@jooxis I think that we are long due having pets and weather in the base game. Start with cats and dogs and some rain and add other pets or weather trough other EPs. Farm animals in a farming EP and more wild animals in maybe a safari EP.
This way we could eliminate to have an actual Pets EP for the 5th time and weather for the forth
This is extremely unlikely to happen though..
They are a business, they want money. Pets and Seasons are BIG sellers so why include something like that in the base game when you can make money out of it?
Would be amazing to have pets and weather in the base game, but let's be realistic here, it's EA we are dealing with.
If they want to make money then they need to have a good game to sell first
Seems like they don't. I don't consider Sims 4 a good game, yet it still sells.
They spend approximately 3 years just making Pets. Even what you consider 'basic pets' takes a ton of work, and very few would be satisfied with only rain or simple weather. I wouldn't expect any of that to come in the base game. At least, not without serious backlash due to the simplicity.
This game can't be compared to the other games; the gameplay/mechanics are totally different and more complicated.
1. An EP always takes about 12 months in this iteration from what they've said (they were able to make an EP every 6 months previously. For The Sims 2 they did not have an extra studio like for The Sims 3 as well, it is just that they focused less on piecemealing content). Do you really think that they were developing pets for full 3 years?
2. I would love basic weather effects. Probably the only game here where we start off with eternal summer, but no rain, or clouds, or any change in the environment really.
3. What's more complicated? If anything it is a lot more simplified. A sim no longer has stats. A sim no longer has 5 traits that could cause clashing with other traits. Most traits are now mood based meaning that all they do is give a buff that can be overwritten by the environment easily, meaning AI will do less varied things. This is the first game where relationships seem to not be accounted for when behavior is set to free will as well, as the AI will almost never select to fight autonomously, even if their biggest enemy is sitting right next to them.
Most EPs take approximately 12 months. Pets (and maybe Seasons) is the exception. And yes, I believe it was developed for approximately 3 years, because they've told us so. It's not speculation, and has been that way for every Pets expansion. And no, they weren't making an EP in only 6 months. They were releasing one every six months, because there were two different teams, releasing packs alternatively. https://forums.thesims.com/en_us/discussion/923677/is-cats-and-dogs-the-reason-why-we-only-have-1-expansion-a-year I'll add a link to Grant's statement if I ever find it.
This game is more complicated than the average game due to the huge number of interactions and possible combinations. What other games allow so many (mostly random) interactions to occur in any order, at any time, with multiple characters? That's why it will always have bugs to some degree. The possibilites are endless, and that makes things complicated.
*In case it wasn't clear, we were comparing The Sims to other games, not TS4 to the previous iterations. Please read for context.
Seeing that SimGuruGrant is no longer a senior producer on Sims 4 and is now "working on a number of important and awesome Maxis things" that's not Sims 4 he could easily now be in charge of Sims 5.
Sims 4 went from "You Rule" to "One of the stories we want you to tell"
Seeing that SimGuruGrant is no longer a senior producer on Sims 4 and is now "working on a number of important and awesome Maxis things" that's not Sims 4 he could easily now be in charge of Sims 5.
Hope not. He was bad at being a Sr Producer for 4 don’t know why anyone thinks he would be better for a new game. This dude fought with players over dog houses, chose a talking toilet over functional elevators and has basically made all sorts of questionable decisions that always seem to end with people complaining. Let’s get someone qualified in the position, just because you’ve worked at Maxis for 10+ years doesn’t mean you are management material.
Seeing that SimGuruGrant is no longer a senior producer on Sims 4 and is now "working on a number of important and awesome Maxis things" that's not Sims 4 he could easily now be in charge of Sims 5.
Hope not. He was bad at being a Sr Producer for 4 don’t know why anyone thinks he would be better for a new game. This dude fought with players over dog houses, chose a talking toilet over functional elevators and has basically made all sorts of questionable decisions that always seem to end with people complaining. Let’s get someone qualified in the position, just because you’ve worked at Maxis for 10+ years doesn’t mean you are management material.
Exactly my thoughts.
A LOT of very poor decisions have been made when it comes to The Sims 4.
I am looking forward to The Sims 5 just so this Sims 4 limitations disaster can be over, but if he is leading it, I have to be very sceptical again.
Seeing that SimGuruGrant is no longer a senior producer on Sims 4 and is now "working on a number of important and awesome Maxis things" that's not Sims 4 he could easily now be in charge of Sims 5.
Hope not. He was bad at being a Sr Producer for 4 don’t know why anyone thinks he would be better for a new game. This dude fought with players over dog houses, chose a talking toilet over functional elevators and has basically made all sorts of questionable decisions that always seem to end with people complaining. Let’s get someone qualified in the position, just because you’ve worked at Maxis for 10+ years doesn’t mean you are management material.
He was one of the leads of the Sims 3 too.
A lot of his *decisions* were not as they said.
The talking toilet wasn’t *instead* of Elevators.
The VFX team did the talking toilet and no new animations were required.
Elevators would have required new animations.
He said that it was VFX only which is why they were done.
He has opinions but I think a lot of the decisions are a group effort.
Seeing that SimGuruGrant is no longer a senior producer on Sims 4 and is now "working on a number of important and awesome Maxis things" that's not Sims 4 he could easily now be in charge of Sims 5.
Hope not. He was bad at being a Sr Producer for 4 don’t know why anyone thinks he would be better for a new game. This dude fought with players over dog houses, chose a talking toilet over functional elevators and has basically made all sorts of questionable decisions that always seem to end with people complaining. Let’s get someone qualified in the position, just because you’ve worked at Maxis for 10+ years doesn’t mean you are management material.
He was one of the leads of the Sims 3 too.
A lot of his *decisions* were not as they said.
The talking toilet wasn’t *instead* of Elevators.
The VFX team did the talking toilet and no new animations were required.
Elevators would have required new animations.
He said that it was VFX only which is why they were done.
He has opinions but I think a lot of the decisions are a group effort.
A lead is lower rank than a Sr Producer. Grant was never a Sr Producer on Sims 3. As much as pack creation IS a group endeavor, the Sr Producer has a considerable amount of influence over production as a whole.
Can u link me the tweet in reference to the VFX thing? Like for real, I’m not going to take your word on that because VFX people don’t model or animate gameplay objects - and YES the talking toilets are animated. The level of animation required for an elevator; eh not a whole lot. The toilet wasn’t a whole lot either, but let’s not act like the Sims would be doing a cartwheel, backflip, forward and backward somersault to use a portkey elevator.
Everyone has opinions. They’re entitled to them, don’t care about that. He made a lot of objectively bad decisions, and instead of learning from those and improving things he threw shade via Twitter to make sure everyone knew he didn’t regret making those decisions. I’m serious about the VFX thing I want to see where he said that, because it’s hardly an excuse to not animate elevators. Last I heard he considered elevators akin to stairs and didn’t see the value in doing anything with them.
Seeing that SimGuruGrant is no longer a senior producer on Sims 4 and is now "working on a number of important and awesome Maxis things" that's not Sims 4 he could easily now be in charge of Sims 5.
Hope not. He was bad at being a Sr Producer for 4 don’t know why anyone thinks he would be better for a new game. This dude fought with players over dog houses, chose a talking toilet over functional elevators and has basically made all sorts of questionable decisions that always seem to end with people complaining. Let’s get someone qualified in the position, just because you’ve worked at Maxis for 10+ years doesn’t mean you are management material.
He was one of the leads of the Sims 3 too.
A lot of his *decisions* were not as they said.
The talking toilet wasn’t *instead* of Elevators.
The VFX team did the talking toilet and no new animations were required.
Elevators would have required new animations.
He said that it was VFX only which is why they were done.
He has opinions but I think a lot of the decisions are a group effort.
Making functional elevators aren't just a matter of animation. They would require work from both client engineers (as all build mode features do; for elevators they would need to work on how elevators are connected through different floors and deal with things like foundations, basements, skipped floors, different wall heights, etc.) and gameplay engineers (lots of logic involved - how they affect routing, how does a group of Sims wait/enter/exit the elevator at the same time, how they operate when Sims need to go to different floors, what if some Sims need to go up while others need to go down, etc.). Meanwhile talking toilets would not need any engineering work at all. I would be surprised if functional elevators aren't at least 10 times more expensive to make.
Seeing that SimGuruGrant is no longer a senior producer on Sims 4 and is now "working on a number of important and awesome Maxis things" that's not Sims 4 he could easily now be in charge of Sims 5.
Hope not. He was bad at being a Sr Producer for 4 don’t know why anyone thinks he would be better for a new game. This dude fought with players over dog houses, chose a talking toilet over functional elevators and has basically made all sorts of questionable decisions that always seem to end with people complaining. Let’s get someone qualified in the position, just because you’ve worked at Maxis for 10+ years doesn’t mean you are management material.
He was one of the leads of the Sims 3 too.
A lot of his *decisions* were not as they said.
The talking toilet wasn’t *instead* of Elevators.
The VFX team did the talking toilet and no new animations were required.
Elevators would have required new animations.
He said that it was VFX only which is why they were done.
He has opinions but I think a lot of the decisions are a group effort.
A lead is lower rank than a Sr Producer. Grant was never a Sr Producer on Sims 3. As much as pack creation IS a group endeavor, the Sr Producer has a considerable amount of influence over production as a whole.
Can u link me the tweet in reference to the VFX thing? Like for real, I’m not going to take your word on that because VFX people don’t model or animate gameplay objects - and YES the talking toilets are animated. The level of animation required for an elevator; eh not a whole lot. The toilet wasn’t a whole lot either, but let’s not act like the Sims would be doing a cartwheel, backflip, forward and backward somersault to use a portkey elevator.
Everyone has opinions. They’re entitled to them, don’t care about that. He made a lot of objectively bad decisions, and instead of learning from those and improving things he threw shade via Twitter to make sure everyone knew he didn’t regret making those decisions. I’m serious about the VFX thing I want to see where he said that, because it’s hardly an excuse to not animate elevators. Last I heard he considered elevators akin to stairs and didn’t see the value in doing anything with them.
There are no animations required for talking toilets. All of the animations were already in game. The only things that toilet had were visual effects like water and fireworks. It was a reply SimGuruGrant made from 2016, regarding the Talking Toilet article on Twitter.
As mentioned above, an Elevator would require whole new animations, engineering work for the Sims to route etc. and from what Grant was saying, the trade off wasn’t worth it (that said I would have much rathered functional elevator system than Kareoke)
Elevators for The Sims 2 & Sims 3, are from Open For Business. And that was a pack that had very few new animations (most of the shopping ones were in the base game).
One of the biggest advantages Sims 3 had was using the Sims 2 engine so they could reuse animations. The Sims 2 for example didn’t get new stair styles until the last Expansion/Stuff Pack. Sims 3 got them almost straight away. But it was very resource heavy to do and that’s why Sims 2 got it last.
Point I’m making though is they probably have the same budget for Sims 4 expansions as they did for Sims 3, but for everything new they want to do, they have to make their engine support it before they even get started.
Grant (or one of the devs can’t rememeber) was saying the other day on Twitter that Pets were really hard to get into The Sims 4, and most of the hard work was actually making the engine support them.
With The Sims 3, they already had the engine that supported them and even reused a bunch of animations on top of it.
I hope if we get a Sims 5 that EA can use the same engine as The Sims 4 but just build onto it like Sims 3 was build onto The Sims 2.
Doesn’t mean the game would be anything like The Sims 4, but I’d hate to keep hearing with the Sims 5 “our engine didn’t support it so we had to build it first” cos that seems to eat most of the budget.
Look at a pack like City Living or C&D. All that engine work and then we’re left with a pack is empty compared to the Sims 3 Pets and Late Night, all because they had to build the engine to support apartments and pets and festivals etc
I hope if we get a Sims 5 that EA can use the same engine as The Sims 4 but just build onto it like Sims 3 was build onto The Sims 2.
Doesn’t mean the game would be anything like The Sims 4, but I’d hate to keep hearing with the Sims 5 “our engine didn’t support it so we had to build it first” cos that seems to eat most of the budget.
I hope that they invest sufficient money into building an engine good for life simulation games FIRST. I mean this is EA, so that's unlikely, however if Sims 4 faces things such as simulation lag that they can't figure out how to fix, building something else on this engine would be a disaster.
This was not true for TS2 or TS1. But the release schedule was the same as TS3. The difference with TS3 is that more of their main team had to also do store content and stuff packs. And with TS4 they're doing gamepacks as well to maximize the earning potential, instead of just doing big expansions like TS1 era.
This game is more complicated than the average game due to the huge number of interactions and possible combinations. What other games allow so many (mostly random) interactions to occur in any order, at any time, with multiple characters? That's why it will always have bugs to some degree. The possibilities are endless, and that makes things complicated.
Any other simulation game. Ever played The Guild? In fact most The Sims interactions are "shallow" allowing it to be quite pointless. No matter the option for talk the animation will be the same and the influence on your relationship will be mostly the same. Ability to select which is just fluff for the player while the program itself shouldn't care.
As for not comparing to previous iterations, why shouldn't we? Why shouldn't we point out that both behavioral algorithm and animation select had to be a lot more complex for TS2 and TS3?
I hope if we get a Sims 5 that EA can use the same engine as The Sims 4 but just build onto it like Sims 3 was build onto The Sims 2.
Doesn’t mean the game would be anything like The Sims 4, but I’d hate to keep hearing with the Sims 5 “our engine didn’t support it so we had to build it first” cos that seems to eat most of the budget.
I hope that they invest sufficient money into building an engine good for life simulation games FIRST. I mean this is EA, so that's unlikely, however if Sims 4 faces things such as simulation lag that they can't figure out how to fix, building something else on this engine would be a disaster.
I think they would build the game using the engine but I think a lot of the bugs like Simulation Lag and the Jump Bugs are how the games are coded, not so much the engine.
The Sims 2 had a very annoying jump bug that plagued it for most of it's shelf life (I haven't seen it in the Mac version which I play which was fixed by the company that handled the Mac release) however, when I played on PC I often encountered it.
Yet I've never had it in The Sims 3, despite all the routing issues that game has.
So I think these kind of bugs are due to how the game is coded, not so much what engine it was used to build it?
I'm not 100% an expert of this though. I do know that even though The Sims 2 and 3 share the same engine, a lot if issues I have with The Sims 2 weren't in Sims 3. The Sims 3 has it's own issues for sure, but they weren't the same bugs. The only ones I have had that are the same in both is NPC's getting stuck doing nothing and I've had to reset them, and this somehow affects Sims who try to interact with them, I then have to reset them as well.
@LiELF no problem https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sims there's info on Wikipedia for sims as well, but generally the first sims outsold the others. The Sims 3 was a bigger release than 2.
I don't think I would trust this over the sims team and sims 2 isn't talked about also I think freeplay did better because its been the longest on going sims game and its free
I hope if we get a Sims 5 that EA can use the same engine as The Sims 4 but just build onto it like Sims 3 was build onto The Sims 2.
Doesn’t mean the game would be anything like The Sims 4, but I’d hate to keep hearing with the Sims 5 “our engine didn’t support it so we had to build it first” cos that seems to eat most of the budget.
I hope that they invest sufficient money into building an engine good for life simulation games FIRST. I mean this is EA, so that's unlikely, however if Sims 4 faces things such as simulation lag that they can't figure out how to fix, building something else on this engine would be a disaster.
This was not true for TS2 or TS1. But the release schedule was the same as TS3. The difference with TS3 is that more of their main team had to also do store content and stuff packs. And with TS4 they're doing gamepacks as well to maximize the earning potential, instead of just doing big expansions like TS1 era.
This game is more complicated than the average game due to the huge number of interactions and possible combinations. What other games allow so many (mostly random) interactions to occur in any order, at any time, with multiple characters? That's why it will always have bugs to some degree. The possibilities are endless, and that makes things complicated.
Any other simulation game. Ever played The Guild? In fact most The Sims interactions are "shallow" allowing it to be quite pointless. No matter the option for talk the animation will be the same and the influence on your relationship will be mostly the same. Ability to select which is just fluff for the player while the program itself shouldn't care.
As for not comparing to previous iterations, why shouldn't we? Why shouldn't we point out that both behavioral algorithm and animation select had to be a lot more complex for TS2 and TS3?
Sigh. This is why I said to please read for context. No one said you shouldn't compare TS4 with the previous iterations. However, I was responding to a statement someone made that had nothing to do with that, so it would be nice if you would read it to understand the point of that conversation.
Anyhow, like I said, this game is more complicated than the average game. You have said nothing to dispute that. I've never heard of the Guild, but I looked it up and it's still not comparable to how The Sims works. And if it was, it wouldn't qualify as the 'average game' that I'm referring to.
I'm not disputing whether the interactions are shallow or not, because again, that's beside the point that I was making. But you would've known that if...
Anyhow, like I said, this game is more complicated than the average game. You have said nothing to dispute that. I've never heard of the Guild, but I looked it up and it's still not comparable to how The Sims works. And if it was, it wouldn't qualify as the 'average game' that I'm referring to.
No, it has a full political economical and dynastic systems making interactions and AI required way above that of The Sims.
As for games, what are we counting as average? Are we including two button games such as "flappy bird"? Because then of course The sims is more complicated than the average. If we narrow it down to simulation genre, I would say likely it is a lot more simplistic than the average. Especially if we count simulation-strategy titles such as Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings. However I do not know what we are comparing it to. Which is why I would prefer to compare it to to specific game titles and not games as a whole. As games as a whole is a very vast and overpopulated spectrum that we can not calculate the complexity of.
Anyhow, like I said, this game is more complicated than the average game. You have said nothing to dispute that. I've never heard of the Guild, but I looked it up and it's still not comparable to how The Sims works. And if it was, it wouldn't qualify as the 'average game' that I'm referring to.
That's kind of disingenuous. What is the "average game"? How can that be defined exactly. Most games today are mobile games where you click a few buttons. Why even compare it to that in the first place...
The Sims is not more complex than other triple AAA games. That's what you should compare it to. It's definitely not the simplest, but is not as complex as lot of AAA titles being released today.
I hope if we get a Sims 5 that EA can use the same engine as The Sims 4 but just build onto it like Sims 3 was build onto The Sims 2.
Doesn’t mean the game would be anything like The Sims 4, but I’d hate to keep hearing with the Sims 5 “our engine didn’t support it so we had to build it first” cos that seems to eat most of the budget.
I hope that they invest sufficient money into building an engine good for life simulation games FIRST. I mean this is EA, so that's unlikely, however if Sims 4 faces things such as simulation lag that they can't figure out how to fix, building something else on this engine would be a disaster.
I think they would build the game using the engine but I think a lot of the bugs like Simulation Lag and the Jump Bugs are how the games are coded, not so much the engine.
The Sims 2 had a very annoying jump bug that plagued it for most of it's shelf life (I haven't seen it in the Mac version which I play which was fixed by the company that handled the Mac release) however, when I played on PC I often encountered it.
Yet I've never had it in The Sims 3, despite all the routing issues that game has.
So I think these kind of bugs are due to how the game is coded, not so much what engine it was used to build it?
I'm not 100% an expert of this though. I do know that even though The Sims 2 and 3 share the same engine, a lot if issues I have with The Sims 2 weren't in Sims 3. The Sims 3 has it's own issues for sure, but they weren't the same bugs. The only ones I have had that are the same in both is NPC's getting stuck doing nothing and I've had to reset them, and this somehow affects Sims who try to interact with them, I then have to reset them as well.
You can stop spreading that now. It’s been refuted numerous times in the past, and here it is again from a studio rep. Each game has it’s own engine it’s not like they copy and paste the whole thing into a new game. Making significant modifications to an engine that drastically changes what it’s capable of doing would therefore make it different.
Rumor says Frostbite 3 engine was being used for the next Sims game if the CEO has his way and has the new Atlas (SEED) program used in the next version. EA has plans to use Frostbite and the Atlas program for all their triple A games that are a part of "the service system" according to what Andrew said back in 2018. He has not said anything different since then so that is my guess.
The fact they dropped all 32 bit support furthers my belief that this is where the Sims is going - and supports this as Frostbite requires really good 64 bit gaming level systems.
"Games Are Not The Place To Tell Stories, Games Are Meant To Let People Tell Their Own Stories"...Will Wright.
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In REALITY, I simply exist.....
You can stop spreading that now. It’s been refuted numerous times in the past, and here it is again from a studio rep. Each game has it’s own engine it’s not like they copy and paste the whole thing into a new game. Making significant modifications to an engine that drastically changes what it’s capable of doing would therefore make it different.
Animations in TS3 is 1:1 to their TS2 counterparts. So yes, they copy pasted a lot into an new game.
Rumor says Frostbite 3 engine was being used for the next Sims game if the CEO has his way and has the new Atlas (SEED) program used in the next version. EA has plans to use Frostbite and the Atlas program for all their triple A games that are a part of "the service system" according to what Andrew said back in 2018. He has not said anything different since then so that is my guess.
The fact they dropped all 32 bit support furthers my belief that this is where the Sims is going - and supports this as Frostbite requires really good 64 bit gaming level systems.
Anthem developers struggled as much as they did due to Frostbite engine, as EA refused to teach them how to use it. I hope TS5 does not meet the same fate.
Comments
No idea what you're saying. I said "more in", not "more than". Also, they don't need to do anything, duh.
Seems like they don't. I don't consider Sims 4 a good game, yet it still sells.
Most EPs take approximately 12 months. Pets (and maybe Seasons) is the exception. And yes, I believe it was developed for approximately 3 years, because they've told us so. It's not speculation, and has been that way for every Pets expansion. And no, they weren't making an EP in only 6 months. They were releasing one every six months, because there were two different teams, releasing packs alternatively. https://forums.thesims.com/en_us/discussion/923677/is-cats-and-dogs-the-reason-why-we-only-have-1-expansion-a-year I'll add a link to Grant's statement if I ever find it.
This game is more complicated than the average game due to the huge number of interactions and possible combinations. What other games allow so many (mostly random) interactions to occur in any order, at any time, with multiple characters? That's why it will always have bugs to some degree. The possibilites are endless, and that makes things complicated.
*In case it wasn't clear, we were comparing The Sims to other games, not TS4 to the previous iterations. Please read for context.
Hope not. He was bad at being a Sr Producer for 4 don’t know why anyone thinks he would be better for a new game. This dude fought with players over dog houses, chose a talking toilet over functional elevators and has basically made all sorts of questionable decisions that always seem to end with people complaining. Let’s get someone qualified in the position, just because you’ve worked at Maxis for 10+ years doesn’t mean you are management material.
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Exactly my thoughts.
A LOT of very poor decisions have been made when it comes to The Sims 4.
I am looking forward to The Sims 5 just so this Sims 4 limitations disaster can be over, but if he is leading it, I have to be very sceptical again.
He was one of the leads of the Sims 3 too.
A lot of his *decisions* were not as they said.
The talking toilet wasn’t *instead* of Elevators.
The VFX team did the talking toilet and no new animations were required.
Elevators would have required new animations.
He said that it was VFX only which is why they were done.
He has opinions but I think a lot of the decisions are a group effort.
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A lead is lower rank than a Sr Producer. Grant was never a Sr Producer on Sims 3. As much as pack creation IS a group endeavor, the Sr Producer has a considerable amount of influence over production as a whole.
Can u link me the tweet in reference to the VFX thing? Like for real, I’m not going to take your word on that because VFX people don’t model or animate gameplay objects - and YES the talking toilets are animated. The level of animation required for an elevator; eh not a whole lot. The toilet wasn’t a whole lot either, but let’s not act like the Sims would be doing a cartwheel, backflip, forward and backward somersault to use a portkey elevator.
Everyone has opinions. They’re entitled to them, don’t care about that. He made a lot of objectively bad decisions, and instead of learning from those and improving things he threw shade via Twitter to make sure everyone knew he didn’t regret making those decisions. I’m serious about the VFX thing I want to see where he said that, because it’s hardly an excuse to not animate elevators. Last I heard he considered elevators akin to stairs and didn’t see the value in doing anything with them.
Making functional elevators aren't just a matter of animation. They would require work from both client engineers (as all build mode features do; for elevators they would need to work on how elevators are connected through different floors and deal with things like foundations, basements, skipped floors, different wall heights, etc.) and gameplay engineers (lots of logic involved - how they affect routing, how does a group of Sims wait/enter/exit the elevator at the same time, how they operate when Sims need to go to different floors, what if some Sims need to go up while others need to go down, etc.). Meanwhile talking toilets would not need any engineering work at all. I would be surprised if functional elevators aren't at least 10 times more expensive to make.
There are no animations required for talking toilets. All of the animations were already in game. The only things that toilet had were visual effects like water and fireworks. It was a reply SimGuruGrant made from 2016, regarding the Talking Toilet article on Twitter.
As mentioned above, an Elevator would require whole new animations, engineering work for the Sims to route etc. and from what Grant was saying, the trade off wasn’t worth it (that said I would have much rathered functional elevator system than Kareoke)
Elevators for The Sims 2 & Sims 3, are from Open For Business. And that was a pack that had very few new animations (most of the shopping ones were in the base game).
One of the biggest advantages Sims 3 had was using the Sims 2 engine so they could reuse animations. The Sims 2 for example didn’t get new stair styles until the last Expansion/Stuff Pack. Sims 3 got them almost straight away. But it was very resource heavy to do and that’s why Sims 2 got it last.
Point I’m making though is they probably have the same budget for Sims 4 expansions as they did for Sims 3, but for everything new they want to do, they have to make their engine support it before they even get started.
Grant (or one of the devs can’t rememeber) was saying the other day on Twitter that Pets were really hard to get into The Sims 4, and most of the hard work was actually making the engine support them.
With The Sims 3, they already had the engine that supported them and even reused a bunch of animations on top of it.
I hope if we get a Sims 5 that EA can use the same engine as The Sims 4 but just build onto it like Sims 3 was build onto The Sims 2.
Doesn’t mean the game would be anything like The Sims 4, but I’d hate to keep hearing with the Sims 5 “our engine didn’t support it so we had to build it first” cos that seems to eat most of the budget.
Look at a pack like City Living or C&D. All that engine work and then we’re left with a pack is empty compared to the Sims 3 Pets and Late Night, all because they had to build the engine to support apartments and pets and festivals etc
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I hope that they invest sufficient money into building an engine good for life simulation games FIRST. I mean this is EA, so that's unlikely, however if Sims 4 faces things such as simulation lag that they can't figure out how to fix, building something else on this engine would be a disaster.
This was not true for TS2 or TS1. But the release schedule was the same as TS3. The difference with TS3 is that more of their main team had to also do store content and stuff packs. And with TS4 they're doing gamepacks as well to maximize the earning potential, instead of just doing big expansions like TS1 era.
Any other simulation game. Ever played The Guild? In fact most The Sims interactions are "shallow" allowing it to be quite pointless. No matter the option for talk the animation will be the same and the influence on your relationship will be mostly the same. Ability to select which is just fluff for the player while the program itself shouldn't care.
As for not comparing to previous iterations, why shouldn't we? Why shouldn't we point out that both behavioral algorithm and animation select had to be a lot more complex for TS2 and TS3?
True. Most of them are merely a series of animations that a player queues up. This pretty much amounts to 90% of the gameplay aspect during live mode.
Yeah, he is the guru I disagree with more overall.
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I think they would build the game using the engine but I think a lot of the bugs like Simulation Lag and the Jump Bugs are how the games are coded, not so much the engine.
The Sims 2 had a very annoying jump bug that plagued it for most of it's shelf life (I haven't seen it in the Mac version which I play which was fixed by the company that handled the Mac release) however, when I played on PC I often encountered it.
Yet I've never had it in The Sims 3, despite all the routing issues that game has.
So I think these kind of bugs are due to how the game is coded, not so much what engine it was used to build it?
I'm not 100% an expert of this though. I do know that even though The Sims 2 and 3 share the same engine, a lot if issues I have with The Sims 2 weren't in Sims 3. The Sims 3 has it's own issues for sure, but they weren't the same bugs. The only ones I have had that are the same in both is NPC's getting stuck doing nothing and I've had to reset them, and this somehow affects Sims who try to interact with them, I then have to reset them as well.
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I don't think I would trust this over the sims team and sims 2 isn't talked about also I think freeplay did better because its been the longest on going sims game and its free
Sigh. This is why I said to please read for context. No one said you shouldn't compare TS4 with the previous iterations. However, I was responding to a statement someone made that had nothing to do with that, so it would be nice if you would read it to understand the point of that conversation.
Anyhow, like I said, this game is more complicated than the average game. You have said nothing to dispute that. I've never heard of the Guild, but I looked it up and it's still not comparable to how The Sims works. And if it was, it wouldn't qualify as the 'average game' that I'm referring to.
I'm not disputing whether the interactions are shallow or not, because again, that's beside the point that I was making. But you would've known that if...
No, it has a full political economical and dynastic systems making interactions and AI required way above that of The Sims.
As for games, what are we counting as average? Are we including two button games such as "flappy bird"? Because then of course The sims is more complicated than the average. If we narrow it down to simulation genre, I would say likely it is a lot more simplistic than the average. Especially if we count simulation-strategy titles such as Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings. However I do not know what we are comparing it to. Which is why I would prefer to compare it to to specific game titles and not games as a whole. As games as a whole is a very vast and overpopulated spectrum that we can not calculate the complexity of.
That's kind of disingenuous. What is the "average game"? How can that be defined exactly. Most games today are mobile games where you click a few buttons. Why even compare it to that in the first place...
The Sims is not more complex than other triple AAA games. That's what you should compare it to. It's definitely not the simplest, but is not as complex as lot of AAA titles being released today.
Actually @jackjack_k,
According to Grant The Sims 2 and The Sims 3 do not share the same engine.
You can stop spreading that now. It’s been refuted numerous times in the past, and here it is again from a studio rep. Each game has it’s own engine it’s not like they copy and paste the whole thing into a new game. Making significant modifications to an engine that drastically changes what it’s capable of doing would therefore make it different.
The fact they dropped all 32 bit support furthers my belief that this is where the Sims is going - and supports this as Frostbite requires really good 64 bit gaming level systems.
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Animations in TS3 is 1:1 to their TS2 counterparts. So yes, they copy pasted a lot into an new game.
Anthem developers struggled as much as they did due to Frostbite engine, as EA refused to teach them how to use it. I hope TS5 does not meet the same fate.