AngoraFish

The "Limited Edition" isn't particularly limited, is it? It's still widely available, so that's not particularly limited... There's extra content, so that's not limited either... Anyone have any clue what's "limited" about it? Anyhow, to the OP, the price is coming down all the time (eg 50% off at Steam today, 24 hour sale) so if you're really desperate wait until the price drops to something you're more comfortable paying. I've got my money on it being $10 within two months. The major revenue stream for XL is PO, after all. They may as well give the client away for free.

You can´t expect an essencially online game not to download fixes, it simply isn´t done. Look at WoW and all the other MMO´s....quote> WOW is an MMO and sold as such. You are not able to play WOW offline. XL is sold as a single player game with some optional online 'enhancements' of dubious value. What makes XL an 'essencially online game' is a mystery to me - the trade window? Meh - I'll take OmniCorp thanks. The chat box? If I need to chat I'll use Facebook. The ability to walk around other people's cities? Seriously, if it means that much to you feel free to email me your savegame. The whole analogy is bunk. What really amazes me is how difficult it is for several of the above posters to see the difference.

I absolutely agree with the original poster. This game just manages to hit rock bottom and keep on digging. The other day I tried to start playing and it started force downloading the first content pack - about 150MB. As I understand it, the content packs are only available to PO subscribers, and I'll be subscribing to PO about the same time as hell freezes over. Prior to this all patches did was try to improve the appalling trade interface that I'm not using because, as above, I'm not a PO subscriber. My internet account has a download cap and it's appalling that I should be forced to consume some of my capped bandwidth on game content that I can't even access. Since trying to download the 150MB "patch", which I aborted, I haven't bothered to load the game since. I don't have any trouble with stability improvements, but it never ceases to amaze me how many ways the game keeps finding to harass, fully paid-up game owners who don't give a rats about their massively over-priced Planet Offer.

The only advantage that PO offers for me over offline mode is that online the trade module isn't deliberately crippled. If for no other reason than as a matter of principle, I refuse to cough up more money to a company that has already charged me $40. A gentle reminder: Please don't bash MC. Thanks. --Liv CXL Forums Moderator

http://citiesxl.gamesplanet.com/cities-xl-limited-edition-game-monte-cristo.html *This pack includes a 7 days free pass for the Planet mode, for Services and additional on-line fonctions for Cities XL I agree, that a month should be the minium, by the way. They're silly not to, since they need to give you time to get hooked on the online features to make you willing to keep coughing up the cash. In my view 7 days is enough to give you a taster, but not enough to get you hooked. PO is mainly going to be of benefit to people with larger, developed cities, and many people won't get that far in only 7 days

Trading-blocks will no doubt form, which you can call 'guilds' if you like. The primary benefit of this will be trading resources, which isn't a particularly intense level of cooperation. Unless you like wandering around other people's houses, sims style, it's hard to see people getting too excited about the social aspects of this game. Blueprints are also available to build monuments. Monuments require enormous amounts of resources to construct and are only available online. Having a group of friends willing to send you cut-price resources will be nearly essential for this. Whether any of this would be sufficient for you to consider joining a 'guild' is up to you - for what it's worth, Monte Cristo thinks it is, since this is almost exclusively the point of Planet Offer. If you read a lot of forums, however, you might easily get the impression that Monte Cristo is on another planet entirely.