Interview: Phillipe Da Silva on Monte Cristo’s Upcoming City Builder MMO, Cities XL

By Steven Crews | February 23, 2009 | | Filed under: Features, Interviews | Tags: CITIES XL, City Builder, Interview, MMOCBG, Monte Cristo

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I’ll be the first to admit that when I received this assignment my initial reaction, with a certain amount of incredulity, was, “Who would want to make an MMO out of Sim City?”

After a few minutes of speaking to Phillipe Da Silva, Internet Director for Monte Cristo, my reaction had changed to one of, “Why hasn’t anyone tried to make an MMO out of Sim City sooner? This actually sounds pretty fun.”

As it turns out, someone had: Monte Cristo, when they published the little-known title Starpeace in 2001. Now they’re back, and hoping to build on their prior experience with Cities XL, which some of its fans have taken to calling a Massively Multiplayer Online City Builder Game.

If you’re tired of the same old slaying dragons or headshotting people all day long, kicking back with some nice relaxing waste management as the overlord of your own personal fiefdom may be just the ticket.

There was a considerable time zone difference between California and France, and I’d like to thank Phillipe for staying at the office until 11PM and risking the wrath of his wife in order to speak with us. Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself to us and tell us a little bit about what it is you do at Monte Cristo.

Phillipe Da Silva: My name is Phillipe Da Silva, and I am the Internet Director of Monte Cristo. I’m mainly responsible for all the community and web aspects of Cities XL, which I’ll come to later on. I’m also involved partly on the game design of the online portions of the game.

The MMO Gamer: Also for those among our readers who are not familiar, as Cities XL is not very high-profile within the genre at the moment, could you please tell our readers a little bit of the games’ background, and the plans you have for it.

Phillipe Da Silva: Sure. Monte Cristo has been in the game industry since 1995, and we have been mainly working on delivering management games. So you find in there city builder games, but also Tycoon games. We started with Wall Street Trader and then we went to some smaller games like Start-Up and quite quickly we went back to the city builder genre.

We have released one online city builder game which was called Starpeace, and we learned a lot of things from it. Then we went back to the single player genre with the game search as Medieval Lord which was a Medieval city builder game, and City Life back in 2006 which is based on top of Medieval Lord engine which was at that time a modern city builder game.

The MMO Gamer: Looking at the site and the available videos, there’s the inevitable comparison to an MMO version of Sim City. Based on the conversation we had before the interview, that doesn’t seem to be quite an accurate comparison, but as I’m sure the comparison is going to continue to be made, could you tell us a little about what is going to set the game apart from some of the more traditional city builder games?

Phillipe Da Silva: Sim City and Sim City 4 is currently the benchmark for the genre. The comparison is just something normal and we are actually quite proud of it because being compared to Sim City is already a good achievement.

Now Cities XL is in a way not that much different from Sim City where you have a city builder game, you will have a public area that you have to manage such as all the security aspects the police stations and fire stations. The water and electricity production, the waste treatment; all those kinds of things that you find in the public area are similar to Sim City.

Then you have the private area that you don’t actually directly interact with, you are more providing a space that will make sure that you have other your cities and companies that come to your cities or residential areas.

You will have commercial areas, industry areas, and the like. You will have to make sure that you have the space to attract them and all the services. The comparison actually ends at that point, because then we are adding other layers on top of the city builder genre so that we actually bring-I would say we answer one of the problems of the genre: replayability.

Replayability of these kinds of games are limited to the imagination of the players and also on the content that you are providing to this kind of game because you are actually playing Lego’s and the more bricks you have to play with, you actually expand the game that you have.

We decided to work on what we call the “GEMs,” gameplay extension  modules, which are Tycoon games that you will be able to get from the Cities XL website for a small amount of money that will plug into your cities and bring new hours of gameplay by giving you some micromanagement.

The single player experience that you have where you are building your cities and then at one point you will actually be able to say, “Ok I would like to actually manage one of my companies in my city. I want to play a ski resort or beach resort in my city.”

So I’ll get to the website and go get the GEM, it will be downloaded to your computer and you will be able to play a ski resort Tycoon game or a beach resort Tycoon game and then you can go into micromanagement stuff and stuff like that.

On another layer that we wanted to have, it’s kinda cool to play Legos on your own, but at some point you actually would like to play Legos with other players. We wanted to have this online portion and go really wide with it, so we will be providing to players who want it what we call the planet offer.

Planets that they will be able to build cities on, and be able to play the exact same game you could play on single player mode, including also the GEMs, but everything that is produced by the cities and by the GEMs can be exchanged with other cities, filling the needs that other cities have, and also getting the resources that you need to be balanced or to actually improve one area or specialize your city to the direction that you want to go.

For instance, online you will be able to easily-you will be able to do this offline too but it will be much more difficult because you have to spend a lot of time in different cities-but if you have just one city online you will actually be able to specialize your cities to become, for instance, a tourist-oriented city where you will have a beach resort, and you will actually play that through your GEM.

In that kind of city you wouldn’t want waste treatment to be there, you don’t want nuclear central to be there, because they are actually polluting a lot of your map. You would like other players to provide you with the energy, the waste treatment capability; potentially you would like also to have workers coming from other cities because you don’t want to have a big area of less rich people in your city.

That’s the kind of things you will be able to do, specialize your city in one direction while other cities will special in other directions for instance you will have other cities that are totally industrial where they will have a lot of factories with a lot of pollution but they will actually be able to provide a lot of employment for other cities in the neighborhood and can actually exchange resources like material construction against workers so that they can have the workers their actual city needs but can provide the material construction that the other city needs to build things. So that’s the type of gameplay you will have.