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.

Just another stream-of-consciousness post so my blog doesn’t go another month dormant (which it probably will, since the end-of-year exam period is coming up for me). I haven’t actually been playing TS3 lately, though I have a mod in the works that I’ve been experimenting with. Again, the lack of an EA hood editor (coming up on five months) doesn’t give me much motivation to play with premade templates, apart from making and testing stuff out. I say an EA one because it seems all but certain the community will come up with a solution before The Man does.

Not long ago, the Left 4 Dead 2 “boycott” amicably wound up (I hate to admit it, it seems like an instance where online petitions do work.) Now outrage is brewing and gamers are cracking out the signatures with the news that the PC version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 will not support dedicated servers – the tried and true model of multiplayer FPS gaming. A brief but amusingly weary summary can be found here. Naturally, this sort of news would not be easy to accept for casual gaming communities, competitive clans, modders and their fans. The developer, Infinity Ward, already indirectly responded to this controversy, rebuking ‘the modders and the tuners’ who want to ‘bifurcate the community’ in favour of a solution that will satisfy the majority of their audience. But is it necessarily good to alienate your most ardent fans in this way? Sound familiar?

Now, neither of these are actually games I play. I rented Call of Duty 2 AGES ago if that counts for anything. It’s just interesting to see that video games will always arouse strong and passionate opinions, and there are circumstances where a game company simply has to make concessions for its own sake. Interesting sort of interaction.

Also interesting how apart from the SecuROM fiasco (for which The Sims was only one game affected) EA seems to be largely immune to its community opinion. Outside of their official forums, is there any meaningful interaction or contact to speak of? I believe this dynamic is no doubt driven by the ‘silent majority’ who help keep Sims games on the bestseller lists constantly. I wish they’d speak up more.

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)

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? :)