Premades and Precepts

Huge missed opportunity here. Here’s my list of suggested traits,
political correctness be damned. Almost all of them were derived from
the ‘opposite’ of the vanilla traits.

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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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Yay, no oppressive DRM! Rod Humble tells all. Of course, the copy protection remains, because EA aren’t THAT progressive.

What nefarious schemes will EA implement instead? Here are some ideas for them…

1) Intentionally program the game ‘broken’, and release a day-one patch while restricting its downloading as much as possible to genuine owners. Games for Windows Live, etc. Issue a statement on your official forums; don’t acknowledge what you did but apologise for the issues and then accuse people with broken games of piracy. Hilarity ensues.

2) Create an awesome bonus feature for your game that increases its replayability 500% OR makes the game so much more functional that it’s practically a necessity for all serious players. Restrict the Awesome Bonus with a one-time code packaged with new copies of the game. Gamers will complain: “It’s too Awesome! Why isn’t it in the game itself? I don’t want to download it!” Accuse the complainers of being pirates. Six months later, release the update for $10. Leave it out of the ‘game of the year’ edition just to piss off a few more people. Extra points if Awesome Bonus isn’t ready for three months.

3) Package the game with a proprietary content delivery system which is a mandatory install with the game. Make it impossible, or at least heavily frustrating, to play the game without the PCDS running in memory, chewing up system resources. Accuse anyone who complains of being pirates.

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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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.