Premades and Precepts

• 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.

Wow, these first posts are difficult to write.

This blog is (or will primarily be) about The Sims 3. I had a ton of ideas and thoughts about what to do for the game, but then EA saw fit to delay The Sims 3. So all those ideas went back into the incubator.

One of the main things I want to do is design and build a custom neighbourhood on the model of the ‘integrated economy’ and ‘For Sims By Sims’ hoods out there for TS2. Some great examples of these are in the links section.

However it’s not clear when the neighbourhood editor will come out (if at all) and what the modding potential will be right after release. So until then, this blog will be a repository for my random ideas and inspirations. I have sporadic bursts of creativity and I have the need to write everything down in one place.

The name? Premades refers to the pre-packaged Sims that come with new hoods. Precepts is a cool word.