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.
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024
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Without endless dlc? Who do you think Paradox is???
They'd charge you for your sims' water bill if they could
Paradox DLC tends to have quite a bit of content in it though. Certainly more than EA tends to give you.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
I never played ck2 but I know that eu4 with and without dlc are like different games
For $500 I would bloody well hope so.
I still have hope for Paralives
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.
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A 64 bit version of Sims3 would fix a lot of the constraints of that game, but it'll never happen.
I don't even care about the DLC, I just want slightly less insane DRM. I can't play the sims 4 right now because of a server outage despite the game already being on my computer. Why do they even need DRM for a free game?
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.
I wouldn't give it a free pass if it ruined the gameplay and would have been easier for them not to implement.
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.
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Oof. Wasn't this the one that was going to have in-depth object customization? I was looking forward to it from a dollhouse-building perspective. Even if it wasn't great, having some competition might convince EA to allocate more dev resources to the Sims, which has ruthlessly embraced the "minimum viable product" philosophy for a long time.
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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.
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.
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I'm not really that upset considering it was going to end up the same as The Sims (with its content in DLC piecemeal) anyway, coming from Paradox.
It visually looked like an asset flip simulation shovelware game you can find all over Steam by searching for the shit with the worst reviews, too.
Should be noted that paradox was just publishing it, not developing
Sad. In a way, it is amazing that The Sims 3 is 15 years old now and still, no game is able to match it.
There's some ageless classics. HoMM3 came out 25 years ago and is still pretty much the top of its genre. Freespace2 more or less shut down the spacesim genre 25 years ago, as well...
boo. Oh well, at least there's that other sims-like in development i'm blanking on the name of.
My biggest complaint about Sims-likes is that the visual style always looks too serious. It gives me the feeling that whatever I'm going to do with my not-Sims, it's gonna be something that makes me regret my real life.
You wanna know what I did the last time I played the Sims 2 though? I repeatedly held parties at my Sim's house and then lured the guests into a room they couldn't get out of. I also used the moveobjects cheat to collect police cars whenever a cop showed up to shut the party down. By the time I was done I had amassed around 70 urns, many hysterical immortal Sims (Sims with households can't die while visiting someone's house in the Sims 2), 4 Police cars and a fire truck.
The Sims has a mischievous air to it that tickles the devil on your shoulder and begs you to listen to them. None of the Sims-likes I'm aware of seem to have the same air.
Edit: now I want to play the Sims again.
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Well, this is fucking depressing…
No surprise. I was really shocked when I saw the videos they released a while ago. Game ran like shit and looked even worse.
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