Maybe it is better to limit random townies number then? I think that currently in my savefiles I have too much ugly, weird and useless townies which I delete sometimes. In my opinion thay can optimalize this aspect than the number of lots because currently we have only 20 sims per loading screen and in the most of time, that sims are new (and have 0 progress and personality). I would like to have 2x less but better townies and 20% more lots. Maybe an option to reduce or increase the number of townies per loading screen will be also a nice improvement. Someone who has next gen console or better PC can have 40 townies per loading screen but someone with worse hardware can have 10 townies for example.
Customization would be great. I would personally be happy with zero townies.
Just curious, to those people who say they have 'empty' lots - do you mean they are empty of sims or empty of any buildings too? @simgirl1010@calaprfy (and anyone else this applies to).
I do have empty houses in my game (usually the more expensive ones, waiting endlessly for my sims to get rich lol) but I don't think I would like looking around areas of the world with no builds on.
@elanorbreton Empty of sims and building. I posted this earlier in the thread.
These are my empty lots.
I did have lots with empty houses but after the game started moving in the 'not in world' sims I bulldozed them all. I didn't even have the fill empty homes box checked. I'm going to try it again because I really do like the look of a well filled town.
Do you use MCCC? That also has options for moving sims in to empty homes.
I think it comes down to time and money. To keep up a certain pace of content release - and, clearly, the studio really is working flat-out, all the time, on new content - one has to set limits on "how much do we put in a pack." Every neighborhood, and every lot in every neighborhood, has to be created. Twelve lots lets them use their freshest ideas. Thirty-six, and either you don't get the freshest ideas, or you get a rush job or cookie-cutter stuff. And even at 12 lots, some ideas are thinner than others (that bar in Glimmerbrook is just kind of sad).
The scarcity of open lots on which to build is harder for me to get my head around, and it's a problem I feel. I like to make use of new BB assets, and often those work BEST in the world that shipped with the pack. Sure, I can use shoji screens in non-Japanese environments, and the furniture translates even more easily. But give me a space, in every neighborhood, that I can place my own lot in. I hate to have to pick a lot to do without to make space for my creations, or a family to evict to house my ever expanding extended Legacy family, their in-laws and offspring.
@elanorbreton Empty of sims and building. I posted this earlier in the thread.
These are my empty lots.
I did have lots with empty houses but after the game started moving in the 'not in world' sims I bulldozed them all. I didn't even have the fill empty homes box checked. I'm going to try it again because I really do like the look of a well filled town.
I did see that earlier, I just didn't know whether you meant empty of sims or empty of buildings.
Does your 80 sims include pre-mades? I'm just thinking of starting mine over; for some reason I have more bugs this time around than I did a few weeks ago when I was playing a different save. I'm just looking for ideas to optimise everything.
But give me a space, in every neighborhood, that I can place my own lot in. I hate to have to pick a lot to do without to make space for my creations, or a family to evict to house my ever expanding extended Legacy family, their in-laws and offspring.
I will be totally glad if they make 50% empty lots and 50% premade lots made by simmers for every expansion. If someone doesn't like to build, EA can also add some premade lots to the personal gallery as they did for Dine Out or Spa Day for example. I don't expect to have for example 30 fully built lots as in Windenburg.
The moral of the story is that you're guaranteed to anger someone whenever you have to deal with a super long-running game that's active many years after you launch it (heck, look at World of Warcraft, which came out in 2004 and which Blizzard has to keep current so it doesn't feel and look like a relic today compared to other MMO games). Keep it accessible and people complain about the technical restraints. Keep up with developments in tech and game design and older players feel left behind or like they have to buy a new computer. You're pretty much boned either way.
Sorry, but the moral of the story is that games SHOULD NOT run for so long. This Games-As-A-Live-Service model may work for MMOs like WoW, but it's a terrible idea for single-player games. They should be released, expanded for a few years, and then move on to a new version.
I don't believe should be made to buy the same basic stuff such as weather over and over either. A basic weather system should be part of the base game like it's part of MOST games nowadays. Just because The Sims has been doing something for years, it doesn't mean it's a good thing.
If they keep up, they're going to end up killing the franchise, especially if competition comes out such as Paralives or whatever game Paradox is developing with Rod Humble.
See, I disagree with that idea. I love single-player games with massively long tails that are nearly endlessly expandable and get new content support many years after initial release form a good chunk of my actual gaming time.
I think of it as being like in the old days of stuff like model railroading. You'd buy the "starter set" which was usually a small oval loop of track and a small train (maybe even just a locomotive) to run on it. But if you went to the hobby shop or bought stuff by mail-order from magazines like Model Railroader you could get layouts like the one my stepfather had in the basement or that formed the backbone of the intro to Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, itself loosely modeled on Pittsburgh, where the show was filmed. Rolling stock, scale model houses and civic buildings, as much as your imagination and floor/table space would allow.
Indeed, Steam will happily sell you something like Train Sim World, which is basically model railroad meets computers, and there's a good reason flight sims have been a pillar of PC gaming for just about as long as home PC games have existed—the very first Microsoft Flight Simulator came out in October of 1982; the first MS-DOS based PC launched in 1981, and in the 40 years or so since, both officially supported and fan-made expansions have been part and parcel of that franchise. Simulation gaming did it first, but Paradox figured out you can do it pretty well with strategy games too. Crusader Kings only got a third installment because they reached the absolute limit of what the engine could do with CK2 (initially released in 2012) and it finally had to be rebuilt; I'm not sure Sims 4 is at that point yet (then again, neither were 2 or 3 when they were done.)
What's more, it's pretty obvious that model is wildly profitable—I wonder how much DLC the average player of such a game actually buys, but I know the enthusiasts (like me) can and will spend a ton of money on them, like hundreds of dollars, over the game's lifetime. As long as it's singleplayer and doesn't have mandatory online components (grouses angrily at both SimCity 2013 and Fallout 76), bring on the long-runners!
(he/him)
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@elanorbreton I only have a few pre-made families. The Goths in Willow Creek, the Pancakes in Oasis Springs, the Bjergsens in Windenberg, Vlad in Forgotten Hollow, the Heckings in Brindleton Bay, and Mr. Cahill in Strangerville. So 6 households.
For me I do not care how many neighborhoods they make for every single one of them will not be free and also have static lots and Having let say fifty neighborhoods is not necessarily an good thing it involving an search for something. It still limits my creativity as you run out of space real quick and some times moving an sim to another neighborhood may not serve an players purpose.
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The moral of the story is that you're guaranteed to anger someone whenever you have to deal with a super long-running game that's active many years after you launch it (heck, look at World of Warcraft, which came out in 2004 and which Blizzard has to keep current so it doesn't feel and look like a relic today compared to other MMO games). Keep it accessible and people complain about the technical restraints. Keep up with developments in tech and game design and older players feel left behind or like they have to buy a new computer. You're pretty much boned either way.
Sorry, but the moral of the story is that games SHOULD NOT run for so long. This Games-As-A-Live-Service model may work for MMOs like WoW, but it's a terrible idea for single-player games. They should be released, expanded for a few years, and then move on to a new version.
I don't believe should be made to buy the same basic stuff such as weather over and over either. A basic weather system should be part of the base game like it's part of MOST games nowadays. Just because The Sims has been doing something for years, it doesn't mean it's a good thing.
If they keep up, they're going to end up killing the franchise, especially if competition comes out such as Paralives or whatever game Paradox is developing with Rod Humble.
See, I disagree with that idea. I love single-player games with massively long tails that are nearly endlessly expandable and get new content support many years after initial release form a good chunk of my actual gaming time.
I think of it as being like in the old days of stuff like model railroading. You'd buy the "starter set" which was usually a small oval loop of track and a small train (maybe even just a locomotive) to run on it. But if you went to the hobby shop or bought stuff by mail-order from magazines like Model Railroader you could get layouts like the one my stepfather had in the basement or that formed the backbone of the intro to Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, itself loosely modeled on Pittsburgh, where the show was filmed. Rolling stock, scale model houses and civic buildings, as much as your imagination and floor/table space would allow.
Indeed, Steam will happily sell you something like Train Sim World, which is basically model railroad meets computers, and there's a good reason flight sims have been a pillar of PC gaming for just about as long as home PC games have existed—the very first Microsoft Flight Simulator came out in October of 1982; the first MS-DOS based PC launched in 1981, and in the 40 years or so since, both officially supported and fan-made expansions have been part and parcel of that franchise. Simulation gaming did it first, but Paradox figured out you can do it pretty well with strategy games too. Crusader Kings only got a third installment because they reached the absolute limit of what the engine could do with CK2 (initially released in 2012) and it finally had to be rebuilt; I'm not sure Sims 4 is at that point yet (then again, neither were 2 or 3 when they were done.)
What's more, it's pretty obvious that model is wildly profitable—I wonder how much DLC the average player of such a game actually buys, but I know the enthusiasts (like me) can and will spend a ton of money on them, like hundreds of dollars, over the game's lifetime. As long as it's singleplayer and doesn't have mandatory online components (grouses angrily at both SimCity 2013 and Fallout 76), bring on the long-runners!
It may be possible only if the developer shows dedication through proper and timely maintenance which for me EA/Maxis has not shown they are up to the task and looking at the handling of Sim City 2013 which was pretty poor and they did the opposite of what they said during its production that they support the game and then came the news the game was dead. EA/Maxis for only after one objective and that is profits and not dedication. So I do not see an viable long tail for this game and there is an lot of gimping which is not good.
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Sorry, but the moral of the story is that games SHOULD NOT run for so long. This Games-As-A-Live-Service model may work for MMOs like WoW, but it's a terrible idea for single-player games. They should be released, expanded for a few years, and then move on to a new version.
@Naus Agree. Especially games that were not designed to. The Sims 4 is cracking and it's been showing for years now, even if people don't like to admit it.
How much better the experience could be compared to what we have now is honestly one of the saddest things ever. People are like I don't mind this I don't mind that, but you know if certain things weren't so limited, or badly executed it would be a better experience for everyone no question.
The game is cracking as EA/Maxis does not tweak the game as often as they should but is quick to produce an pack.
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They need to give us CAW and stop punishing players who have systems who can handle large worlds I'd rather have 1 world with 50 lots than 5 worlds with 8-12 lots it should be my choice.
Sims 4 went from "You Rule" to "One of the stories we want you to tell"
The moral of the story is that you're guaranteed to anger someone whenever you have to deal with a super long-running game that's active many years after you launch it (heck, look at World of Warcraft, which came out in 2004 and which Blizzard has to keep current so it doesn't feel and look like a relic today compared to other MMO games). Keep it accessible and people complain about the technical restraints. Keep up with developments in tech and game design and older players feel left behind or like they have to buy a new computer. You're pretty much boned either way.
Sorry, but the moral of the story is that games SHOULD NOT run for so long. This Games-As-A-Live-Service model may work for MMOs like WoW, but it's a terrible idea for single-player games. They should be released, expanded for a few years, and then move on to a new version.
I don't believe should be made to buy the same basic stuff such as weather over and over either. A basic weather system should be part of the base game like it's part of MOST games nowadays. Just because The Sims has been doing something for years, it doesn't mean it's a good thing.
If they keep up, they're going to end up killing the franchise, especially if competition comes out such as Paralives or whatever game Paradox is developing with Rod Humble.
See, I disagree with that idea. I love single-player games with massively long tails that are nearly endlessly expandable and get new content support many years after initial release form a good chunk of my actual gaming time.
I think of it as being like in the old days of stuff like model railroading. You'd buy the "starter set" which was usually a small oval loop of track and a small train (maybe even just a locomotive) to run on it. But if you went to the hobby shop or bought stuff by mail-order from magazines like Model Railroader you could get layouts like the one my stepfather had in the basement or that formed the backbone of the intro to Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, itself loosely modeled on Pittsburgh, where the show was filmed. Rolling stock, scale model houses and civic buildings, as much as your imagination and floor/table space would allow.
Indeed, Steam will happily sell you something like Train Sim World, which is basically model railroad meets computers, and there's a good reason flight sims have been a pillar of PC gaming for just about as long as home PC games have existed—the very first Microsoft Flight Simulator came out in October of 1982; the first MS-DOS based PC launched in 1981, and in the 40 years or so since, both officially supported and fan-made expansions have been part and parcel of that franchise. Simulation gaming did it first, but Paradox figured out you can do it pretty well with strategy games too. Crusader Kings only got a third installment because they reached the absolute limit of what the engine could do with CK2 (initially released in 2012) and it finally had to be rebuilt; I'm not sure Sims 4 is at that point yet (then again, neither were 2 or 3 when they were done.)
What's more, it's pretty obvious that model is wildly profitable—I wonder how much DLC the average player of such a game actually buys, but I know the enthusiasts (like me) can and will spend a ton of money on them, like hundreds of dollars, over the game's lifetime. As long as it's singleplayer and doesn't have mandatory online components (grouses angrily at both SimCity 2013 and Fallout 76), bring on the long-runners!
Yikes. Just because something is profitable, it doesn't mean is good in any way. Mobile games are very profitable thanks to whales who buy anything, but that doesn't make those games good for the average player. You're forgetting how much of an addiction compulsive spending is. But I guess you probably don't recognize it in yourself, so you probably don't think it's an issue. But it is.
Once again the EA team is putting quantity over quality, and not very much in the way of quantity either. The excuse they have given for why they won't do any more is just that, but then any "reasonable excuse" can be used to justify not doing more for the game as they can do that. No, i see it that EA want to spend as little on the project as possible and have the developers get what they can out on an arbitrary time limit set by EA, regardless if the quality of the product and then simply move on and do it again.
I'm not at all convinced of the EA management and how they use their developers on this game and neither do i hold it against the developers for the excuse itself.
The moral of the story is that you're guaranteed to anger someone whenever you have to deal with a super long-running game that's active many years after you launch it (heck, look at World of Warcraft, which came out in 2004 and which Blizzard has to keep current so it doesn't feel and look like a relic today compared to other MMO games). Keep it accessible and people complain about the technical restraints. Keep up with developments in tech and game design and older players feel left behind or like they have to buy a new computer. You're pretty much boned either way.
Sorry, but the moral of the story is that games SHOULD NOT run for so long. This Games-As-A-Live-Service model may work for MMOs like WoW, but it's a terrible idea for single-player games. They should be released, expanded for a few years, and then move on to a new version.
I don't believe should be made to buy the same basic stuff such as weather over and over either. A basic weather system should be part of the base game like it's part of MOST games nowadays. Just because The Sims has been doing something for years, it doesn't mean it's a good thing.
If they keep up, they're going to end up killing the franchise, especially if competition comes out such as Paralives or whatever game Paradox is developing with Rod Humble.
See, I disagree with that idea. I love single-player games with massively long tails that are nearly endlessly expandable and get new content support many years after initial release form a good chunk of my actual gaming time.
@ACruelButLovingGod You do realize though that there are big issues that come with such games running for a long time. First of all, the game cannot evolve and become better and we see that in the Sims 4, how difficult it is for it to be something more than it's predecesors. We can never change the engine/fountation of the Sims 4. It's there and it will be there until we decide to evolve and move on. All we can do is throw things over it to make it seem like it's changing. There is no fundamental change in the Sims 4 and there will never be unless we decide to move on.
Then there is the problem of newer machines having trouble running such old software. It is already happening with the Sims 4 not running well enough on newer machines.
And then most importantly there is the issues of "spaghetti code", which is a huge problem the Sims 4 has been facing for so many years and there is no way to overcome it unless we start over.
In theory it is a nice concept to be adding to a game so you "make it better" but in reality it doesn't work like that.
I understand people are very attached to their money, especially when they have spent so much but I think it's important to realize that the products you bought will not be taken away from you if the Sims team decides to move on from this game.
A question for those knowledgeable people out there with technical insight to game engines - How difficult is it to upgrade a game engine, if a game proves successful and it runs for a longer than originally expected? I noticed there was job advert for an engineer recently to extend the Sims engine's function.
A question for those knowledgeable people out there with technical insight to game engines - How difficult is it to upgrade a game engine, if a game proves successful and it runs for a longer than originally expected? I noticed there was job advert for an engineer recently to extend the Sims engine's function.
A perfect example is Skyrim. The original version runs on the Creation Engine, which is an upgraded version of the Gamebryo engine used for Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and New Vegas. However, Fallout 4 implemented a new renderer with dynamic lighting and tesselation (among other things).
Then Bethesda decided to port Skyrim to their new engine (let's call it Creation Engine 2.0 for convenience). Considering Skyrim was running on the same core engine, it wasn't hard to port it to the new version of the same engine. It's the same as porting an Unreal Engine 3 game to Unreal Engine 4. Some games were ported mid-development when UE4 came out (Xing: The Lang Beyond) for example.
What can be truly hard is to port a game from two very different engines. You may need to redo a huge chunk of the game. Ultimately, engines are the middle man between you and your PC. It saves a lot of time and resources, but you don't really NEED an engine to start making a game. You can write your OWN engine as you write the game, especially if you're very good at writing in a low-level language such as C.
So whenver I see a claim that The Sims 4 can't do this or that because of its engine I wonder if people understand what an engine is. It's not a corset. It's suppose to make things EASIER for you. If the engine isn't capable of doing something, you just upgrade the engine and that's it.
Thanks very much for the explanation and the insight. So, if the engine doesn't get upgraded, then it follows its because there's no investment in development of the engine rather than because it's not possible.
Imagine if they gave us the option to include or exclude certain worlds in our savefiles? Or link certain worlds together in groups, only having a small selection of them active and travel-able at a time. That would be nice.
Kind of like how TS3 makes us select which packs we want to use, through the launcher, because all of them at once was getting too unstable.
This wouldn't be such a bother if we had the ability to at least duplicate worlds. If a modder can do it so can the developers.
Lol that’s exactly why they want to keep the worlds small. They don’t want you to have too many lots in a single save as it can cause performance issues.
What doesn’t matter: the number of lots in a single world.
What does matter: the number of lots across all worlds in a save file.
Worlds are merely an illusion in TS4. You can create a brand new 2D map view with 3 neighborhoods from Willow Creek, 3 neighborhoods from Windenburg, and 3 neighborhoods from San Myshuno, and then call this whole thing a single world & everything would work just fine. The game simply does not care whether a neighborhood is categorized as part of Sulani or part of Windenburg, as it is completely arbitrary. What the game does care is the total number of lots across all worlds, as it will affect performance. Your loading time for example will significantly worsen as there are more lots & more Sims in your save file.
I as the player should be able to make that decision for myself. If I want to add more lots into my save file at the expense of performance, by duplicating worlds in a single save for example, the game can prompt me with a message saying "this could lead to the game being less stable blah blah etc." but that would be my choice to make, so if the game slows down that's a result of my decisions, not the developers. And besides, The Sims 4 has an abundance of features where if over used will slow the game down, Sims 4 is no stranger to player created instability with the available set of features, why stop now?
This: If they are afraid that the game will no longer work or slow down old machines, then let us give the ability to add more lots for people who have higher end computers to maximize what they can in TS4. Imagine spending like Hundred Dollars in your computer but you cannot customize the world because the game is still Supporting Windows XP 64bit computers.
A question for those knowledgeable people out there with technical insight to game engines - How difficult is it to upgrade a game engine, if a game proves successful and it runs for a longer than originally expected? I noticed there was job advert for an engineer recently to extend the Sims engine's function.
@Kironide I think the biggest issue is that the fountation of the game has already been set. Let's use the worlds as an example. World design in the Sims 4 is part of its fountation and is fundamental to all the other aspect of the game working.
If the team wants to redesign and make worlds better, for example by making the districts open and adding trasportation they would have to re-edit so many things. They would have to redo the worlds to match the design, they would have to redo the roads to make cars be able to navigate trough them, they would need to redo the lot design in order for the cars, like carpool or services to be tied and correctly placed to the road and the corresponding lot.
If they make open districts for the worlds that would also affect sims massively, they would have to go back and reprogramm all the NPC behavior because as it is now, NPCs load their actions during the loading screen always according to what is available in the lot. If now the whole district has to be loaded they would have to take that into consideration, maybe load more sims to do more actions.
Every game is fundamentally a system, when one thing changes the whole system is affected. It doesn't mean changing the fountation is not possible or unachievable. It only means that changing the Sims 4 fountation so late into its cycle would require such a massive amount of work, it would be like designing a game from scratch and maybe at the end it wouldn't work correctly with all the DLC.
This is why there is no reason to believe that the Sims 4 has any potential to change and become better in its core. It will stay the same game forever. All that is ever going to be done is add new sparkly features on top of it to disctract from the root of the problems. That's all.
A question for those knowledgeable people out there with technical insight to game engines - How difficult is it to upgrade a game engine, if a game proves successful and it runs for a longer than originally expected? I noticed there was job advert for an engineer recently to extend the Sims engine's function.
@Kironide I think the biggest issue is that the fountation of the game has already been set. Let's use the worlds as an example. World design in the Sims 4 is part of its fountation and is fundamental to all the other aspect of the game working.
If the team wants to redesign and make worlds better, for example by making the districts open and adding trasportation they would have to re-edit so many things. They would have to redo the worlds to match the design, they would have to redo the roads to make cars be able to navigate trough them, they would need to redo the lot design in order for the cars, like carpool or services to be tied and correctly placed to the road and the corresponding lot.
If they make open districts for the worlds that would also affect sims massively, they would have to go back and reprogramm all the NPC behavior because as it is now, NPCs load their actions during the loading screen always according to what is available in the lot. If now the whole district has to be loaded they would have to take that into consideration, maybe load more sims to do more actions.
Every game is fundamentally a system, when one thing changes the whole system is affected. It doesn't mean changing the fountation is not possible or unachievable. It only means that changing the Sims 4 fountation so late into its cycle would require such a massive amount of work, it would be like designing a game from scratch and maybe at the end it wouldn't work correctly with all the DLC.
This is why there is no reason to believe that the Sims 4 has any potential to change and become better in its core. It will stay the same game forever. All that is ever going to be done is add new sparkly features on top of it to disctract from the root of the problems. That's all.
Yes, I see, thank you for expanding my understanding, that certainly does explain why the old worlds are not getting the open world treatment, but does that mean that any new worlds couldn't be created to include new more open world elements or is it still fixed by the overall game framework? Sorry, if that's ignorant.
To be honest farming pack wasn't on my wishlist, but when I saw the trailer I was pleasantly surprised of this expansion and now I'm sure that I will buy it. In my imagination I planned that I put some farmhouses, maybe rental lot and some community lots in HoB but not. This time our new world has only 12 lots in total and only 2 empty lots maybe. I'm tired of that. Again I need to decide what to build or destroy premade houses which I generally want to leave in my savefiles. I totally can not understand why can't we receive bigger lots especially that we have closed neighborgoods and lots. What is more, we can have only 20 sims per loading screen. Currently we have 37 empty lots in total (with Newcrest)and with a new expansion, we will have 39 empty lots per save in total. It is really, really small number especially if you have one or two free lots per map. EA really destroys my fun because of that every time, because I have to choose what is more important for me, which family should I put into the map ect. I totally don't see any adventages of loading screens then.
Nope, just pray that Sims 5 will go back to an open world.
I feel I am in the minority of not liking how big windenburg is and some of the other earlier worlds (not including the get to work one). I play rotational and have 1 main save I’ve been playing for 3 years now and I have loads of empty lots in the 3 basegame worlds, windenburg and brindleton bay. I just don’t have enough sims to fill them all.
I actually wonder what people are doing with all these lots 😅😅 I rarely play windenburg too. I play rotational and I have tons of sims and tons of community lots. Different themes for each world.
The only thing I want more of is "bigger" lots and exotic looking worlds like the destination worlds. because I play big families and love to build cities or large community lots.
Other than that I'm not too fused.
Comments
Customization would be great. I would personally be happy with zero townies.
Do you use MCCC? That also has options for moving sims in to empty homes.
The scarcity of open lots on which to build is harder for me to get my head around, and it's a problem I feel. I like to make use of new BB assets, and often those work BEST in the world that shipped with the pack. Sure, I can use shoji screens in non-Japanese environments, and the furniture translates even more easily. But give me a space, in every neighborhood, that I can place my own lot in. I hate to have to pick a lot to do without to make space for my creations, or a family to evict to house my ever expanding extended Legacy family, their in-laws and offspring.
Does your 80 sims include pre-mades? I'm just thinking of starting mine over; for some reason I have more bugs this time around than I did a few weeks ago when I was playing a different save. I'm just looking for ideas to optimise everything.
I will be totally glad if they make 50% empty lots and 50% premade lots made by simmers for every expansion. If someone doesn't like to build, EA can also add some premade lots to the personal gallery as they did for Dine Out or Spa Day for example. I don't expect to have for example 30 fully built lots as in Windenburg.
See, I disagree with that idea. I love single-player games with massively long tails that are nearly endlessly expandable and get new content support many years after initial release form a good chunk of my actual gaming time.
I think of it as being like in the old days of stuff like model railroading. You'd buy the "starter set" which was usually a small oval loop of track and a small train (maybe even just a locomotive) to run on it. But if you went to the hobby shop or bought stuff by mail-order from magazines like Model Railroader you could get layouts like the one my stepfather had in the basement or that formed the backbone of the intro to Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, itself loosely modeled on Pittsburgh, where the show was filmed. Rolling stock, scale model houses and civic buildings, as much as your imagination and floor/table space would allow.
Indeed, Steam will happily sell you something like Train Sim World, which is basically model railroad meets computers, and there's a good reason flight sims have been a pillar of PC gaming for just about as long as home PC games have existed—the very first Microsoft Flight Simulator came out in October of 1982; the first MS-DOS based PC launched in 1981, and in the 40 years or so since, both officially supported and fan-made expansions have been part and parcel of that franchise. Simulation gaming did it first, but Paradox figured out you can do it pretty well with strategy games too. Crusader Kings only got a third installment because they reached the absolute limit of what the engine could do with CK2 (initially released in 2012) and it finally had to be rebuilt; I'm not sure Sims 4 is at that point yet (then again, neither were 2 or 3 when they were done.)
What's more, it's pretty obvious that model is wildly profitable—I wonder how much DLC the average player of such a game actually buys, but I know the enthusiasts (like me) can and will spend a ton of money on them, like hundreds of dollars, over the game's lifetime. As long as it's singleplayer and doesn't have mandatory online components (grouses angrily at both SimCity 2013 and Fallout 76), bring on the long-runners!
And remember this above all. Our Roman gods are watching. Make sure they are not ashamed!
My NBA site, Pace and Space
It may be possible only if the developer shows dedication through proper and timely maintenance which for me EA/Maxis has not shown they are up to the task and looking at the handling of Sim City 2013 which was pretty poor and they did the opposite of what they said during its production that they support the game and then came the news the game was dead. EA/Maxis for only after one objective and that is profits and not dedication. So I do not see an viable long tail for this game and there is an lot of gimping which is not good.
The game is cracking as EA/Maxis does not tweak the game as often as they should but is quick to produce an pack.
Yikes. Just because something is profitable, it doesn't mean is good in any way. Mobile games are very profitable thanks to whales who buy anything, but that doesn't make those games good for the average player. You're forgetting how much of an addiction compulsive spending is. But I guess you probably don't recognize it in yourself, so you probably don't think it's an issue. But it is.
I'm not at all convinced of the EA management and how they use their developers on this game and neither do i hold it against the developers for the excuse itself.
@ACruelButLovingGod You do realize though that there are big issues that come with such games running for a long time. First of all, the game cannot evolve and become better and we see that in the Sims 4, how difficult it is for it to be something more than it's predecesors. We can never change the engine/fountation of the Sims 4. It's there and it will be there until we decide to evolve and move on. All we can do is throw things over it to make it seem like it's changing. There is no fundamental change in the Sims 4 and there will never be unless we decide to move on.
Then there is the problem of newer machines having trouble running such old software. It is already happening with the Sims 4 not running well enough on newer machines.
And then most importantly there is the issues of "spaghetti code", which is a huge problem the Sims 4 has been facing for so many years and there is no way to overcome it unless we start over.
In theory it is a nice concept to be adding to a game so you "make it better" but in reality it doesn't work like that.
I understand people are very attached to their money, especially when they have spent so much but I think it's important to realize that the products you bought will not be taken away from you if the Sims team decides to move on from this game.
A perfect example is Skyrim. The original version runs on the Creation Engine, which is an upgraded version of the Gamebryo engine used for Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and New Vegas. However, Fallout 4 implemented a new renderer with dynamic lighting and tesselation (among other things).
Then Bethesda decided to port Skyrim to their new engine (let's call it Creation Engine 2.0 for convenience). Considering Skyrim was running on the same core engine, it wasn't hard to port it to the new version of the same engine. It's the same as porting an Unreal Engine 3 game to Unreal Engine 4. Some games were ported mid-development when UE4 came out (Xing: The Lang Beyond) for example.
What can be truly hard is to port a game from two very different engines. You may need to redo a huge chunk of the game. Ultimately, engines are the middle man between you and your PC. It saves a lot of time and resources, but you don't really NEED an engine to start making a game. You can write your OWN engine as you write the game, especially if you're very good at writing in a low-level language such as C.
So whenver I see a claim that The Sims 4 can't do this or that because of its engine I wonder if people understand what an engine is. It's not a corset. It's suppose to make things EASIER for you. If the engine isn't capable of doing something, you just upgrade the engine and that's it.
Kind of like how TS3 makes us select which packs we want to use, through the launcher, because all of them at once was getting too unstable.
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This: If they are afraid that the game will no longer work or slow down old machines, then let us give the ability to add more lots for people who have higher end computers to maximize what they can in TS4. Imagine spending like Hundred Dollars in your computer but you cannot customize the world because the game is still Supporting Windows XP 64bit computers.
http://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/924539/features-that-needs-depth-and-ways-to-improve
@Kironide I think the biggest issue is that the fountation of the game has already been set. Let's use the worlds as an example. World design in the Sims 4 is part of its fountation and is fundamental to all the other aspect of the game working.
If the team wants to redesign and make worlds better, for example by making the districts open and adding trasportation they would have to re-edit so many things. They would have to redo the worlds to match the design, they would have to redo the roads to make cars be able to navigate trough them, they would need to redo the lot design in order for the cars, like carpool or services to be tied and correctly placed to the road and the corresponding lot.
If they make open districts for the worlds that would also affect sims massively, they would have to go back and reprogramm all the NPC behavior because as it is now, NPCs load their actions during the loading screen always according to what is available in the lot. If now the whole district has to be loaded they would have to take that into consideration, maybe load more sims to do more actions.
Every game is fundamentally a system, when one thing changes the whole system is affected. It doesn't mean changing the fountation is not possible or unachievable. It only means that changing the Sims 4 fountation so late into its cycle would require such a massive amount of work, it would be like designing a game from scratch and maybe at the end it wouldn't work correctly with all the DLC.
This is why there is no reason to believe that the Sims 4 has any potential to change and become better in its core. It will stay the same game forever. All that is ever going to be done is add new sparkly features on top of it to disctract from the root of the problems. That's all.
Yes, I see, thank you for expanding my understanding, that certainly does explain why the old worlds are not getting the open world treatment, but does that mean that any new worlds couldn't be created to include new more open world elements or is it still fixed by the overall game framework? Sorry, if that's ignorant.
Nope, just pray that Sims 5 will go back to an open world.
I actually wonder what people are doing with all these lots 😅😅 I rarely play windenburg too. I play rotational and I have tons of sims and tons of community lots. Different themes for each world.
The only thing I want more of is "bigger" lots and exotic looking worlds like the destination worlds. because I play big families and love to build cities or large community lots.
Other than that I'm not too fused.