Cities XL or previously known as Cities Unlimited is a city-building simulation computer game. It is under the development of Paris based company Monte Cristo. Prior to Cities XL Monte Cristo developed City Life. Cities XL was planned to be launched in Q1 2009, but the released date are postponed to later part of 2009. Cities XL allows players to do many things related about a City, like manage the economy, care for need of citizens, and most importantly shape the city. Online play mode enable players to interact with online members of the game.

Both the features of city designing to lay out a city of plopping and the automated growth aspect of zoning. Mass Placement tool which allows player to select tags that will decide what they want to build in a zone. This feature adds control and flexibility to the game. These tags will describe many things including building functions to important characteristics. Buildings functions described by these tags are Residence, Hotel, Industry, Commercial Services e.t.c. Important characteristics included in the game are level of wealth, size, architectural style, geographical origin and so on. Each building is marked with a tag so that you can choose specific buildings. There is an option of players choosing and creating their own tags.

City XL allows players to play on persistent online virtual community known as Planet. As a member of the Planet you can do many things like build cities in a virtual world populated by the inhabitants of different players, trade with the players, host events and visit cities. There are competitions and events to make sure player will return to the game. However there is a monthly playing online and community.

Cities XL are promising to provide bigger, more beautiful landscapes. The terrain is composed of textures, a normal map, and heightmaps. To generate unique realistic terrain Cities XL uses existing Third-party tools like World Machine, GeoControl, and EarthSculptor. These terrains are then moved to their terrain editing software. Adding to that middleware like SpeedTree is used to make game look better. A lot of attention is put into the 3D engine of the game to make it available on low level PC.

First announcement for the game was made by the developers on April 15, 2008. It was announced that official title for the game would be City XL not City Life 2. The new game is expected to have more features and graphics. It was also reported that Monte Cristo had worked hard to remove the building repetition that haunted the City of Life. According to the developers the game will focus on transport, economical realism, and variety through building numbers. A map release of Aspen describes that there will be snowfall in the game. Official trailer of the game was released on June 4, 2008.

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