the MMO approach (which we call the "Planet" offer) will give you access to a persistent planet with a player-dependent economy.
This opens up completely new possibilities in terms of trading cash and resources, allowing you to specialise each of your cities or to build together what you couldn't achieve on your own. We will provide all the usual features like chat, customisable 3D avatars etc.
What you call a mission-based management game is I believe a reference to what we call GEMs (Gameplay Extension Modules). In fact they aren't mission-based, but fully-featured tycoon-style games that are integrated into the larger city context. Each one adds hours of gameplay in solo mode and allows you ultimately to produce more resources that you can trade online. It is like running a business and competing with others for clients, whether that's from winter tourism, a theme park or from a specialisation in the motor industry.
You're giving gamers a lot of options but it sounds as though it could be a little complicated. How important is it that the game's accessible to a wide audience?
Marchal: We know not only from our previous experience in the genre, City Life, that many city builder and tycoon fans are casual gamers, so it is really important to make the game accessible to a wide audience, all the while providing a deep experience to core gamers. That's why we have opted for a modular system.
The player can basically choose the level of complexity he's willing to take and how deep he wants to micromanage. Take the mass placement tool and you can tag areas a lot yourself or just let them grow organically; take the traffic management and you can define your lanes or just use standard lanes, or stay in the solo mode if you want to learn the tricks of the trade, and just decide to join the planet when you are comfortable enough with the game. We are also strong believers that the community will help newbies in the system, and to be honest we will reward them for that.
Can you tell us a bit about how the game's city building tools differ to others?
Marchal: Freedom for the player is one of the guiding themes in our game development process and the construction toolset is one of the most important aspects for making excellent city building games. Conceiving the best tools possible for our players was therefore one of our biggest challenges.
If you take the mass placement tool, it allows players to define the content of zones through a set of tags. As the tag number is free, players choose the level of control of what is growing in their city. So if you want to have a rich suburb, choose the tags "Rich", "Small Size" and "House". If you want a leisure area, just select "Restaurant" and "Cinema" etc.
The new thing is that these tags will also be, in the long term when the number of buildings will have grown further, of visual nature like "American Style", "Red Coloured". This allows you to have not only a better control of the functions, but also of the look of your cities. As Cities XL is not based on a grid system, there's much more flexibility than in other games of this type and you will be able to adapt both construction zones and roads perfectly to the existing landscape.
The construction toolset for roads, bridges and tunnels is something we are particularly proud of. You can just click and drop bridges, roads and tunnels in any angle - or even without, as you can draw curves - and they will automatically adapt to the terrain.
How much content will be available straight out of the box and what will need to be paid for via subscription fees?
Marchal: Cities XL will come out of the box as a full scope city building game featuring more than 500 different buildings, more than 25 different possible map layouts, an amazing simulation depth, and comprehensive management and construction tools - it will be priced the same as other new released games, which means around £30.
The choice is then up to the player: if you decide to take the experience further, you can subscribe to what we call today the "Planet Offer" - it allows you to create interconnected cities on persistent planets, to trade with other players in a global economy, to specialise your cities and to participate in events and competitions which we will organise.
Furthermore you can create and customise your avatar, visit your friends' cities, communicate online and participate in the community through your blog and social network functionalities - three months of the Planet Offer will cost around £10, less than one month of a premium MMORPG. And for those who want to keep on enriching the game we will offer new content on a pay as you go basis, and a lot of content will also be distributed for free to players.
Is the MMO/city building genre one that could be successfully translated to consoles, and is that a direction you are interested in pursuing?
Marchal: We think that PC is the most adapted platform for this kind of title. A translation to console is really nothing we have particularly looked into, as our aims for Cities XL are already extremely ambitious. An adaption to console would necessarily be extremely complex. It would require a very different game design and gameplay, less complexity, adapted controls. It's really not on top of our list.
What kind of review scores and sales are you hoping for with the new game, and which of these is more important?
Marchal: We are striving to create a massive entertainment experience for city builder and tycoon fans and our biggest hope is that gamers will really enjoy the experience, participate with life on the planet and pass the word of mouth to others. If we can achieve this, both sales and review scores should normally follow.
So let's say even though an outstanding review score would be soothing for our souls, the activity on the planet and the sales of the game will be better units of measurement.
