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Cities XL dev. talks about motivation for new MMO direction
Bountytaker
Member Posts: 323
One of the developers from Monte Cristo, working on Cities XL, replied to a recent blog post about virtual worlds (here: http://thehardcoregamer.com/?p=3586). In his response, Philippe discussed the teams motivations and reasons for attempting a city building mmo. Some of his comments were quite interesting, and reflect, IMO, some of the discussions we have about innovation and repetativeness in the genre.
You can check out the blog post, and the response, at the above link...but, for those that don't want to, here's Philippe's response:
Hi HCG Dreadsorrow,
First of all, I want to thank you for this very well written blog entry. I feel very proud seeing such an enthusiasm and I really hope you’ll enjoy what we are working on.
But the purpose of my comment doesn’t just stop here.
I wanted to let you know that you are expressing what we feel about the game industry exactly in these words (are you sure you weren’t in the meeting I had this afternoon with some members of the dev team? :P)
Jokes a part, when we looked at what we could do back in 2006, we had a RPG game called Silverfall which is quite good but what would have been the next game?
Another sequel? na…
A MMORPG based on the Silverfall universe and try to get a percentage of the WOW subscribers?
Not a good idea: why would you try to fight against a game that has already 3 years of content and balanced gameplay?
Moreover, going down this route, you just don’t have to convince players to play your game… But you also have to convince them to stop their previous game!
Look at how many hours MMORPGs are required for you to level up; does it sounds usual to read in your guild forums: “Hey! You weren’t there for yesterday’s PVE instance at 9:00pm?!!!” and you replying “I’m sorry but I had to take care of my childs (replace at your convenience by wife, homework, clients, etc)”…?
You are right about this virtual world question you introduced your blog entry with. When you look at the online game market, you will either see Virtual Worlds (Second Life being the most representative for adults or Habbo for teenagers) or MMOG.
On one hand you’ll have the Social Networking aspects (Chat, Mini games when available) but no many reasons unless your friends to get back and on the other hand a very time consuming, engaging and rewarding online game experience (at least for the good games).
We felt that their could be something in between and CITIES XL is one potential answer.
We develop CITIES XL with our heart and convictions we gathered through time with our experience on management games and recently on City Builder games.
We wanted players to be able to get to the shelves, buy a box for a reasonable price and be able to play for ever with it and not seeing the light switched off after a free (60 US$ retail box is not really free for me) trial of 1 month. That’s why we decided to release a fully featured Single Player experience with CITIES XL.
Then, we also wanted to bring replayability which is very important for a City Builder game and one of the answers to that is to bring players playing together in a persistent planet and we want players to play 3 months of CITIES XL for what you would pay for 1 month subscription of a premium MMORPG.
Not because we want to make some price competition but because we want players to be able to play their game whenever they want, and not being forced to play long sessions in one month for the sake of their monthly expenses…
Moreover, we also wanted to make a real usage of the Web 2.0 tools and principles. Not because they are trendy but because they make sense in a MMO. Being able to share with your friends what you’re doing even when you’re outside of the game is just a natural thing (I personnally do it every day in the studio). Moreover, why wouldn’t you let players have some gameplay even when they are not in front of their home computer: during their lunch break or if you are a traveller like me from any other part of the world just to make sure that everything is ok.
That’s what we intend to do and we feel like it is a new response to what players may be seeking.
Try to bring something new in the industry instead of following the Hollywood Cinema pattern: that’s what we want to do… Only the future and players will tell us if we are right to have faith on it or if the Marketing law of repetitive Franchise sequels is the real answer.
You can check out Cities XL at it's main site, www.citiesxl.com Release is planned for Q2 of this year.
Comments
BTW: Philippe's native language is French...so, some of the "awkwardness" of the post can be chalked up to translation.
Not sure is my cup of tea, sims city building.. what is the fun of it, is there a end game reason to run your city? to higher limits?
To be honest I can't really enjoy city building either. I've played ceaser II..it was fun for awhile. If my city can positively and negatively affect other cities then I would give it a shot.
this is a game about the journey, not the destination. The end game would be to start a different city with a different focus, who knows.
Just don't live life with this mentality, because the end-game content there could involve a bus....
Frank 'Spankybus' Mignone
www.spankybus.com
-3d Artist & Compositor
-Writer
-Professional Amature
Sounds fascinating in a "if this works it could be a hell of a lot of fun" kinda way. My concern is how you can allow these cities to interact meaningfully without opening up all kinds of painfully griefing. From one side there is a serious possibility here for cooperation to generate a real world economy similar to EVE, but without a PVP aspect of blowing the hell out of other people when you get bored of being economically sound. Based on this I guess it is a very niche game, though meriting a look based purely on trying something new and original.
"Horse eating... a fire hydrant... the hell?" - Dan
I agree that the competative aspects are what's going to make, or break, the Planet Offer. We'll have to see how it turns out, but, for now, they do have plans:
In the Planet Offer, your city can both compete against, or work cooperatively with, the other player run cities on the planet, thanks to a few designs:
1) Varied resources. Allowing you to trade, or monopolize, important components that other cities may desire. You can specialize your city as well, making it the water producer or electricity provider for the region, for example.
2) Major projects. Famous landmark buildings will require blueprints, resources, and time to build, meaning you may need help. And, some of those may only be built once on a planet, giving a competative edge to erecting, say, the Eiffel Tower.
3) Regular events. The devs have said they have regular events and contests planned to foster competative play.
4) GEM's. These are mini-tycoon games that you can add on to your city, opening up other levels of play. For example, the car manufacturing GEM will allow you to create and run automobile factories, like, say, Car Tycoon. You'll create a unique product from the GEM, then use it to trade with other cities, or just make more cash. They plan to release with a Ski Resort and a Beach Resort GEM, giving players the opportunity to compete over tourism.
You can check out the main site's forums for more info.