By Jim Rossignol on August 26th, 2009 at 7:07 pm.
My present “spare-time” gaming could not have two more extreme poles. On the one hand I am playing a bit of Quake Live – jumping onto capture the flag maps to realise I still know how to use a railgun (weird how it returns, like different programming, hardwired into fundamental bits of my brain) – and on the other I am poking about in Cities XL, slowly trying to drag my farming town into megalopolis status. Cities XL – which is still in a long, long beta – has proven to be a slow burner for me. I’m not spending a lot of time with it, but I’ve been spending time on it regularly. Today I’ve been browsing other people’s cities (your avatar can go and visit other player’s cities anywhere on the planet) and realising that I still have a long way to go to get a properly functioning large city. I’m definitely a long way off worrying about the stuff featured in this trailer, which is about maximising the “attractiveness” of the city, which means big, geometric city-plans, parks, and status the size of skyscrapers. Hell, I’ll settle for being able to develop a decent number of skyscrapers on my commercial district. There’s a single glass tower on the map right now. I feel like I have made the Swindon of the Cities XL universe. Maybe I have. A recession-banged Wiltshire of virtuality.
Anyone else building? Or Quaking, for that matter…
That looks really interesting. Is it as hardcore as SC4?
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I’ve been Quake Living quite a bit, although I find that Free For Alls are a bit too easy – I usually win – whilst Duels always put me against the pro of the pro and I get my ass kicked. I love the intensity of a of FFA though, when it gets to 3 frags left I literally stop breathing.
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I’ve been playing Half-Life 2 on the Xbox 1, because I like shitting on my own face.
That, and Quake Live, when an internet connection is near. Now that I’ve played QL a bunch, I can’t stand ioQuake3. Pity.
On topic: What would be a good easy city building game? I’m a weakling when it comes to strategy games.
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@Anarki: Funny you say that, for me it’s the exact opposite. I’m always second or third in full FFA, yet win duels regularly. I also figured that, if fair, your chance of winning a full 16-player server of FFA is only 1/16. Still my favorite mode. If I wanted CTF, I’d play something more tactical anyway…
But more importantly: How do you get your hands on a copy of Cities XL? The website lists it as beta, and apparently, not a very open one, either… Would love to try it.
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I’ve sunk a decent amount of hours into the CXL beta.
Here’s my city from before the wipe (you’ll need beta access to see it):
http://beta.citiesxl.com/index.php?option=com_kunena&Itemid=131&func=view&catid=6&id=12081
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I failed to get into the beta, which I was gutted about. I love city builders, and I’m super excited about this one.
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The problem with QuakeLive, is to feel that even though you remember yourself as being good… It’s still impressive to get hardly kicked by people who look like they have played this game non-stop for the last 10 years, according to their skill. :/
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You seem to have an ad on the site that’s making an annoying ‘Oh my God, No way” noise whenever I load a page…
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The game got too sluggish on my venerable computer once I hit around 20k people, so my betaing was cut short. I really should upgrade.
NDA still probably stands so I don’t think I should say more than that.
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somnolentsurfer: is that ad visible to you right now? It should have been removed.
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Yep, just opened a bunch of tabs and still got it in some of them.
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cant get the hang of Quake, too many years of CS has left me with a different skill set :P
However Combat Arms is quite fun and I am surprised that it gets no love at all on RPS. Its free, the micro payment option is not too heavy handed to unbalance the game play and its got some variety!
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Grr! I’ll fix it.
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I’m definitely up for a RPS Quake Live match, or 5!
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I am both building and Quaking, oddly. My drug is Simcity 4 of course, not your schmancy MMO-thing beta.
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My experience with Quake Live is as follows:
Log in.
Play tutorial/difficulty setting match thing.
Get ready to play people at my skill level.
Get my tail handed to me on a silver platter.
Log off.
Then again, I never played Quake growing up. My only real experience with Quake was coming in second at a Quake 3 tourney while having never played it before. Apparently I just fps too much.
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Wait, you can make Swindon … and then bomb it? Sign me up.
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I shall have to return to Cities XL, I must admit that I let Anno 1404 take over from it in my city building escapades!
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Maybe I’m just reading the wrong sites, but I’ve yet to find some good info on CXL’s gameplay; is everyone sworn to NDAs or something?
SC4 is a wonderful simulator, but I think it fails as a fun game, but I guess that depends on who’s playing :P . As someone who spent many hours with SC2k/3k, I find them far more enjoyable as far as sitting down and just building a city. In many areas, SC4 just collapses under its own weight. I wish I could take the graphics and landscaping tools of SC4 and mesh them with SC2k’s ruleset…
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I have the demo of this installed on my PC, cheers PC Gamer!
The demo doesnt work yet, because the publisher hasnt finished the sign-up process yet.
No cheers, monte cristo!
The game looks lovely, its frustrating as hell not to be playing it… Typical clueless publisher I reckon… bah!
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DarkNoghri just described my quake live experience to a tee.
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I’m in the Cities XL beta, and must say that I’m nonplussed. Rather, significantly less than plussed. I’m not really sure what can be discussed within the confines of the NDA, so I’ll be general and say that it has a very looooooooooooong way to go until I’d consider paying actual monies for it, and even further to go until I’d actually pay MONTHLY for it (provided that’s what they’re going to do– I haven’t actually heard any news on what the sub model is going to look like). It runs very slow on my machine, and while I don’t have a particularly obscene deck, I can play Men of War with all the gubbins cranked up to max, so I can’t see why placing a few roads with the shadows about would be taxing.
It’s a pity I’m not enthralled, because this is about as firmly up my alley as anything can ever get.
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“I’m not really sure what can be discussed within the confines of the NDA…”
Everything you just said falls under the NDA. I’m not the NDA police or anything, I’m just saying so that you know.
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wish i had cites xl beta, mind you as i am packing up my flat and will be netless it would be a bit lost on me. love the idea of a non violent strat mmo. in fact most types of mmo minus rpg grindathons interest me, wish more existed.
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Want, want, want, want, waaaant! Although not interested in playing online, just want a good city builder to replace SC4 (don’t even look at me while you’re thinking about Sim City Societies).
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I used to play this interesting game online that was like an mmo where you developed cites with other players , can’t remmeber what it was called but I remember it being very interesting. I would like to give this a try but I don’t think it is the same thing :P I gave my copy of SC4 away to a friend who wanted to use it for something or another and never got it back , I’ve missed city building since then ehe.
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I used to play this interesting game online that was like an mmo where you developed cites with other players , can’t remmeber what it was called but I remember it being very interesting. I would like to give this a try but I don’t think it is the same thing :P I gave my copy of SC4 away to a friend who wanted to use it for something or another and never got it back , I’ve missed city building since then ehe.
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Quake Live keeps drawing me back. There’s something incredibly addictive about it, and the ease with which you can jump into a game makes it perfect for quick-fix action. Being Q3 though, it’s potentially life-devouring too of course. But there’s something about the feel, and if I’m honest probably my own lack of ability, that’s preventing me from falling too deeply in love.
@Jim, have you played Warsow at all? Just wondering if you’re aware of it, as there’s a fairly major release due within the next few days and you seem like the most-likely RPSer to be interested. I was thinking of firing off a quick email, but your mention of QL made it seem relevant here. (I’m not associated with the wsw team, just a big fan who is hoping to see some fanfare around the 0.5 release.)
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the trick with Quake Live is that you have to want to play it. If you’re new to it, there’s a lot to learn. Obviously you shouldn’t jump straight into duels as this is the most taxing gametype. Like Jim mentioned, just go into CTF, grab a railgun, and try to shoot some of the little men wot bounce across your screen. It’s kind of like “building” in that way – you learn one thing, it becomes automatic, then you start learning the next thing.
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Yeah, I reckon ‘avoid Duel’ is sound advice for newcomers to any deathmatch game.
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Also, “you have to want to play it” is very true. There’s a fine line between getting owned a couple of times and quitting forever, and seeing something in the game that makes you want to stick with it. You have to enjoy the learning process, I think, but it certainly helps if you have a reason to believe that the end result (being able to play at a decent level) is worth a bit of frustration. When I’m ‘selling’ a multiplayer game I always try to link to exciting videos and show people what is possible with a bit of application. Obviously some games are better than others at being fun for beginners and satisfying for serious players, and I don’t think any game does both perfectly. As far as ‘hardcore’ dm games go, I think Q3 (and QL) does pretty well in that regard.
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I wish more games were this ambitious.
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Well, ambitious sure. But according to some of the speculation over on their forums, it looks like they were too ambitious. After all, accurately simulating human behavior in a game context is rather challenging. There is also speculation that several of the transportation systems are either going to be late or dumbed down.
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@MD
In terms of ‘exciting videos’ I am convinced that Quake is without equal in that regard. Watching Get Quaked 3, Claw and Order and Dag Def Extreme 3 were what convinced me to start playing Quake again.
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@ Railick – ” used to play this interesting game online that was like an mmo where you developed cites with other players”
I remember playing “Legacy Online”, which was like a city-builder but with a strong economy focus (you were really running a company, not running a city, although residential buildings were one of the things your company could build) run in an MMO way. It had the Anno-style focus on supply-chains too – build a chemical plant to make chemicals, need those to make plastics, need plastics to make CDs, sell CDs in your music store, etc.
It was really cool, but suffered from the usual public-multiplayer issues. Some guy with spreadsheets had found the optimal way to run a particular company, so newbies couldn’t compete. Some guilds or friendships would form, and the entrenched successful guys could dump millions on new players to help them get a jump start on other, friendless newbies. Things like that. As I recall, zoning was controlled by players who were elected by the other players.
It seems to be also-known-as StarPeace, and in varying states of disappearance now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_Online
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I’ve been playing Cities XL for a while now and it’s a great time. Slow burn for me too, at first I was skeptical and now I’m incredibly excited for it.
The developers still have a LOT of work to do in the coming month before release, but they’ve been fixing and adding things at a nice pace so far. I have faith.
Cities XL could be great.
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I loved SC4. It, along with UT2k4, was the first game to beat 10g on my PC before WoW. I’d use the Simcity Exchange and Simtropolis and just get more and more and more building sets that a lot of talented modders made, in the hopes of approximating what I feel a built-up city looks like, and foremost of that is:
Street Walls – where the facade of one building lines up with the facades of adjacent buildings.
So guess what’s missing in Cities XL Beta? Its as if the designers are too infatuated with their curved highways and their giant monuments to have building sites that don’t plop Corbusier’s dream of buildings in the middle of otherwise bare plots. No matter how tall the buildings are, it feels like suburbia, and considering the bread and butter of most cities are not their highways or their monuments but their built up environment, I was less than impressed.
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I do believe you sign an NDA when you create an account with the beta, which means not talking about it. ;)
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