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.

(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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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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• 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.

Gradual aging is one of those “OMG wishlist features” that gets brought up a lot. I personally like life stages. It fits in well with my idea of ‘Simminess’; the fact that Sims are distinctly not human, but only resemble them in the entertaining ways.

But on the topic of gradual aging, I’m going to use my soapbox here and spell out exactly why gradual aging (GA) sucks.

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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?