Premades and Precepts

From the interactive preview CD revealed in this thread:

http://bbs.thesims2.ea.com/community/bbs/messages.php?threadID=1b3acec347263a40b763308c4af2d0a2&directoryID;=225&startRow;=1&openItemID;=item.225,item.43,item.61,item.104,item.41,item.127,item.23

*Sigh* Will they ever learn…

I don’t know if I’ve expressed it elsewhere on this site, but I don’t like the whimsical nature of the TS3 careers. They should at least pay heed to the notion that the workplaces are visible, that the setting is a medium-size town/city, and that people in the real world don’t get paid for jobs that employers aren’t willing to pay them for. At least in TS2 the action happened offscreen. They could be a bit more imaginative with the settings.

Anyway, here’s my take on what was revealed career-wise.

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So, somewhere in development EA dropped the Entertainment career – it seems. Future EP, maybe? Possibly involving some Stars that are Super? I have to admit that I didn’t buy the last two EPs for The Sims, Making Magic and Superstar. As I’ve said in the past, I am a realist player. Letting everyone be famous and practise magic is not really that fun for me. If such an EP comes out in the future, I’m unlikely to buy them…unless awesome objects make up for the undesirable gameplay.

Damn you EA! Always putting neat new objects into expansion packs I have no intention of buying!

• Inconsistent world style. Especially careers. There is a definite shift towards ‘realism’ in the presentation, yet TS3′s writing still sticks to the far-out whimsical style of TS2 when you can become the World Leader of a town with a population under 100.
• In game advertising. Especially having to pay for it. Take a hint, game companies – gamers (well, PC gamers I’d like to think) don’t like to see advertising except in certain contexts (e.g. sports games). They’ll respect it less if all it does is add to the game company’s revenue, not drop the price meaningfully for consumers or provide some tangible benefit. Example: they could give discount codes for the Store to players that leave ads on. Reward people!
• The missing features. Not just pets and weather. Specifically: guitarist-ism. EA, please think of the pianists, the drummers, and most importantly the BASSISTS. And give brass and woodwinds some love too.
• Four month delay, and they STILL wait to release the neighborhood editor? Come on it can’t be that hard to do in that time.
• Crappy textures and copied stuff. Yes, it’s meant to be a low-spec game, but not everyone appreciates “gameplay > graphics”. I do, naturally. I actually like that TS3 sticks close to the graphic style of its predecessor, but some screenshots and videos show outright duplicates of objects and animations. Don’t make TS3 “53% new game.”
• Lack of custom content. EA’s the type of company to whom ‘modding’ is a foreign concept. More advanced creators will undoubtedly be frustrated from the lack of concern.
• The dodgy save system. On a PC game this is inexcusable. Limiting save numbers and tying them to a single family seems like a recipe for fiery-ball descruction.

Really, PC developers should not overlook a good save system. Don’t use a limited list, use the file system. Let players organise their saves into subfolders. Do it automatically, and let the player define rules (like email clients). Give save files meaningful, renamable names. If the game has quicksave/autosave, I really mean this, ROTATE THE SAVES. It’s not that hard.

One of the ‘traditional’ additions of Sims expansion packs is exciting new methods of death, with a corresponding shiny new ghost colour. But ever noticed that the death-types added in the TS2 expansion packs practically never happen unless you play to that end! It’s a conscious design decision by EA to NOT have Sims die in hilarious ways in the course of normal gameplay.

I’m definitely in the minority here, as a player who doesn’t actively ‘play to kill’, but I do wish that random death would occur, you know, autonomously. It’s the natural consequence of story progression. Would it kill EA to occassionally have an adult Sim die of some accidental cause offscreen?

I hope EA completely re-invents the idea of sub-neighborhoods (found in Uni, NL, OFB even though it was pretty superfluous, and AL) in The Sims 3. With the seamless neighborhood, sub-hoods would be a reversion to TS2′s ‘every home is an island’ timekeeping. That would suck. It would be a step backward.

With the additional possibility that players have custom hoods, they’re going to need a creative way of ‘expanding’ the play area and allowing access to those features. I believe they will do this with ‘ploppable’ community lots, and creating a new town in each EP (not so much to ask for, is it?)

Anyway, here’s my wish-list of additional buildings:

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The  appearance of TS3 Sims seems to be a mildly controversial topic. I actually think they look kind of weird now. Especially the children. But I can see why they changed their aesthetic – it makes it easier to make Sims resembling real-life people. Particularly, the fact that you can make Sims with wider heads makes up for their “Sims of the Corn” appearance.

I think it’s partially because we haven’t seen them moving very much. TS2 Sims always had an undercurrent of activity and excitement which was only really obvious when you saw them flailing about. I know I always look awkward when frozen in pictures.