Premades and Precepts

This is just a fun little revisit about a post I made exactly ten months ago: So, what will suck in The Sims 3? Let’s see what was fixed, what’s fixable, and what still sucks.

• 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.

Realism mods might still be thin on the ground, but for the most part few players have taken an attitude towards the unrealism being detrimental to the game. Personally, I found it was not so much the whimisical style that put me off, but the surprising lack of quality in the writing, and also the lack of attention to detail to constructing a believable, fictional world. The release of World Earth Adventures proved that I, and probably a few other players, are in the minority when it comes to caring about the fact that Sims world != real world.

• 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!

Non-issue, as TS3 shipped without ads, and it’s highly unlikely that they’ll ever be introduced in the future. I was pretty pleased they used Simlish in-world banners as replacements.

Instead EA is much more focused on advertising their own Sims store in the game, as the addition of Shop Mode last November proves. I guess they just couldn’t strike a good enough advertising deal with anyone, so they resorted to shilling their own stuff.

• 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.

Yes, think of the bass guitarists. It should have added fuel to the fire when revealed that a lot of missing features are already coded into the game (those images I put up are barely the tip of the iceberg), but most players take this in their stride.

• 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.

Ha ha. I was only beginning to get whiny about it, and seven months passed before Create-A-World was released.

• 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.”

Yup. And let’s not forget that most of TS3’s reused objects have fewer features than their TS2 counterparts did (e.g. the toddler play table).

• 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.

On this point I was wrong: there was no lack of custom content. In fact TS3 modding was quite storied. First came the advent of core modding, with the rapid rise & fall of Indie Stone and ongoing development of AwesomeMod; the subsequent boom in scripting mods and TS2 conversions; the release of more mod tools; the patch that broke .packages; the patch that broke Sims3Packs; the patch that broke both; and so on.

• 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 …
• There was no save limit, but certainly more than a fair share of fiery ball destruction with Error #s all around (the # depending on the patch level, or indeed any unknown factor). AwesomeMod added an autosave function.

Overall? The things I complained about were for the most part alleviated, although the release of TS3 brought many other issues to the fore. Over time, the game will mature with more mini-titles adding more gameplay, objects and features.

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)

There is a two-part interview with Russell Arons, VP of marketing for EA Play (so that’s what it’s called now) up on Gamesindustry.biz. I like to read these ‘industry sources’ because you often get a totally different perspective from what press releases and official previews tell you, such as…

TS3’s REAL core audience

“The Sims 3 is looking at 16-24 year-old PC players .. [it] has been developed from the ground up specifically against those consumer audiences.”

“it’s not just about appealing to the current Sims fans – they’re critically important, but we know we have to bring new consumers in too.”

So the people complaining about unnecessary changes, and who aren’t in this nicely-segmented age bracket or are ‘old consumers’, have a point. It’s not “developed against” them.

More below about the delay, social networking and kids, and the surprising use of the Internet to market games.

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It seems overly philosophical, but if I were writing a Sims story, I would really try to evoke the sense that Sims live in a completely different universe, with different rules. If you think about the game in that way you don’t get hung up as much on the less realistic parts of their lives.

• Technology never changes.
• Sims have different physiologies. They are pregnant for a large chunk of their lives, they are all the same height, and they make blue pee (and they can ONLY pee.)
• No real-world references in general, especially branded stuff. I would probably go to pains to avoid using brand names, or even pixelate the stuff like a 90s hip-hip music video. Advertising truly bugs me when it gets subliminially inserted into Sims stories.
• There is no English in the Sims world, no real-life writing or signs.
• Sims are fully capable of driving, swimming, etc. without lessons.
• Sims are strictly non-religious except for the odd supernatural element (i.e. Grim Reaper).
• Sims are more relaxed about privacy – witness the TS2 telephone directory. Also, they’re generally more permissive with their children and teens (letting them go off on their own), even though they can NEVER be left at home alone.
• Education and professions work differently. There’s no such thing as professional qualifications: any entry-level bum can become a doctor or lawyer without a degree (despite TS2’s weird reference in the Paramedic description to ‘night school’). Uni was a bit of an aberration if you ask me.
• Llamas must pervade everything. (Hey, why haven’t there been actual, ownable llamas in The Sims yet? If you’re listening, EA, OWNABLE LLAMAS!!!!