• brsrklf@jlai.lu
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    5 months ago

    The Sims 4 is not quite a fan favorite. It is disappointing that they may be working on it for another 5-10 years

    There’s no way what they had in store for Sims 5 would have pleased the fans disappointed by Sims 4.

    Sims 4 was already a last minute attempt to correct course of something those fans never asked for. An always online multiplayer skinner box, probably barely simulating anything at all. They only shifted when the terrible SimCity 2013 crashed and burned.

    It was too little, too late, Sims 4 at release ended up the most incomplete release a Sims game ever had and even after many updates is still the most boring experience you could have with the series. Even the bugs are not the entertaining kind.

    Guaranteed, Sims 5 was going to try more of what Sims 4 was supposed to be.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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      5 months ago

      I really doubt Sims 5 would have been what Sims 4 tried. I’m reasonably confident it would have been a single player first game, and with that in mind would bring back the open world and that stuff. Would it have been good? Who knows. I doubt it’d be the dumb lobby thing that The Sims 4 was.

      • brsrklf@jlai.lu
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        5 months ago

        Life By You, published by Paradox was cancelled, for some undisclosed reason, not even to the developers themselves it seems. It was supposed to be close to release.

        There are other life sim projects in progress (the indie Paralives I think is the one gathering attention right now).

        • ampersandrew@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          All the footage we’ve ever seen of it was very frame-y, so I just assumed it was a technical mess that couldn’t be saved.

          • yamanii@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Paradox is the mess that can’t be saved, they just wanted to rush that thing but after the heat they took from Cities Skylines 2 they got cold feed and just cancelled everything.

            It was a damn shame since it was being made by the producer of Sims 3 too, very ambitious, was quite ugly but that’s what early access was for anyway.

            • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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              5 months ago

              The game delayed at least three times I believe, for several months each time. They weren’t being rushed. They missed deadline after deadline and still weren’t where they needed to be, so I’m assuming Paradox saw this as the core being broken and canning it, instead of just throwing more money into that hole. I can’t really blame them either. Everything we saw looked janky and not good. That was pre-release content of course, and I was still hopeful there was something worth it in there, but Paradox must not have.

    • shadowedcross@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      iirc we’ve known about Sims 5 since before PDX’s game got announced, but maybe not. The biggest competitor was always Paralives to me anyway, since it looks better and more polished.

  • BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I’m still on the Sims 3 because you can get it origin free still, but I feel like the Sims treadmill is just buying mostly the same game over and over. There’s a lot of franchises like that, but I feel like it’s a lot harder for a game like the Sims with the demographics it serves to keep creating reasons to upgrade.

  • 242@lemmy.cafe
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    5 months ago

    I thought the entire Sims system was releasing a new game and then dropping the same 50 DLC until the next one was ready to repeat the cycle. I guess they’ll just milk Sims 4 forever?

    • adarza@lemmy.ca
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      5 months ago

      they’re probably still making ‘enough’ money off the addons and dlc for the current one (which itself is now free-to-play), that they don’t have to remake it again to resell remade addons and extras again…yet.

    • Rakonat@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      The only reason they were making a sequel was because there was going to be a competitor to their 10 year old game that would absolutely take the market share of this niche. Now that the competition died they can put the devs back to making a bunch of overpriced DLC for another 10 years or when ever another viable competitive game shows up on their radar.

      EA knows their current Sims game has been a flop they had to make the base game free to play. They wanted a games as service model but 2013 SimCity had such a strong backlash they had to scramble to make it something else and hope no one noticed. So here we are with an underperforming game from a series that pretty much always topped the charts when it released a new game or expansion pack. Thats how bad they screwed up.

  • Pika@sh.itjust.works
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    5 months ago

    Honestly, this was likely for the best. With the direction of sims 4, I don’t think Sims 5 would have done well, yes I was interested in it but, I fully expected it would be a game I was passing on due to corporate greed. Sims 4 was missing critical core mechanics for the sims games, relying on DLC to add it in postfacto. it has the same clock bugs that sims 3 had, without the requirement of the game being a longlasting game with a lot of items, and was missing base items that was logical that a life sim would have (like alarm clocks… lol) I think them releasing the sims 5 with that tendancy in their studio would mark the end of the genre for them, and I think they knew that.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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      5 months ago

      The Sims 4 was an online game forced to be single player. That’s why it’s so broken. Lots have to be instanced, unlike 3, because they were basically lobbies for players. Showing them all would have been too much data.

      This isn’t to say The Sims 5 would have been good but, assuming it was single player from the start, it couldn’t have been worse. I would have pirated it probably.

  • HereToLurk@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Wonder how this will affect Paralives. Less competition with this and Life By You gone, but possibly bigger expectations from disappointed fans?

    • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
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      5 months ago

      I don’t think Paralives will even come close to the same scope of the Sims franchise and people looking for an alternative will find something much simpler, which is probably not what they were looking for since a lot of people were already disappointed by the Sims 4 and how dumbed down it was.

      • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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        5 months ago

        If they built a rich simulation, that could make it appear larger without the extra manpower behind it. It’ll be interesting to see no matter what, assuming it also doesn’t get canceled.

    • Random Dent@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      You know what… if it turned out that they just sent it back to the lab because someone had the idea to try and get all the Sims to run on AI or something I honestly wouldn’t be surprised. It is EA after all.

      • taiyang@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        EA: “We’ve added AI to allow your Sim to take care of themselves entirely without your help! Pay $14.99 a month to watch you Sim feed itself, apply for jobs, build and furnish their own home! You don’t have to do anything, except purchase additional packs your Sim requests to live it’s best life. Sims AI, Because We Deserve This”

        Edit: wait, crap, I just described an idle clicker.

        • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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          5 months ago

          Honestly, a rich simulation human ant farm game could be pretty cool to chill out and watch. That’s sort of what The Sims is, except they’ll die if you don’t provide some input.

          (Also, why have we never gotten a SimAnt 2?)

          • taiyang@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Sim Ant 2 would have been too good for EA after they got the rights. Can’t monetize ants? (But look, this ant has a rare gacha Hawaiian shirt! So cool)

    • Pika@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      Now introducing, The Sims - Remastered! Now with an online community store to maximize your potential sim needs!