Latest Events

One of the important events of the past weeks has been the release of the first Content Pack for Cities XL. We are very pleased with warm welcome the Old England buildings have received and we are dedicated to keep providing quality content in the months to come.

For nice screenshots of cities who made good use of the medieval buildings to create nice historic neighbourhoods, check the Community Highlights article we have published last week if you haven’t done so yet!

End of October, we also activated the Blueprints system: twice a week, currently on Sundays and Thursdays, you have a chance to win a Blueprint on your profile page, which you can then activate to build an impressive Megastructure in your city.

But you can also share them with others, and some players have obviously been very active requesting Blueprints, as we’ve seen cities with no less than fifteen Megastructures already built or under construction.

Upcoming patch

Since the game launched early October, we have received a lot of feedback from players either through the ingame chat, the fan forums or www.citiesxl.com/feedback. We wish to thank everyone for helping us improve Cities XL.

Education issues have already been fixed, and with the addition of a new school building and Megastructures that have a positive effect city wide on education, it is now much easier for mayors to satisfy their citizens’ cultural needs. It is now time to tackle on the pollution issue, which will be done in an upcoming patch.

Pollution

With pollution from heavy industries and oil production facilities spreading in a thin haze all over the map, quality of air has become the number one issue for mayors who wish to keep offices profitable and attract tourists and businessmen with quality hotels.

A study by our Great Cabinet of Unbiased Experts has demonstrated that offices, high tech industries and hotels were far too picky on the purity of air and would disregard too much the quality of life in the neighbourhood. It has been decided it should not be so.

With next patch, offices, high tech and hotels will now react to the overall quality of life, which is reduced by air and noise pollution and enhanced by landmarks and decoration areas. Thus, mayors will have means to fight the negative effects of pollution by building pleasing neighbourhoods.

However, mayors of huge metropolises must be warned that they might face an economic crisis if their offices and high tech industries are currently placed in noisy neighbourhoods, such as near airports or busy roads. It would be prudent to prepare for the upcoming change by funding a small quality of life improvement program and adding landmark generating buildings and nice plazas.

MINI Cooper

England is not simply about medieval buildings. It is also about Royal Family, tea, Bobbies, red phone boots, impassive guardsmen, double-deckers, fish and chips and... MINI cars!

A new MINI Cooper car model will sneak its way in the same patch and is sure to add a modern and exciting touch to your cities which will be particularly appreciated by your Qualified Workers and Executives.

What else to expect?

Busses are coming along well. They can be expected early December and will be followed, before Christmas comes, by another patch that will add various improvements to the game such as detailed taxes per category or advanced graphical settings.

We of course have a lot of other neat content in the making, not the least of them a pack of country-specific roads and service vehicles or the pack of Chinatown inspired buildings. But we’ll tell you more about these in due time.