Gameplay vs Cities XL and SimCity

[Ethion]

I have played both Cities XL and SimCity and found both games to be disappointing. On the whole I found SimCity 2013 to be a lot more entertaining than Cities XL. The main reason was that SimCity was a game where you had to guide the development of a city.

Cities XL was a really lightweight game and mostly just a city builder. It was very mechanical in that you did everything directly and it told you what was wrong and you just fixed it. The cities could look great but they didn't really seem alive.

SimCities the cities were much more alive, brighter and more dynamic feeling. However in SimCity the cities were small and the game had numerous game killing bugs....

Wo do we know anything about Cities XXL? Is it going to be just an updated Cities XL with perhaps better graphics or will it have more game play similar to SimCity?

I'm seen information on Cities: Skylines which looks like it is much closer to SimCity?

Does anyone know? I can't find any information on Cities XXL and I'm really thinking about canceling my preorder.

[Wilsonatron]

i dont think cities XXL will be all that diffrent from Cities XL, but i think the main feature is it has multi core support. (why on earth the originals dont is beyond me they certainly came out in the time we had multi core hardware)

anyways this will allow you to build much larger cities without lag, as long you have a decent computer

as for other new features an gameplay elements. i cant say. but i am sold on the fact that it simply improves performance. XL lagged too much after a certaIn size an i have a monster of a machine. i be glad the game can use full use of my hardware this time

[City Builder]

Don't hold your breath on the game play changing, it won't. What I mean by that is that unlike SC4 and even SC13, CXL is a static game, it's a plop game. You plop a zone and it stays that until you tare it down and build some other type of zone, where as the SC games were meant to try to simulate the city evolving.

CXL was never really meant to try to simulate your city evolving and so they don't.

CXXL (just in my opinion since I'm writing this prior to owning it, if I ever buy it at all, I'm still undecided) will be more of the same, they've not touted that they've changed the engine so drastically that it's no longer a static type of city building game but now a evolving type of simulation and I firmly believe that if they did that, their marketing department would be screaming it from the highest roof tops as that would be a huge selling point to many players of the CB genre.

So.... I think it's fairly safe to assume that other than a few tweaks, we'll be seeing CXXL to be basically the same as was CXL other than the small additions that they DO say has been added/included into CXXL. Anything beyond what they've written on the official page we can safely assume is only people dreaming of a better game.

And the thing is that there are players that prefer the more static approach that CXL took as there are those that prefer the more natural evolution that the Simcity games took. Personally, I despise the more static CB games although I'll play them, but I would have so much more preferred if Montecristo had originally written the game as an evolving city builder instead of what they did with "City Life" which I believe is where they started the whole static game play choices.

[The doctor is in]

i do not think change will really change all that much

its more about improving the game by doing minor changes to it that people have long have asked for like better multicore support, improved ui, steam workshop support, additional content, but fixes, ect...

[Ethion]

Thanks, I've decided to cancel my preorder and wait till the game is out. I bought cities xl since it gave me a big discount but I don't think I want to go forward with cities xxl until I get more information.

[spacecoasttoast]

Someone didn't play SimcIty 2013 long enough to experience the game busting bugs. And one of them still exsists that's pretty bad. The ability to make a city instead of a town. Room and city size was the chief complaint of SC2013 along with offline play. Offline is fixed but not city sizes they said the game engine just won't support it - period. And OP you apparantly didn't expereience the other game breaking bugs with the garbage and the population size issues. MAybe they are all fixed today with the exception of the city size which is pathetic. But, after a year of coming back to it off and on OP the game is entertaining until it breaks then you want to pull your hair as you are forced to start over. I will not invest any more time in SC2013 and the last time I played it was last summer. I did get Deadspace 3 for free , however, as EA did give us that for the issues with the game. In otherwords were sorry we released a game out of a beta and didn't fix it even though peoiple told us about it.

[The doctor is in]

actually simcity 2013 was broken on purpose of making it fun for casual players

so they ripped out the engine they were working on and replace it with basicallly fudging to fake it.

the current engine they use wont scale very much cause like this game all the game logic is handled by a single thread using a very slow interpreter scripting language.

so both games sort of suffer the same thing. the only big difference is simcity 2013 hides it by putting limits like on size of map and fudging and this game does not so the limits show.

if this game did the same things simcity 2013 does they could easily handle much larger cities, well faked cities with fudged numbers for simcity 2013

[Ethion]

Originally posted by lakesideguy:

Someone didn't play SimcIty 2013 long enough to experience the game busting bugs. And one of them still exsists that's pretty bad. The ability to make a city instead of a town. Room and city size was the chief complaint of SC2013 along with offline play. Offline is fixed but not city sizes they said the game engine just won't support it - period. And OP you apparantly didn't expereience the other game breaking bugs with the garbage and the population size issues. MAybe they are all fixed today with the exception of the city size which is pathetic. But, after a year of coming back to it off and on OP the game is entertaining until it breaks then you want to pull your hair as you are forced to start over. I will not invest any more time in SC2013 and the last time I played it was last summer. I did get Deadspace 3 for free , however, as EA did give us that for the issues with the game. In otherwords were sorry we released a game out of a beta and didn't fix it even though peoiple told us about it.

I think the first comments I made about simcity point out that it has game killing bugs. The point I was trying to make is that setting aside the bugs the SimCity game concept is much more fun than Cities XL. This isn't to say that you can just ignore the bugs, as I said they are game killing and as much as I'd like to enjoy it after several times starting over I'd come back to even more bugs.

So NO while simcity is a better game in terms of design it is hopelessly flawed due to critical bugs.

If SimCity worked without bugs it would absolutely be the best game by far even in spite of the small size. I'm not even sure the small size is that big an issue when you can have an area with a number of cities and the multiplayer aspect is interesting as well.

As it is in my opinion both SimCity and Cities XL are not worth buying. If Cities: Skylines is like SimCity but without the bugs that alone would make it an amazing game. Add some new features and it will set the new standard.

[rovaira2]

I enjoyed Simcity, and will probably like Skylines. This one is kind of a flip of the coin as far as excitement goes.. I didn't think the last version was much fun to play (the one I had was 2012). There is no manufacturing chain like in Simcity.. Example: Simcity - you have oil, you build an oil well, you then can build a buidling to manufacture plastic, then combine the plastic with another resource, etc.. The manufacturing/selling side of the game is fun in Simcity..

In addition in Simcity you watch as the city develops. You don't just plop a building/zone down.. it develops over time.

The lack of both of these features makes the fun factor down in the Cities X... games imo. Larger cities are nice, but I never could play it long enough to make them. I'm hoping the 'fun' element is improved in this version, but it may not be to much avail.. The screenshots/preview looks ok-good, but nothing jumps out at me like this is a must have. I still will buy, but I don't see this being all that exciting.

[TheMajorJR]

I like to see the Gameplay of this Game

[Erufailon]

Originally posted by lakesideguy:

Someone didn't play SimcIty 2013 long enough to experience the game busting bugs. And one of them still exsists that's pretty bad. The ability to make a city instead of a town. Room and city size was the chief complaint of SC2013 along with offline play.

I wish it was even possible to build a town, but 2x2kms is only a few streets, hardly enough for a small village.

[City Builder]

Originally posted by Erufailon:

Originally posted by lakesideguy:

Someone didn't play SimcIty 2013 long enough to experience the game busting bugs. And one of them still exsists that's pretty bad. The ability to make a city instead of a town. Room and city size was the chief complaint of SC2013 along with offline play.

I wish it was even possible to build a town, but 2x2kms is only a few streets, hardly enough for a small village.

The small size in sc13 was a major pitfall for me. I can't remember the exact number anymore since it's been a while since I played 13, but I think it was something like 13 or so streets /roads/blvds that you could have on a map which isn't even a town.

I tried my best to get over that but never really could. I tried to trick my brain into thinking that there's really a huge city out there and I was only seeing a little slice of it but that wasn't enough to keep me interested in playing it anymore.

[Ethion]

Originally posted by City Builder:

Originally posted by Erufailon:

I wish it was even possible to build a town, but 2x2kms is only a few streets, hardly enough for a small village.

The small size in sc13 was a major pitfall for me. I can't remember the exact number anymore since it's been a while since I played 13, but I think it was something like 13 or so streets /roads/blvds that you could have on a map which isn't even a town.

I tried my best to get over that but never really could. I tried to trick my brain into thinking that there's really a huge city out there and I was only seeing a little slice of it but that wasn't enough to keep me interested in playing it anymore.

Yeah I think that's about right. You really only built your cities with less roads. However you still have a lot of fun with the development and can make some pretty cool cities where you have to balance a lot of changing charactistics. You also have a larger area with maybe 7-8 similar city area's and they can all work together. I had a mining city, a manufacturing city, a tourist city, a services city, etc and they all supported each other. Could have been a lot more fun without city busting bugs :(

Size is nice but isn't everything. Cities XL can make large cities but the game play isn't there. In SimCity the city grows itself with your direction and it has a lot more character and game play. Thats my biggest issue with cities xl. After playing simcity it really felt lifeless and boring.... Really I need to replace all the areas of my city based on unlocking new buildings?!

[Ethion]

Do you think that Anno 2070 or Banished might be good alternatives to SimCity since I really didn't like Cities XL? Anyone think I'd like that based on the context of my previous comments? Or am I gonna be waiting for the new version of simcity, you know the new one that's coming without bugs? Haha... Maybe Hell will freeze over and it will come out.

[City Builder]

I agree. Size is not everything and if the game play of CXXL hasn't changed (and many of us are assuming that it won't change drastically) then we'll still have a plop city building game which is fine for those that enjoy designing their cities and not having them change on them but for me that just doesn't work. I can play such games but they rarely hold my attention since I know it's pretty much not going to change unless I somehow change it myself, I kind of like to guide my cities and let them grow and then when I find something unexpected happening, it becomes a thrill to see and try to correct (if possible).

[City Builder]

Honestly, I thought that Banished is an excellent game but there are some that downright hate it saying that it's either "to easy" or "too hard" or too limited in size / scope etc. But with the Colonial mod (in the Banished workshop) it really fleshes out Banished a hell of a lot.

Anno 2070.... Hmm, I love the Anno games and always have but something inside of me tells me it's less of a city building game in the traditional sense and more of a RTS sort of CB game. I still love them but when I think of city building games, the Anno series is not usually at the forefront of my mind, although as said, I do really love to play them in the past.

If you haven't yet played any, try looking up some of the roman city building style games, there mostly old now but they were a lot of fun in their time, or try the Children of the Nile game (not the online version but the real game) as I would consider it to be one of the best CB style games for it's time.