Very surprising. The game looked like it had a lot of potential and could’ve been the most popular sims alternative, but it’s suddenly been cancelled.
I guess no game is better than a shitty one, but can someone please make a modern sims game that’s not EA and their endless DLC crap.
I mean, you say that, but a new player looking to get into Stellaris or CKII is looking at a $300 bill if they want all the content. In fact that’s what prevented me from getting into Stellaris, I own the base game, but when I discovered I’d need to shell out an additional several hundred dollars, even during a sale, for not only new species but just for base game mechanics, I stopped in my tracks.
Compare with Civilization, I own Civ V and Civ VI and all the released content for each, pretty sure I bought each of those for less than $20.
Endless DLC is literally the paradox business model. I happen to find it an acceptable compromise for continuous development of the games I like, at least the way paradox does it, but lets not pretend like this was going to be different from a business model perspective.
I feel like the amount stuff paradox are putting behind dlc is better than what it was before either games like ck2, however, the quality of the stuff in the dlc has gotten a lot worse
CK2 dlc was mid as fuck. Every single one adds a few features at most that don’t meaningfully change anything, just enhance things slightly. Some changes are borderline QOL but all of them leaving you with fomo when you watch streamers. It’s always been bullshit and predatory.
While true, I think Paradox does it better than Maxis. First, you almost always get some stuff for free. Second, it’s usually more substantial (or it’s art packs or whatever, which you don’t need but are fairly cheap). Would this game do it well? Who knows. Just having them competition would force them and Maxis to do better though.
All this said, I pirate most of the DLCs for Paradox games. I’ll buy the first few near release, but when I want to revisit a game after a few years, likely just for one playthrough or less, I don’t feel like spending $100+ to catch up, and I’d like to see where the new content went. I’ve given them plenty of money where I feel no moral issue with doing so.
My problem with endless DLC isn’t the cost, but the fragmented result of each ‘feature’ needing to stand separately and not interact with any other DLC feature. You end up with some really janky gameplay where nothing works intuitively and the stuff you can implement is all hurt by those limitations.
Not to mention the sheer code hell that all this results in with an exponential increase in possible install states to account for. Which the devs just give up on and the game becomes a little buggier with every new expansion.
Honestly think they should move to a sort of MMO model. Charge for the most recent expansions and older DLC eventually gets merged into the base game. Cuts down on complexity and most of your sales will happen in the first year anyway.
While PDX-published games may suffer from the decouplement of features between DLCs, at the very least PDS-developed games have a built-up expertise when it comes to managing this.
As for MMO model, it’s a hard sell because purchased things get made “free” for new comers. It’s one of the crux that EU4 faced when they rolled many DLC features into the base game.
I’m keeping an eye on this but I really hate the anime blush on every character
Lol, I’m not sure I’d describe it as anime, but I understand what you mean. Personally I quite like the aesthetic of it. It makes them feel just the right amount of fake to me that I won’t feel bad deleting the pool ladder. I can totally see how it would bug you though. Hopefully it’ll be easy to mod out, or at least turn down.
boo. Oh well, at least there’s that other sims-like in development i’m blanking on the name of.
I wonder how that’s going. When the devs started they were clearly overpromising things that they thought would be cool to have without any idea of how long it would take to implement them. I always suspected it would remain in development for many many years, but apparently it’ll be playable next year.
Well HECK! I have been advertising this game to every gamer I know, finally a Sims game that’s not EA… :( I was very hopeful when they delayed without a new date, just take your time and get it right. Dang, I was really looking forward to this
Paradox is just as bad as EA with DLC. Look at Stellaris, or Victoria, or cities skylines, or surviving mars
They sell you a product at a fair price without putting it behind a loot box, unless I missed something. I don’t think that makes Paradox “just as bad” because they make a lot of DLC that you could choose to not purchase.
TBF, when it comes to The Sims specifically, that’s the same as EA’s model: a bunch of DLC/expansions you don’t have to buy.
Cities Skylines 2 launch is worse than any EA launch I can remember. Even that sense of accomplishment horseshite. They released a paid DLC 5 months after launch while not dealing with core functionality bugs.
They sell you 15 minor features for $10 each and then every tutorial/gameplay video you watch has 5-10 features you’ve never seen before. It fills you with fomo and when you do cave you end up spending $80 to make a $40 game slightly more interesting. It’s predatory as fuck, paradox can go fuck themselves.
Sorry, I really hate paradox.
Realistically, at least for Stellaris, Paradox updates the game for free for everyone that breaks everyone’s in-progress games and breaks key features of the game by fundamentally changing how the mechanics work. Then they sell the DLC that is absolutely necessary to fix whatever they broke for people who don’t own the DLC.
Paradox creates the problem and then sells the solution.
Yeah. Pdx went the same shit route as EA by now, even have subscriptions too. Doesn’t matter if I have to through hundreds of bucks at EA or Pdx for a single game. It’s both the same shitty principle.
It’s a shame. But based on what I saw about it, it looked like maybe they had some delusions about using LLMs for character dialogue, which seems like an insanely complex feature to build into an already complex game.
Why? It can’t be much more than using one of those chatbot girlfriends. I know there could be delays as it takes time to generate but it could have a local version that just is a stripped down version that just processes dialogue. Probably requires a beefy GPU though.
You’d need the conversations to be highly constrained in order to not break the game. Currently there are too many ways of “jailbreaking” LLMs. It was too much of a scope creep for a game which was already biting off a lot more than most studios could chew.
constrained in order to not break the game.
While that’s true, I suspect that whoever gets there first will get a free pass in the court of public opinion, so long as it’s a single player game.
“Look how awful my Sims are” is already a recurring gag hobby, anyway.
There already are a small number of games utilizing LLMs. Yes it‘s immersion breaking from time to time but the worst part is the credit system many of them use to pay for the API. If you go past your conversation limit, you‘ve got to pay extra.
Haha no worries. Did you see the Kickstarter for the sequel to Star Control 2?
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pistolshrimp/free-stars-children-of-infinity
