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An Honest Post From A Long Time Fan (Long Read)
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Actually SC2 disappointed me cause I REALLY missed those Western and Medieval expansions from SC1. lol I never quite got over that. I did like the series overall but never got beyond SC4. From the sounds of things I'm glad I stopped there. One of these days I might even go back to it for kicks.
For now though, I'm getting all my sim girls in China to winning the tourney and going home before I attempt to get LN working tonight. Ah it's really going to be a Late Night for me tonight. :roll:
Groan! :-)
1: BBQ
2: Operate heavy machinery of some kind.
3: The capacity to crack really bad jokes.
4: ...
I NEVER get the urge to play way into the morning like I did TS2. Don't get me wrong, I have a life, I went to school and work, but on my days off, I LOVED playing all night long well into the morning. There is no drive to play TS3 for that long because everything is so predictable and boring. I like TS3 enough to play it a bit to keep me entertained for a short while, but when I'm really in a geeky Sim mood, I totally go back to playing TS2. It never gets old!
I totally believe in this statement lol.
As for "chasing the dragon", perhaps I am but I don't think it really is all that unreasonable to want the same experience that I got in a previous generation of the same series and by that I mean quality gaming and the same bang for my buck. With that being said I don't feel like the Sims 3 lived up to my expectations I feel kinda cheap-ed out on that one.
Uninstalled LN after having both performance issues, empty clubs and the occasional freeze where everything (except sound effects) just froze. After that my performance increased but my bugs also increased. My Sims kept getting wishes to purchase a hot tub (even though I am sure they weren't in Ambitions or World Adventures.)
For now, the Sims 3 will kinda sit on the back burner for now. I have all the Sims 2 EP's + SP's - Happy Holiday Stuff so I am more than content to play that game.
Thank you for listening fellow Simmers, I hope my whining wasn't too much to bare lol.
XanderGC
Honestly, apart from WA I haven't had a single disc from TS3 that would allow me to simply install trouble free. Just not right. Not right at all. If I had my laptop I could probably get the file on that and copy it over the network but I don't. meh.
I do hear with envy the tales of other games that run, to quote one simmer here, "as smooth as butter". It doesn't seem too much to ask that I not have to be really technically proficient in order to play a game.
Xander, I really appreciate this thread. I've enjoyed reading all the thoughtful commentary-I read through all the pages, which often doesn't happen, even with enjoyable threads. Thank you for getting it started.
I hate to admit it but I guess my DVD drives are getting old. I had read somewhere in an old post older drives might have trouble reading the disks (though in theory it shouldn't matter right? DVD is DVD). But the laptop installed the base game fine and this other computer copied the file off the disk just fine so.. meh.
I look at all nighters more like evidence. You know you're still young when you can still do it and keep going.
Edit: Well, trouble free install and game is running. Now to play or to nap. The next few minutes will tell. Pft.. I could've been playing 3 hours ago. :P
Excuse me, but I don't know what dream world you've been living in. You need to go back to The Sims 2 BBS, click on the ambulance icon, and find out that *each* and *every* Sims game, from the base game to the expansion packs and at *least* one stuff pack, has had a patch made for it that fixes whatever bugs there were in the game. If you think the game was working when you got it, you obviously missed the jump bug. You missed the whooping and hollering when Tim LeTourneau inadvertantly revealed that there wasn't going to be a separate patch for University but that the fixes would be included in Night Life. You will see where they did indeed end up making a patch for University because of the boycott threats. And you will see also that even though Mansions and Gardens (a stuff pack that installs like an expansion pck) has problems and bugs, EA has never bothered to make a patch for it, nor will it ever.
In fact, the only difference between this website and the Sims 2 website is that in The Sims 2 website, you didn't have people moaning about how The Sims was so much better, and they should go back to making The Sims 2 more like the Sims. But as for there not being any patches and the game never needing to be fixed? If you didn't patch your game everytime a new patch came out, you must have been playing with a pretty buggy game and never even noticed.
"We Don't Care If You LIKE The Game, Just As Long As You BUY The Game!"
I Disapprove (Naturally)
I Took The Pledge!
I was really into Sims 1 way, way back - although I was rather young and I probably didn't get all of the game, I thought it was awesome. Then came Sims 2 and... I never got hooked. I got University long after Nightlife came out, then I got Seasons and Pets and that was it. I liked Seasons, but I just wasn't that interested. In retrospect I wonder why. I can't remember much of Sims 1 (I wish I had a computer old enough to run it) and I haven't played Sims 2 for ages - I never witnessed anything beyond Seasons. All I ever did was create Sims, make them live a few Sim-weeks, get rid of them, create new ones.
Yet when I got Sims 3... I was addicted. I was truly addicted again. I didn't have expansion packs until after Ambitions came out, still I played generations of Sims. I do nowadays feel the excitement lowering again - the expansion packs don't add as much to the game, to be honest. Late Night was in some ways a disappointment because I had been looking forward to it a lot. Ambitions also was a little lame and World Adventures... I don't know, really. It was exciting at first, but I don't like the questy feel of it.
Now what I wonder is this: Why have I had the opposite feelings? I think that maybe it is because I "skipped over" Sims 2. I never got into it, maybe because I never gave it a chance. Maybe because I was just hostile to innovation. Maybe the game didn't fit into my life at the moment. I ask myself whether I should go back, play Sims 2, just because you should know what has already been done better...
Because I never got into Sims 2 far enough to even realise that you could do certain things, or I simply forgot.
But, I'm sorry to say that, the *only* way we players will ever get the game *we* want, is when the development teams drops everything and simply starts *playing* the game from a *player's* perspective, not from a game developer's perspective. I truly believe that if EA let them take the time and was willing to make that investment in man-hours *before* thinking about the next expansion pack, they'd not only get a better understanding of where the fans are coming from, but they might even take the time to tweak the games we currently have, especially if they played the game in various combinations..(base game/WA, base game/Ambitions, base game/LN, base game/WA/Ambitions, base game WA/LN, base game WA/Amb/LN).
I believe that would give them a better understanding of what's wrong and how the games interact with each other. It's something that they *should* have done with the Sims 2; if they had, they would have know how the latest expansion pack can conflict with a previous one. Anybody remember how the Sim leaving a present in front of an apartment mailbox would cause other Sims to be unable to get their mail? That's what I mean. You'd think they'd have learned from that.
"We Don't Care If You LIKE The Game, Just As Long As You BUY The Game!"
I Disapprove (Naturally)
I Took The Pledge!
I agree with you whole-heartedly Jarsie9! I too have the feeling that the people who are designing and developing the game aren't fans of The Sims. I watch the interviews and see Grant talking about how inovative the team is - and I wonder if we are refering to the same game! If only management would invest a few more man-hours into the game, it would be so much better.
When players make a complaint or have their great ideas of how things should be done, they usually don't have a clue or simply fail to design the development side of things into consideration. Yes this is very hard to do if you don't know anything about development I admit. However, I think if players put more effort into seeing things from the developer point of view it'd be a lot easier to forgive some "lesser" issues. Like why there's no animation to climb in and out of cars anymore (to use an example already talked about here).
EPs don't just magically appear. They didn't JUST start working on the next one. They've been working on it for months. Someone is already thinking about the one that's going to come afterwards. There are often technical reasons why things aren't just so and business reasons for a lot of everything else.
Then again, trying to see the developer side of things just irks me at EA management all the more. heh But I find being able to look at both sides as a player and would be developer provides a nice, balanced perspective.
Granted I like the fact I didnt have to wait a year every time a EP came out but is it because of this deadline and EA with their cutbacks that we are seeing mediocre EP's?
What can we design,code and implement in 6 months time? Now I am sure they have teams working on the next EP before 1 is released, but how many?
They did it ok with Sims 2 but still had bugs but what kind of manpower did they have to work with compared to these scaled economic times?
How many employees are left that truly love the sims the way the sims fanbase does? How many are just employees that punch their clock because they need a job and put in their 8-10 hrs and go home with no pride in their work or worry that their product is found wanting.
The Sims have been a PC money maker for EA, they should be making sure these games are polished and full of fun and surprises. Do they think that if this well dries up their Sims fanbase is going to start playing their millions of FPS shooters?
Its really hard to say what goes on behind closed doors but I remember games that come out that had dev interaction constanly on their forums and while they may have agreed or disagreed with posters they at least gave you reasons while this could or couldnt be done but that they were working to fit it in down the road.
I am not saying the devs are a souless corporate entity, but to me it seems like the games are shoved out with less love than previous incarnations and we the fans are left wondering what happened.
WA was a different concept for tomb raiding but its almost a single player game, I have a family of 2+ and want them all to enjoy vacations, but unless I want the others to be fishing or learnig fung foo or nectar making the rest just have to wander around another lot.
Ambitions, while it was nice to be able to modify neighbors clothing,hair and houses the rest feels not as satisfying. Their is no feel to having a job so much as arcady type gimmicks. I thought the ability to see your sims at work was a cool concept until I realized this only pertained to their new jobs.
LN bars and clubs were a nice touch, but did we need 6 different bar tyoes and not 1 restaurant feature? Vamps and celebs are novel but a town full of celebs and vampires isnt novel anymore. Bands again a nice concept but man how hard is it to find different members for different instruments, and not alot of band options.
I dont know it just feels like they intruce a concept , have their guys code it and just ship it out to market without actually playing them and saying you know this seems like its missing something. But again this is just me
I would say that's highly probable. It's not so much the schedule necessarily as the budget. Higher budgets means more manpower. More manpower reduces the time requirement. TS2 had the same schedule but not nearly so many problems. So if EA cut back on the budget by cutting manpower that would certainly have an adverse effect on the quality of the product.
I would say it's likely every EP has at least a 9 month production cycle. Well, maybe a little less, it's hard to guess anymore. I mean come on.. I just found a chair listed under counters in the kitchen catagory. How hard is that to miss? I found it right away and I wasn't even looking for mistakes.
Anyway, there are things they can do early. Early design stages should be done at LEAST several weeks prior to the release of the previous EP. Modelers can easily be working on content early. In fact I'd say the EP should be well into QA 2 months prior to release. Obviously EA isn't doing that here.
Certain aspects of the game just sort of kill it for me:
The sims look cartoony
The way sims get in their cars kills any realism there might be.
The lack of depth to anything in the game.
I'm beginning ot wonder if my taste in games has just changed or if sims 3 is really just a flunk. Only time will tell.
The game feels as if it where downed for younger players which is a dreadful idea most companies up the game as their players get older so they get new fans and keep the old fans. This way they lose the old fans and are less likely to get new fans over 10. Example: Tombs are no more dangerous then going to the basement to get nectar. The PI career all you have to do is press that blue button and dust for prints at the house. Awards are givin for doing something as simple as solveing 3 cases and Celebs are basicaly everywhere and if you are the player all you have to do is talk to people or not even that to be a celeb.
Even if you loved the previous games it would be hard to put up with how esay it is to do basicaly anything. I am playing on normal life span and my sim became a 4 star celeb before he was an adult. He just came out of CAS as a Young Adult with no friends or skills.
The big machinima community there used to be. From what I read, most replies come from Sims 2 players, so you guys must have known sims99 and JD with her wonderful Sims movies. All gone ...
http://www.jd-movies.com/blog/?p=167
http://www.indiadrummond.com/sims99/
I used to make sims movies meself from time to time, that's what I loved the most of the Sims. But instead of making it easier to shoot movies, they make it almost impossible now they left out the interaction boxes and all the spawns we used to have.
Those Sims movies where the best advertising a company could have. What a sad evolution. I've played LN for a bit now and i'm already fet up with it.
I think it's end of storie with the sims for me too ...
Posts that are 'offensive' or poorly articulated, mostly (or entirely) emotionally based etc are much less likely to be listened to than a respectful and well thought out criticism. I can almost guarentee you that this thread has been followed by someone at EA. Maybe not someone with any authority to make changes, but someone who can point here and say 'ok this thread has some good points and isn't just a bunch of guys blowing off steam'
We don't see them but I know EA folks at least read the forums even if they're only moderators. That is at least one aspect I have yet to lose faith in in regards to EA. I wouldn't be surprised if even Grant has skimmed this thread once or twice by now. (down fan girls down!)
Indeed!
Xander:
People who are up in everyone's face about it:
A few of the worst offenders:
The people who put one post up lambasting the game and never come back, leading to countless pages of rage from both sides of the argument:
Remember kids, be like Xander.
Thank you!
That was my whole thing, I didn't want to sound like a flaming 12 year old on a forum post.
I do remember the bugs from the Sims 2, I remember the jump bug, I remember disappearing dormies in the dorms or townies who couldn't be called. I was there when the pets sank into the ground or when Sims would get a want to rub a cat's belly (there was no interaction in the game for such a thing.) I remember when Sims would either burst into flames because their temperature would spike too high too fast (hot tub or working out excessively) or if children got too cold the social worker would whisk them and all the others away. Bon Voyage with it's need to spawn a new tour guide for every new visit and apartments and dating didn't mix well.
I remember all these bugs and many more but I kept on playing because I knew a fix was down the pike or most were close to being rare as to not being game breaking.
The difference I see is that patches are a given nowadays for most games/studios and with that comes along "it's good enough, we'll patch it later." which leads to sloppier code, rushed QA testing (if any is done) and a buggy release that the fans will have to be content with. In my personal opinion and experience, the Sims 3 just screams potential but the flaws diminish it's attractive,addictive shininess. My mom wouldn't even try it after she saw me playing it and she is as big a Simmer as I am.
Her reasoning "It just doesn't feel like the Sims" I couldn't agree more.
I've never really had bugs in any Sims games (Minus this one Sims 2 nanny bug :roll: . That on brought a lot of annoying moments to me. She would NEVER LEAVE!), but I feel for the people who do have them. Part of the reason why there are more bugs in this version is because the software is very advanced and there are so many different types of computers with different stats nowadays. I mean you have people playing it with computers from 2006. My guess is that EA tests the games on very advanced computers which could lead to the problem of so many bugs for some people when others have none. And cc and all that jazz. At least that's what I think.
My cousin, who used to be a huge Sims fan, did hate Sims 3. She thought the Sims looked too weird. That was her main reason she went back the Sims 2. I personally love the way they look and I love the way the game play is set up, but that's just me. You're allowed to have your opinion too. I don't just get why SOME people who hate Sims 3 continue to play it while Sims 2 sits on their game shelf. It seems to me that those types of people just like to complain. In my opinion more people should follow your method :thumbup: . If they did, they'd get a lot more respect from the other side while still getting respect from their own side.
My main complaints about the game are that there are no memories (Although I get why they weren't included), the limited town objects that you can put down in mapview, and the pre-made towns architect style. I'm sorry, but Sunset Valley makes no sense. 50s homes, futuristic homes, and beach homes don't go together EA :evil: ! Pick a style and stick with it!