Well, the "Eco Living" trailer dropped a few days ago, as we all know. It doesn't look terrible to me. I mean, trash piles up, people can rummage in dumpsters...we get dumpsters...Death by Flies has come back for all those people who missed it, there's a smoggy industrial town, there are shipping container textures to put on homes to make it look like your sim is living in a genuine "container home," there's green roofs and solar panels and wind turbines...Yeah, it looks O.K.
However, I have one concern about this pack, one little gripe. From the looks of this initial trailer, it doesn't look like there was anything done to make playing with the world's polluted state as much fun as cleaning everything up. I saw no evidence of toxic waste/mutagenic ooze that could cause a sim to mutate or gain super powers, I saw no pollution-forged mutant monsters to have to deal with if you let the environment stay polluted or get worse. We saw plenty of Planeteers, but no evidence that we can also have a sim be Hoggish Greedly and jack the place up by polluting for profit...you know, a real antagonist for our eco-friendly sims to be able to push back against (a good role for a grown Malcolm Landgraab, actually...). The CAS offerings have a bit more edge to them than most other packs, but it doesn't look like there's much edge to the gameplay. No real potential for conflict or mayhem built into the pack's mechanics. It's just kind of After School Special/Commercial Break PSA environmentalism, and that's about it.
A new trailer or gameplay demo might prove me wrong, but from the initial trailer, it seems that there are a lot of lost opportunities with this pack. There's no real room (gameplay-wise) for an antagonist in this pack. There's no room for weirdness and freaky stuff happening. It's just a, "Hey, let's all reduce, reuse, recycle, upcycle, and clean energy our way to a sustainable future! Yay!" pack. And, yes, sustainable living is something we should all be aiming toward, but...I just wish this pack also had more of a dark/weird side to it too.
There is a song I hear, a melody from the past...
When I woke for the first time, when I slept for the last.
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Comments
Climate change is very important, especially with some now coming out to deny it (lol). I think the caring for the environment is equally very important, but it’s just one of those things that I don’t feel like makes for a good game experience in The Sims as a stand-alone expansion. I feel like we’re being offered to buy a dirty town for $40 so we can spend our time virtually cleaning it up. Turbines and solar panels are cool, but my Sims have too much money saved up as it is, how much more money do I need to physically spend to ensure they get even more of it? It’s a very one-sided pack. I would’ve loved to have an evil Sim with his army of slimes wrecking havoc on all of my good Sim’s efforts to clean things up. That to me is wacky, classic Sim gameplay.
IMHO, everything eco-living would have made an awesome side feature list to a pack with the greater theme of Sims changing every world around them in multiple ways (not just environmentally).
But I kinda do get what Maxis was going for here, and see why they wouldn't want to make the polluted world 'fun' to play.
Only problem is the newer Fallout games are Shooter-RPG hybrids and the older ones have a combat system that looks really clunky when I see it in gameplay and retrospective videos. With RPG combat systems, I prefer either a well-done hack-and-slash action-based system with no AI buddies or an old school JRPG turn-based system with maybe a few tweaks (a timing system or strategic field movement or combo attacks...little tweaks, not big revolutionary upheavals). Whenever I've played RPG's with combat that veers too far off from that, it just leaves me cold. (It's 80% of the reason I'm not into Kingdom Hearts, with the other 20% being the gummy ship sections in the first game. They're not hard, they're actually dirt-easy if you put a wall of guns on the front of the ship and hold down the shoot button...which is no fun at all...) I'm very picky when it comes to combat systems in RPG's, since battles are at least half the gameplay. The stories in the Fallout games look interesting to play through...but the combat doesn't look fun at all to me, in either of its forms.
Back on topic, though...
Mainly, I'm disappointed in the lack of mutants, monsters, and anti-environment baddies in this expansion because I grew up with a lot of 90's action cartoons...and their propensity to either give their characters powers through toxic waste/mutagens or have at least one episode involving someone or something getting mutated. I want to be able to put my sims through those sorts of plotlines too...but if the pack lacks that stuff, I am once again out of luck for content that corresponds to the stories I like to tell for yet another pack. Also, I loved Captain Planet growing up, and being able to make a sim who looks like Captain Planet, but no way in gameplay terms to actually have his antagonists active in the game doing their thing is heart-breaking. Do you know what Captain Planet would be like without those iconic villains? It would just be the Planeteers cleaning up the environment and clowning on Mati for having the lame power.
...But, I'm getting carried away now...
I like to build stuff
Let them shun, I'm pretty sure they are the minority, and the majority would enjoy a pack with a balancing game-play like good vs evil, it's such a good narrative that is always fun to play, but it seems there is lack of evil.
I'm just going to go back to my tormented vampires who cry about drinking plasma from other sims, and have my evil sims go through all sorts of gameplay hoops to murder other sims (which can take 3 sim days or more and he can't even leave the venue or that sim will be no longer there yaaaaaawn......) and feel smug about it.
We need a decent Good vs Bad &
Heroes vs Villains in the game.
You mention the word virus now days TRIGGERED
Break in TRIGGERED
Alien invasion TRIGGERED
This list is endless and the nerfing they did to the aliens and vampires are proof.
This pack was perfect for that mutant as you say, crime, apocalypse, zombie, or any of those things pack. But nope. Go clean and be happy.
I can only hope if ever get wearwolves and zombies they are done justice. The magic pack was a big Dissapointment for me as an occult lover. They don't feel like the backwoods witches I wanted. More like Harry Potter style humans with a bit of magic.
Did you see what happened to even the repo man in university? I never even saw him and probably never will because that's how hard it is to get him to come.
How is an game with Vampires and Magic Casters realistic? Those parts are as unrealistic as Nuclear mutations.
I was a bit worried about this....