Vapourware Scam in progress - Cities XXL

[LESS T_T]

THE NEXT CHAPTER IN THE CITIES XL FRANCHISE REVEALED IN THE CITIES XXL REVEAL TRAILER
The world's largest city builder is back!

The Cities XL franchise returns with Cities XXL: a bigger, better city builder pushing the city limits to the edge of your imagination, as seen in the stunning world reveal trailer. Running on a vastly improved game engine, Cities XXL offers classic and extended city-building content, including over 1000+ buildings, 70+ maps including new landscapes and environments, and ecological features making CitiesXXL the ‘greenest’ Cities XL game yet.

Discover in the first Cities XXL video the sprawling cityscapes and city-life in action, to get a sense of the scale and grandeur of the game:



As you’ll see in the video, CitiesXXL lets you design and build a sprawling metropolis across many different landscapes and maps, with varying available resources – from oil to fertile farm land – to keep the denizens of your city content. Featuring four classes of citizens spanning four densities of housing, you’ll watch as your cosmopolitan paradise grows from a quiet suburban town to huge economic powerhouse.

With varying road-sizes, including curved roads, bridges, and tunnels unlocked from the start, you'll be able to plan the entrance to your city and its layout before you start plotting its city-scape. As it grows, take advantage of a unique richly detailed street-level view, and meet the citizens as they drive to work, ski, play basketball, or even parachute of the top of towers in unprecedented detail for the genre.

Cities XXL features low-level city management mechanics, such as local air and noise pollution levels illustrated with the new stream-lined UI, and beauty hot-spots suitable for holiday locations to supplement cash-flow.

At citizen management level, you'll be able to track a person's route to work in order to best manage transport from sea, underground and over-ground rail, or air. Cut-down on traffic queues with the park and ride and busses, or even bike hire - reducing that carbon footprint!

Now with Steam Workshop support and streamlined modding, it has never been easier and quicker to share and download user-created content for a Cities XL game. With Cities XXL, you’ll be able to use widely available free tools online to create your content and upload it to the Steam Workshop, for all players to download it right through Steam!

To find out why Cities XXL helps you to build a bigger, better world, see the feature break-down below:
- Over 70 huge maps across multiple terrains and landscapes, from the tropics to the mountains and all in between.
- Region specific roads to match your country: French, English, German, etc.
- Over 1000 buildings, many with civilian activity animations to enjoy at street level
- Greener options for the environment conscious, such as the park and ride, bike hire, and ability to upgrade industrial buildings to reduce emissions
- Unprecedented detail for the city builder genre, with multiple sky-boxes to choose from and a dynamic time-of-day
- Steam Workshop support to easily create, share and download new content

Estimated release date is Q1 2015, close to the release of Paradox/Colossal Order's Cities: Skylines.

 

[Norfleet]

Remind me again, what happened to "Cities XL", and why does it seem to have been so utterly forgettable that we never mentioned it again? It was shit, wasn't it? This'll be shit, too. If they ever bother to actually make it instead of wasting their time on rigged demos.

 

[Whiran]

Remind me again, what happened to "Cities XL", and why does it seem to have been so utterly forgettable that we never mentioned it again? It was shit, wasn't it? This'll be shit, too. If they ever bother to actually make it instead of wasting their time on rigged demos.

I believe it had "performance issues" so most people who got it didn't play it for long. As such, it didn't leave much of an impression other than it being meh and forgotten.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

Remind me again, what happened to "Cities XL", and why does it seem to have been so utterly forgettable that we never mentioned it again? It was shit, wasn't it? This'll be shit, too. If they ever bother to actually make it instead of wasting their time on rigged demos.

it was built on a bit less mmo-like mechanics than shitcity.
and it sucked sooooooo baaaaaaaad because of it.

 

[Angthoron]

Problem with the Cities XL series was largely because it started as an MMO, and once it was taken over by a different team, they didn't really change it enough to become properly single-player.

It's definitely not a shit game though, in fact, once you get past all the clunkyness (usually with a couple of cheaty mods), it's a very enjoyable game. The problem is that when they lumped everything into singleplayer, they basically made the player have to take care of every aspect, like, say, taking an MMO raid and instead of each player managing their role, have one person take over for 40 people. And there's some engine issues that haven't been fixed in the last 2 iterations. If XXL fixes the two aforementioned items (and replace the mind-blowingly bland music with something composed by a human being), it'll be a pretty fun game.

Hell, I still remember my Multi-Headed-Dickia (yay curved roads, yay freeform zoning) night lights with fondness.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Problem with the Cities XL series was largely because it started as an MMO, and once it was taken over by a different team, they didn't really change it enough to become properly single-player.

It's definitely not a shit game though, in fact, once you get past all the clunkyness (usually with a couple of cheaty mods), it's a very enjoyable game. The problem is that when they lumped everything into singleplayer, they basically made the player have to take care of every aspect, like, say, taking an MMO raid and instead of each player managing their role, have one person take over for 40 people. And there's some engine issues that haven't been fixed in the last 2 iterations. If XXL fixes the two aforementioned items (and replace the mind-blowingly bland music with something composed by a human being), it'll be a pretty fun game.

Hell, I still remember my Multi-Headed-Dickia (yay curved roads, yay freeform zoning) night lights with fondness.

Yes, it was annoying that you couldn't really specialize / focus on one city. For tokens you had to create lots of single purpose pseudo cities you didn't care about. But the game itself was ok, and there are plenty of mods which made it better.

 

[Angthoron]

Problem with the Cities XL series was largely because it started as an MMO, and once it was taken over by a different team, they didn't really change it enough to become properly single-player.

It's definitely not a shit game though, in fact, once you get past all the clunkyness (usually with a couple of cheaty mods), it's a very enjoyable game. The problem is that when they lumped everything into singleplayer, they basically made the player have to take care of every aspect, like, say, taking an MMO raid and instead of each player managing their role, have one person take over for 40 people. And there's some engine issues that haven't been fixed in the last 2 iterations. If XXL fixes the two aforementioned items (and replace the mind-blowingly bland music with something composed by a human being), it'll be a pretty fun game.

Hell, I still remember my Multi-Headed-Dickia (yay curved roads, yay freeform zoning) night lights with fondness.

Yes, it was annoying that you couldn't really specialize / focus on one city. For tokens you had to create lots of single purpose pseudo cities you didn't care about. But the game itself was ok, and there are plenty of mods which made it better.

There were a few mods that supplied infinite tokens. Unfortunately most of them were bundled, so if you wanted infinite food, it'd also give you infinite industry and infinite IT and then your city was full of unemployed Residential, big whoop. They should just rework the whole dependency system, that'd instantly make the game pretty close to great. Plus maybe add a bit of fluff like Sim City series had - newspaper, councillor "personalities", semi-fake news ticker, that sort of shit. I know it's of no interest to people interested in a sim, but it'd open the series to the casuals, so, better budgets etc, while at the same time there'd be no need to dumb down the core formula.

 

[Burning Bridges]

I always had Cities XL on my to play list, but it got mixed reviews.

That's an uninteresting video by the way. Is there anything that shows the game and does not look like a TV commercial?

 

[Norfleet]

It's hard for there to be a video that shows the game when the game does not actually exist, unless you believe in time travel.

 

[Burning Bridges]

The game does not exist? Now I am confused.

 

[Angthoron]

I always had Cities XL on my to play list, but it got mixed reviews.

That's an uninteresting video by the way. Is there anything that shows the game and does not look like a TV commercial?

Ah yes, this is another thing. All of the Cities series videos are utterly uninformative and insanely boring. I guess those early 2000s video editors did find jobs after all. Oh yeah! A fly-by of the city! Shots of traffic! Exciting dubstep busssssssssss fuck yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Think your best bet would be to look up an LP or a video guide for the game and mechanics on youtube, that's what I eventually did, anyway. Remember to keep the finger on the "mute" button though, there's a 90% chance you'll want to eviscerate the random player narrating the experience.

 

[LESS T_T]

Wow, they've made yet another rehash, and sold it like a new one?: http://www.incgamers.com/2015/02/cities-xxl-players-very-unhappy-with-new-focus-release

...

What looks to have happened, and we’ll vouch for this as we’re in the middle of our review, is that Focus has effectively re-released Cities XL Platinum and added the multi-core and Steam Workshop support. Beyond that, not much has changed with the game.

This has caused gamers who jumped in early, expecting a few more improvements and additions to the game, to become rather annoyed with Focus. The Steam discussion hub exploded on release yesterday, with some gamers gloating over the fact they didn’t buy in with a pre-order while others professed faith that this Cities XL would finally be the Cities XL game the original should have been. Some players said they “dodged a bullet” after a few Youtube videos appeared prior to the game launching on Steam.

The new game costs £29.99 and anyone who owned the previous releases would receive a 50% discount. While a discount is always great, the only major changes are Steam Workshop support and multi-core support. These are two features that could arguably have been patched in for Cities XL at no cost (engine-permitting, in the case of multi-core support.)

It’s also debatable whether performance has massively improved because we’ve experience jerky play and huge pauses while the game thinks about the player’s action. We’re still experimenting for the review but dragging lengthy roads really causes FPS issues.

While we continue with the review, we wanted to post this now as a warning to anyone who already owns City XL, because this new version is not really worth your time. Expect our full thoughts on Cities XXL shortly.

 

[Havoc]

 

[Mr. Pink]

The lack of railroads in city building sims lately makes me want to cry. It's like as if these games are designed by Americans who have never rode a passenger train in their lives.

At least the Synekism guy promised railroads.

 

[Angthoron]

Well, this is just fucking disgraceful.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/2uxr49/a_warning_to_all_people_thinking_of_buying_cities/

Well of course its a scam. Its been 6 years and they have sold the same game 4 times now.

The original devs (monte Cristo of "City Life" fame) went bankrupt and left Focus Home Interactive with nothing to really work with.

All Focus did was unlock unfinished on-disc DLC that Monte Cristo was harping on about during Cities XL's beta to give people the ILLUSION of them working on it. The unfinished DLC buildings they unlocked was mostly tied to the GEM mechanics, a planned mechanic of "building" resorts, etc EXACTLY like Simcity 2013's expansion system but meant to be used by online visitors in a third person street view.

Monte Cristo wanted to put in microtransactions out the ass on top of a subscription fee. What Focus did here is worse than what Monte Cristo was gonna do to it. I didn't even think that was possible.

Hell, Monte Cristo rushed their crappy MMO and laughed in the face of their beta testers. When the servers went haywire, Monte Cristo was posting pictures of a fancy party. Which meant the gamers were high and dry while everyone at the company was getting drunk. Somehow Focus manages to be worse than that.

Cities XL has been the longest running scam on steam since the very first release, yet people still find excuses to not blame Focus for its scams because "there are no other city builders out there."

Then again, the steam forums are full of day 0 shill accounts calling people who are angry with it paid shills from EA. Focus is really scrapping the bottom of the barrel here. Often times only owning a single game, Cities XXL.

EDIT: THE DEVS ARE NOW LOCKING THREADS NOW THAT PEOPLE ARE NOTICING SHILLS AND ASKING FOR REFUNDS.

http://steamcommunity.com/app/313010/discussions/0/612823460255879366/#p3

Page 1:https://archive.today/COXuN Page 2:https://archive.today/eYd2t Page 3:https://archive.today/xiVmY

I think its officially time for a petition to kick this developer off steam. This kind of scam is unacceptable. Hell, they have developers trying to pose as regular users yet were dumb enough to have an open group called "FHI_Beta" on steam with everyone on there having 75 hour play times on cities XXL. It hasn't even been out for 24 hours yet.

I mean, look at this travesty:https://archive.today/pP21o

EDIT 2: They are now backpedaling by removing any mention of multi core support to try to side step getting slapped with false advertising. They are wiping the description.

Not only that, BUT THEY TOOK DOWN THE PROMISE OF SMOOTH FPS. Focus is really digging its own hole. This is Ubisoft level steam shoveling here.

Check it: https://archive.today/fb1Zd https://archive.today/Ui2if

EDIT 3: The devs are aware of this reddit thread. Prepare to get brigaded, which I am 70% sure they have been doing to /r/ gaming. Anything relating to the problems this game has ended up being downvoted into oblivion in a matter of minutes with all other awful new posts there untouched.

https://archive.today/PaF6d

UPDATE: The thread has been deleted off their steam forum.

They have been trying to chip away at this post's top spot every few seconds. I know this because every 30 seconds to a minute or so i get a wave of downvotes. It is always a wave, never 1. Luckily, reddit ain't having that shit and keeping this high up. Thanks, guys!

EDIT 4: Holy shit, reddit gold! THANK YOU!

 

[Multiple Sarcasm]

@ pre-ordertards

 

[Lyric Suite]

It would have probably took less effort to put some actual work into the game rather than try to run this scam.

 

[Astral Rag]

So many shitty plants

Spoiler

 

[JohnTheRevelator]

Not exactly surprising considering it's Focus Home Interactive. Their whole business model is about trying to sell you same game several times. This, Bloodbowl, Wargame, Farming Simulator etc.

 

[commie]

Not exactly surprising considering it's Focus Home Interactive. Their whole business model is about trying to sell you same game several times. This, Bloodbowl, Wargame, Farming Simulator etc.

Not to seem a defender of FHI, but how is that different from EA/Activision/Ubisoft etc?
Beamturd made it an artform to sell old games with free mods...

And FHI actually hardly has a gigantic portfolio to work with so who really gives a shit? A few more months and they'll go the way of Jewood...

 

[Astral Rag]

 

[Angthoron]

Yeah, that other video, where dude's FPS fell to 1 when he zoned a just a couple of Residentials, I never had it that bad in XL, and my PC is nowhere in the same ballpark. It did drop, of course, but nowhere that bad.

Man, they dun fucked up.

 

[felipepepe]

The worst part is that the first Cities XL was a good game. Had a lot of limitations, but for a first title was ok. And modding made it better. I expected the sequels & expansions to deliver a great game in the years to come... yet I just got the same game over and over...