Premades and Precepts

As I kind of just declared on this blog a few days ago, expansion packs suck. Let’s look back at TS2 for a moment: But which one, in retrospect, was the worst? In the spirit of negative awards, I present the AFAs – the Aspiration Failure Awards for The Sims 2.

If you agree or disagree with me, feel free to comment.

DISCLAIMER: These are just my personal opinions. As I’m a storytelling player more than a gamer or modder, that’s the perspective from which I’ll approach my choices. Also, I completely ignored the mods that fixed many of the problems I mention. EA/Maxis didn’t provide those; the community did.

On with the awards…

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As we approach the release of TS3 I’d like to give a shout out to all the sensationalist media outlets and moral crusaders. Your misinformed insights and biased reports bring joy to all gamers. I know that the game isn’t out yet, but if most ‘angry’ critics don’t bother to play the games they’re complaining about, why should I?

Here’s ten fresh controversies for the nutters with microphones. (Keep in mind some of my suggestions are actually saner than others. I needed ten things, OK?)

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So, somewhere in development EA dropped the Entertainment career – it seems. Future EP, maybe? Possibly involving some Stars that are Super? I have to admit that I didn’t buy the last two EPs for The Sims, Making Magic and Superstar. As I’ve said in the past, I am a realist player. Letting everyone be famous and practise magic is not really that fun for me. If such an EP comes out in the future, I’m unlikely to buy them…unless awesome objects make up for the undesirable gameplay.

Damn you EA! Always putting neat new objects into expansion packs I have no intention of buying!

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’.

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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Calendars are iffy things. They’re pretty much critical for running ‘governed’ hoods and they add a nice sense of immersion – readers can sense the time passing. However, the real world doesn’t translate well into the Sims’ when it comes to the calendar.

I like to world-build from a Sim perspective. Sims only perceive life in days and weeks (due to weekdays/weekends). So, the easiest calendar is one that counts what are known as ‘Sim Days’ from day 1 onwards. I don’t find this terribly immersive, although it works.

In TS2 I decided that 20 days would equal a ‘year’ (a tropical year I guess) due to the 5 day seasons. Complicated. It obviously messed up the days of the week with respect to seasons, especially because I played 3 day periods Prosperity-style). I ended up having to chart out the seven year cycle with a spreadsheet. (more…)

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.

Expansion packs are structured around introducing the player to new gameplay elements. In TS2 they did this by subtly forcing those new elements on you in a ham-handed fashion, usually through Wants. Prime example – the first EP, University, caused Teens to almost always roll the ‘Go to College’ want (apparently hard-coded too). If they went, they got a 10,000 asp point boost and a ‘green’ memory. If they didn’t the memory would be BAD – they went ‘Uneducated’. Being Uneducated was even a Fear most of the time!

So presuming you don’t like college, but like the instruments (for sake of example), you keep Uni installed and put up with the annoyances.

EVERY TS2 EP did this, mainly through those persistent wants to go on a date/buy a pet/hire so-and-so/go on vacation etc.

I’ve been thinking about how this relates to telling a neighbourhood storyline.

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