Premades and Precepts

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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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.

I’m not really a ‘news blogging’ person but Rod Humble (Head of Sims and EA Play, and the guy who wrote the no-DRM open letter) mentioned a few interesting things in this forum thread. I’m just picking out the interesting stuff that I haven’t seen elsewhere.

• “… we open up a whole bunch of the game to modders that I think will impress people. Not sure where this idea that [modding] was harder came from. Newer, yes, different yes but not harder.”
• “I assure you, there will be fully featured very large expansions.”
• “Similar to Sims 2, the new formats will start out hard and get easier as the team works with the modders and updates/releases tools.”
• “Meshes are at the high end of hard (as you would expect). I just went down and asked the (very tired) Sims 3 team leads. It is very high on their agenda.”
• “Making meshes to put in the game is not that hard, its getting everything to work perfectly throughout the game that is the tough part.”
• On availability of nude/no-censor mods: “Given the priorities of modders, learning the system, testing time, audience demand etc I would say ………. Day 1.”
  

That seems to confirm post-release tools (neighborhood editor FIRST please!) and technical support for modders.

Also, Rod Humble thinks Sims players are perverts. Aren’t we all? :)

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!

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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Expansion packs are structured around introducing the player to new gameplay elements. In TS2 they did this by subtly forcing those new elements on you in a ham-handed fashion, usually through Wants. Prime example – the first EP, University, caused Teens to almost always roll the ‘Go to College’ want (apparently hard-coded too). If they went, they got a 10,000 asp point boost and a ‘green’ memory. If they didn’t the memory would be BAD – they went ‘Uneducated’. Being Uneducated was even a Fear most of the time!

So presuming you don’t like college, but like the instruments (for sake of example), you keep Uni installed and put up with the annoyances.

EVERY TS2 EP did this, mainly through those persistent wants to go on a date/buy a pet/hire so-and-so/go on vacation etc.

I’ve been thinking about how this relates to telling a neighbourhood storyline.

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