Premades and Precepts

I found out through Simprograms that Jeff Green, former member of Department Sims over at EA and current EA.com editor, has a Mailbag where you can send in questions. Questions on anything! I thought to myself, there’s no way I’m passing up such an opportunity to rant a little about Sims paysites. The world must know…

Anyway, here’s the contents of my short letter, preserved for online posterity.

(And in case it ever gets a response…but I’m not very optimistic.)

Dear Jeff,
I love The Sims 3, but we fans of The Sims have had to put up with paysites for years. These sites make a tidy profit from selling unlicensed user-made content and mods. As a lifelong PC gamer and modder, it disturbs me that The Sims is virtually the only modern PC franchise where paysites operate so openly and rampantly. I’m not seeing a Dragon Age or Battlefield 2 paysite taking off any time soon, either – it’s just The Sims where you’re ‘allowed’ to stick a price tag on your pixels and get away with it. My question is, why does EA turn a blind eye to Sims paysites? Selling modified game files breaks all sorts of IP laws and the game’s license agreement to boot, so it’s entirely within your rights to be cracking out the legal threats and busting these scumbags. Instead, I see paysites getting endorsed on the official forums and their representatives invited to fan events. What gives?
–Ryan D.

Additional remarks:

• If you search Google for “dragon age paysites” and “battlefield 2 paysites”, guess what? All roads lead to The Sims. That’s how idiosyncratic this problem is.
• If anything the second-to-last sentence is too hot for EA! However, it is factual. Here’s my evidence should I need to back the claims up:

TS3 forum sticky: Custom Content Sites – Share em’ with us! [sic]

• Save parsimonious.org, all the sites listed withhold a portion of their content from non-paying customers. I believe this advertisement is a pretty prominent endorsement of their continuing operation.
• The PMBD definition of paysites: “a paysite is any site that offers user-created content that you must pay for, whether through a donation or a subscription. If it is not freely available to all, it is a pay item.”

Another sticky: SIMPOSIUM Write-ups and Reviews from the attendees

• Both The Sims Resource and Holy Simoly are paysites whose agents attended this recent event. This was just the most recent one: paysites have attended past events, and if nothing changes, future Sims events too. It’s a bit like a cop inviting a gang lord on a skiing trip, isn’t it? (Don’t tell me, I suck at analogies).
• TSR is definitely the worse offender of the two, being an incorporated business and all. That’s just the tip of the murky iceberg that is The Sims Resource.

That’s all I’ve got today. Well, seeing Jeff Green’s name makes me want to go and watch some Curb Your Enthusiasm, so I think I will now. You know, I keep meaning to actually post some screenshots of my TS3 games or something up on this site. I’m sure I’ll eventually get around to it.

How should Sims look? As I’ve said before I’m not heavy on the use of  custom content overload. But I’m also totally not original, and will just randomise most of the time. It’s trickier to roll for style, though.

What should dictate style? I’ve started thinking about these things, TS3-wise:

• Traits - obvious things, like an evil Sim will wear black, or an outdoorsy sim will wear shorts and skimpy clothes to soak up that sun. Slobs won’t really care what they look like, etc.
• Interests - rather more abstract. I actually looked at Interests for inspiration in TS2 quite often.
• Fashionable friends - Sims will copy the style of their best friends if they are popular. (Here’s my hoping that Sims 3 socialising will be more clique-y like real life, so we can have real social groups. It was always a bit more detached in TS2)

One thing I started to randomize in TS2 was baldness and glasses. A nice touch of realism. Basically at each male Sim’s age transition (or when I get around to playing them) I would roll for baldness. The older they are, the more likely they are to go bald. Same for glasses.

The fun part is deciding how they will cope with their baldness. Some might shave their heads. Others may wear hats. Some might choose the combover! Again, this is based on their pre-existing fashion tendencies and what I think would suit them. Similarly for glasses, choosing the type of glasses they wear is based on their personality and fashion ’set’.

The  appearance of TS3 Sims seems to be a mildly controversial topic. I actually think they look kind of weird now. Especially the children. But I can see why they changed their aesthetic – it makes it easier to make Sims resembling real-life people. Particularly, the fact that you can make Sims with wider heads makes up for their “Sims of the Corn” appearance.

I think it’s partially because we haven’t seen them moving very much. TS2 Sims always had an undercurrent of activity and excitement which was only really obvious when you saw them flailing about. I know I always look awkward when frozen in pictures.

I just wanted to put in a shout-out for Hook’s RandomStuff. I’ve been using randomstuff for ages for choosing names and even randomizing appearances in TS2. Basically I configured the text file to give a number for each preset – face 4, brow 6, eyes 10, nose 12, etc. Unlike townie generation, which just chooses from a pool of 27 faces (I think) you can create unique-looking Sims in CAS very quickly by randomizing the presets.

It will be interesting to see how face generation works in TS3. Hopefully the engine is a little more chaotic and each facial feature will be randomized, rather than getting the same couple of dozen faces. I’m not big on obsessing with genetics (that’s a topic for another whole post) but I like seeing variations.

As for TS3, from what we’ve seen of the screenshots, Sim faces are overall smoother. Although they’re all premades… I wonder if we’ll be seeing the return of the ‘uglyface townie’ phenomenon. Personally I prefer plasticky soulless-eyed wax dolls over the angular faces, ridiculous noses, and red mohawks/mismatched outfits of TS2’s townie generating. Well, the last may still return.