Cities XL

Lore & Background

Cities XL was developed by Monte Cristo as a follow-up to City Life. The game allowed players to zone residential, commercial, and industrial lots, with residential lots further divided into four social classes: unskilled workers, skilled workers, executives, and elites. Players could create road networks with various road types, bridges, and tunnels. An add-on introducing buses was released in December 2009. An unimplemented feature called Gameplay Extension Modules (GEMs) was planned, which would have allowed detailed management of features like ski resorts or beaches, with the main city simulation paused during GEM management.

The game's terrain was composed of height maps, textures, and a normal map, created using third-party tools such as EarthSculptor, World Machine, and GeoControl. Middleware like SpeedTree was used for in-game afforestation. Monte Cristo developed a 3D engine designed to allow lower-range PCs to run the game. The game was released in standard and limited editions, the latter including additional landmarks, maps, and a poster. Monte Cristo shut down in May 2010 following poor sales of Cities XL.

Focus Home Interactive acquired the franchise in June 2010 and released Cities XL 2011 on October 14, 2010, adding more buildings, maps, improved public transport, an enhanced tax system, and better trading options. Subsequent versions included Cities XL 2012 (October 20, 2011), Cities XL Platinum (February 6, 2013), and Cities XXL (February 5, 2015).

Reader's Guide

Cities XL is notable for attempting to bring a persistent online multiplayer component to the city-building genre, allowing players to trade resources and collaborate on structures on shared planets. However, the online service was short-lived, closing in March 2010 due to low subscription rates, and the game transitioned to single-player only. The franchise continued under Focus Home Interactive with several annual releases—Cities XL 2011, Cities XL 2012, Cities XL Platinum, and Cities XXL—each adding new buildings, maps, and features. The game received average reviews, with critics praising its curved roads and graphics but criticizing the multiplayer feature as shallow and overpriced, and the single-player mode as lacking features. The game's legacy includes its influence on later city builders and its role in the evolution of the genre, though it was ultimately overshadowed by titles such as Cities: Skylines.

Did You Know?

• Cities XL was originally titled Cities Unlimited to avoid confusion with City Life 2.
• The online multiplayer service required a monthly subscription fee and was closed on March 8, 2010 due to low subscription rates.
• A patch released on the same day as the online closure allowed buses to be used in single-player mode.

The Online Planet and Its Brief Life

Cities XL launched with an ambitious multiplayer layer that set it apart from other city builders of its era. Players could join a persistent virtual world called a planet, which required a monthly subscription fee. Within this shared space, subscribers built their cities side by side, traded resources like electricity, collaborated on landmark structures such as the Eiffel Tower, and even visited one another's cities as avatars to host events. The concept was genuinely novel for the genre. However, the experiment proved short-lived. On January 27, 2010, Monte Cristo acknowledged that subscription numbers had fallen well below expectations and announced the shutdown of the online service. The servers went dark on March 8, 2010, reducing the game to a single-player experience. On that same day, a patch was pushed that unlocked buses for solo play, since they had previously been exclusive to the multiplayer mode. The episode remains one of the most notable examples of an MMO-style city builder failing to sustain its community.

Zoning and the Social Class Framework

One of Cities XL's most distinctive design choices was its layered zoning system. The game offered three fundamental lot categories—residential, commercial, and industrial—each supporting multiple density levels. What set the residential layer apart was its four-tier social class structure: unskilled workers, skilled workers, executives, and elites. Before any building could be placed, the player had to explicitly designate which class would inhabit a given residential zone, and the simulation would not alter that assignment over time. This gave players granular control over the socioeconomic makeup of their metropolis. In terms of mechanics, zoning could be applied by selecting a broad area of the map, after which the game automatically generated individual lots within that boundary. Players who preferred precision could also place lots one at a time. Previews had also teased a Mass Placement Tool that would let users filter by building tags, so that only specific categories of structures appeared when outlining a zone.

Technical Foundations and Terrain Creation

Behind the scenes, Monte Cristo took a pragmatic approach to building Cities XL's world. Rather than developing proprietary terrain tools from scratch, the studio leaned on established third-party software such as EarthSculptor, World Machine, and GeoControl to generate realistic height maps, textures, and normal maps, which were then imported into their own terrain-editing pipeline. For vegetation, middleware from SpeedTree handled in-game afforestation. In a September 2007 interview, developer Philippe Da Silva emphasized that the game would ship with a wide variety of maps and landscapes to give players deeper creative freedom, and a pre-release screenshot of an Aspen map confirmed that snowy biomes were on the table. On the engine side, Monte Cristo built a custom 3D renderer specifically tuned so that lower-range PCs could still run the title at acceptable settings, while delivering visual quality that surpassed their predecessor, City Life, even when not every graphic option was maxed out.

Monte Cristo's Fall and the Franchise's New Home

The commercial arc of Cities XL ended in disappointment for its original creators. The title launched on October 8, 2009 in Europe and Oceania, and the following day in North America, in both a standard and a limited edition that bundled extra landmarks, maps, and a poster. During development, Monte Cristo had maintained a developer blog and community forums, both of which were quietly removed before launch; the studio assured fans that valuable posts had been archived and that they would remain active on community sites like Simtropolis. Sales, however, fell short of expectations, and in May 2010 Monte Cristo ceased operations entirely. The franchise's future was secured when Focus Home Interactive acquired it in June 2010, releasing Cities XL 2011 on October 14, 2010, with expanded building rosters, new maps, improved public transport, a reworked tax system, and enhanced trading. The series continued through Cities XL 2012 in late 2011, Cities XL Platinum in February 2013, and finally Cities XXL, announced in November 2014 and shipped on February 5, 2015.