Wasn’t it the last Sims games made by Maxis as a separate studio? Isn’t that why everything after it felt so lifeless?
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It was the last major Sims title released while Will Wright was still with the company. That would explain it.
Maxis continues to exist as a studio under EA, but most of the original people are gone, including the founders.
Will Wright was still there for Spore, so everything he touched was not gold. It’s supposed to be a whole universe and it’s barely a simulation of anything, somehow he forgot to design a game around it.
And now he’s hopped on the Blockchain/NFT train…
Spore was alright for the time. It looks like they cut a lot to get it over the line but it was a good concept and ok-ish.
I don’t think “for the time” is that relevant here. My major problem with it is how shallow it is. All 5 phases are so repetitive, with so little variations and so little to do.
The only good things about it were the editors, those were impressive, especially the creature editor. But it’s just cosmetic, mechanics are so poor almost nothing emerges from it. It’s quite disappointing for designers that have been major actors of the simulation genre forever.
The only thing that stops me from playing the sims 2 as my main is that Sims outside of the current household don’t age and if you ever achieve platinum status (which is surprisingly easy) there’s no challenge in the game anymore. Because needs barely matter anymore.
I was once trying to do a “realistic” run with my sim starting in a trailer park and eventually working my way up the property ladder. I got platinum before i moved out of the trailer.
3 would be the best if it was stable and had the moodlet system of 4. At least for how I want to play the Sims.
Yeah, pretty much. The best Sims game doesn’t exist, it’s a Frankenstein monster that would take bits of the 4 games.
I love the idea of 3 with the open city and NPC progression, but wow this game’s an unstable glitchy mess. It’s not even close to be playable without many unofficial fixes, and even then, it runs like shit.
The only things I’d take from 4 would be maybe moods (nice to have, I guess) and the more organic body models, with more seemless morphs. 4’s gameplay is boring as hell, nothing interesting ever happens. And they got rid of create-a-style which is a huge creativity downgrade.
Why the heck did nobody yet develop an alternative like we’ve seen with SimCity/City skylines?!
They would make so much money and fuck EA.
Paradox seemed like the ones to do it, what with publishing Cities Skylines, but unfortunately their life sim was canceled.
Paralives is still going strong in development, though, with a pretty constant stream of updates. Really hoping that one sees the light of day. They’ve already got a pretty impressive building system working, but they’ve got some big ambitions, particularly when it comes to adaptive interactions with character heights.
There are several projects trying to do their own life sim. One that was supposed to be published by Paradox was cancelled recently, shortly before planned release, and to the surprise of the dev team apparently.
This is not an easy genre to develop for, lots of things can go wrong and it might be hard to find a good balance between boring and unmanageable feature creep.
Even Cities Skyline devs had a headstart, they already had a successful transport sim before they tried to fill the smoking crater left by EA SimCity’s explosion.