Premades and Precepts

EA now typically spends two or three times as much on marketing and advertising as it does on developing a game. That’s because advertising is critical to getting a game in the top ten rankings. If you have a $10 million game, don’t be surprised if the the TV advertising costs drive the ad budget to $30 million. If a $60 game yields revenue of $35 for EA, then (according to my math) the company has to sell 1.1 million copies just to break even.

I’d sure like to know how much it cost to develop The Sims 3, and exactly how much of that budget was spent on flashy billboards and product placements.

(Source)

As I kind of just declared on this blog a few days ago, expansion packs suck. Let’s look back at TS2 for a moment: But which one, in retrospect, was the worst? In the spirit of negative awards, I present the AFAs – the Aspiration Failure Awards for The Sims 2.

If you agree or disagree with me, feel free to comment.

DISCLAIMER: These are just my personal opinions. As I’m a storytelling player more than a gamer or modder, that’s the perspective from which I’ll approach my choices. Also, I completely ignored the mods that fixed many of the problems I mention. EA/Maxis didn’t provide those; the community did.

On with the awards…

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(Psst. Check out Lost EA Traits, my new page. Looks like a couple of my trait ideas were close to what EA had planned after all. Before they cut it for EP#X.)

I enjoyed TS3’s freedom from expansions while it lasted, but all good things come to an end. EA have announced the first TS3 expansion.

I am wholly, WHOLLY unimpressed with a single flaw in this game design.

From the press release:

"[Players will] discover new cities in China, France, and Egypt, and share new stories."

Why am I unimpressed?

Because using real countries is a freaking stupid idea.

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So recently I’ve been delving deep into the the game’s localisation String Tables in hopes of reworking some of the game’s worst writing.I don’t know about other players, but to me a lot of the writing seems stilted and strangely-worded, as if EA outsourced the job of writing the English text to some foreign country.

Funnily enough, the recent 1.3 patch claims it corrects “several spelling and grammar mistakes”…it fixes exactly five! It also removes “Amanda” as a male name, if that counts as a grammatical error…

Anyway, I wrote a little C# program to make editing large chunks of game text slightly easier. It’s called the STBLizer and it lets you work with the strings in a CSV spreadsheet format, and simply import and export them to/from the STBL without needing to make changes one at a time in the other STBL editors currently available. You can download STBLizer from Mod The Sims. I thought that while I’ve been posting links to it on various sites, I might as well plug my shiny new tool on my personal blog while I’m at it.

There are a few better . Then again, AwesomeMod now has its own solution for that (custom name lists)

Random Title Generator (Internet Archive) – I got some great dramatic/fiction titles out of this. Examples – The Unwilling Tales, Ravaged Edge, The Ragged Dreamer, Wanton Winter.

Fantasy Novel Title Generator – Actually I can’t remember at the moment whether Fantasy is an available genre, but whatever. Finally, you can put names to the vaunted God and Illusion Cycle: The Dream of the Children, The Lollian Rogue, The Discord of Adian, and Master and Empire (coming in Summer 2010).

Random Speculative Fiction Title Generator – you gotta hit this one a few times to get some interesting titles. Like Killing of the Worm, Dark Station, Ghost Vendetta, and my personal favourite: Sword Spam!

By the way, I was planning an update to the lot rotation experiment I had going on. I got up to the middle of the seventh round, but I was let down by two things: boredom with the Sims themselves, and a lack of good housing in Riverview. Unfortunately I’m not that great a builder, and the complex decoration in the building options puts me off a little. Also I don’t like massive lots – another reason to wait for the World Builder to come out, I suppose.

So, I’ve wiped Riverview and I’m currently playing one of the random families that decided to sneak in while Story Progression was left on.

I added a couple of useful links to the sidebar under ‘Need Names?’ I’m typically uncreative when it comes to naming stuff, and when prompted to give something a name I will run off and try to find a random name generator.

I’ve recently come across two:

For artwork names

http://noemata.net/pa/titlegen/ – For naming Sim paintings. Who can resist ‘Pathological Echo’, ‘Sketch of Drunk Figure’, or ‘Nude Deciphering the Orange Field’?

For star names

http://direpress.bin.sh/tools/sf_name.html – choose ‘Space’ in the Type dropdown box and ‘Star Name’ in the one below it to get random star names. Examples – ‘2426 Jing Xiu’, ‘Scatha’, ‘1372 Galli’.

Trawling through the TS3 scripts, one finds a lot of interesting code, no doubt implemented in anticipation of cashy expansion packs.

For instance, pets are all but confirmed.

The fact that ages are defined for the same animals as in TS2 seems to reduce the chances of a Farm EP. I mean, farm animals age too.

Also, Piano?

Did they cut pianos from the game? You know, I’m 99% sure one of the Store hairs was shown in a preview video somewhere as part of CAS. As if you needed more evidence that EA is out for the money.

UPDATED 13/7/09: Now includes AwesomeMod’s MaxOfficeHolders tags (career caps). If you don’t have that mod, ignore them.

These data are extracted straight from the XML in the game’s files, though I’ve stripped out some of the extraneous information and adjusted it a little where the ingame job title is different from the XML name. Feel free to copy this data and rewrite it into readable/meaningful form.

Note that:

• I can’t explain what the skill and mood Mappings mean.
• DayLength = the number of hours to work
• In DaysToWork, R means Thursday and U means Sunday

TS3 Careers (html)

TS3 Careers (xls)

I’ve been attempting the Prosperity Challenge with a cleaned-out Sunset Valley and have run into a weird snag. Apparently, whenever you apply for a job, the game either generates new (unhoused) Sims to be your co-workers and boss. However, it also appoints Sims living in the ‘hood to fill those roles. Meaning that sometimes a Sim from a “Prosperity family” gets a job I did not want for them to have.

What’s more, Story Progression is OFF and I’m using Awesomemod. Now, I did modify the “Demographics” XML in the game’s GameplayData.package to encourage households to get jobs…maybe this is how the game reacts. But it’s a frustrating mechanic.

I think in my last post I complained about Story Progression townies always being unemployed? If I didn’t, I’m complaining now. Well, now that I’m attempting a Prosperity playstyle the problem’s reversed. My Prosperity Sims keep getting high-level jobs at random places (and which don’t match up with their career LTW). *Sigh* EASS, what will you do next…

By the way, with this little Challenge I was trying the aging idea posted here by Rebeka. Thanks, Rebeka! Anyway the idea is to turn SP off (obviously) and leave aging off for all but one round (which I haven’t gotten to yet).

Yay me. I ninja’d a copy at 8:30 in the morning because I didn’t preorder (or rather, they delayed the preorder by a FULL DAY and it would have cost more). I wasn’t the only one buying it at that time, oddly enough, though I was the only single guy there.

I’ve been pretty busy over the past few days, while most of my free time has been taken up with playing TS3 (of course) as well as mucking around with the .packages using S3PI. Already I’ve made a few basic hacks for personal use: an aging hack to reduce the duration of Toddler- and Elder-hood, a hack to reduce the chance of genetic mutations, and a hack to stop families moving out. I don’t know what effect the last one has on long-term Story Progression though, so I’m currently testing it out.

Anyway, I won’t post my full thoughts on the game here because it would just repeat what others have said over the past two weeks. At first the game didn’t “hook” me like TS2 did, but I’m warming to it. I will make a few comments though:

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