Its time for the final screenshot thread! Show us what ya got here!
Forum Announcement, Click Here to Read More From EA_Cade.
A year wait between EPs?
Orchid13
Posts: 8,823 Member
Is it true that there was an interview where a guru said that the next EP might take a year again?
1
Comments
Well what a mess so for basic features like pets or seasons we have to wait a year? The sims 4 has like 3 years left before they move on to the sims 5 IF they even move on.
So where does that leave a supernatural EP or a university one. We are missing so much stuff
Rumor has it that vampires are coming in a GP, not an EP; if that goes over well, maybe we'll get other supernaturals the same way (I like the idea for sure: it means more being able to pick and choose, and possibly more fleshed out supernaturals too compared to shoehorning them in or having a ton of them in one pack). Maybe university would be GP-scale too - the coding for active careers already exists, and the rental coding might be partly reusable for dorms. Pets seems to need to be an EP, and to be "due" if timing is similar to previous games (just after 2 years for Sims 2 and a few months longer than that for Sims 3). Seasons (which also I can't see as fitting in a GP budget) came out at about 2.5 years for Sims 2 but not till 3.5 years into Sims 3.
I suspect that we could get some things earlier because GPs can come out faster, and some things later.
FWIW, we also don't have anything but precedent to go on for the game lasting 5 years. Sims 3 got harder and harder to run as it aged; if Sims 4 doesn't, it might last longer. (I know that's lousy for people who want to move on to a next Sims version, but for those of us who want a fairly "complete" Sims 4 before that happens, so we have it to keep going on after, it would be a positive - this is something that maybe we can't all "win" on, and I don't feel horrible putting my own interests first and hoping the game lasts long enough to get All The Things before it's over. Other people would put their interests over mine, so fair's fair. We're all "selfish" this way.)
I hope vampires do come out in a GP , but after having witches, fairies and mermaids we know they can't give us GPs with different supernaturals
There are a lot of players waiting for alternate life states.
When I started playing around with TS4 I had the feeling it would never include as much as previous versions did.
We don't even have basic stuff there is no space for new stuff. And for many of us supernaturals are cool and we want them back in the game
Yeah me too, but never this much we are missing like 70% of classic content and the new features are not such a big deal and not worth the replacement of old features, if they were there wouldn't be so many complains
All of one supernatural? We've literally had one supernatural and the game has been out for two years.
Do aliens even count as a supernatural?
I think it might be a collective supernatural effect. There have been 19 EPs in a row that had a playable or NPC supernatural, alternate life state or magic in The Sims series. There was a little uproar on one of the social sites when one of the devs announced that they were never meant to be a tradition.
Personally I miss the mummies, the vamps, the witches and all the rest. There were quite a few times I bought EPs because of the life state. The rest of the pack might not be to my taste but I had to have my "creature".
*cries*
Really? and which ones are those, since there is 0 in there at all already, when we finally do get them added, then others would be able to make that comment, but since 0 are in there, you really can not say that. I for one have been waiting from day 1 for Vamps, and Supernaturals, I can not wait for them to finally be added.
P.S. forgot to say that the Costumes for witches & pixies do not count, since that is all they are just costumes, not the chars themselves.
And not even supernaturals , just think abut the fake bears we got... in a GP. Even the sims 1 beat the sims 4 in that, we had a real bear
Follow me on Twitter
Check out my Gallery
Peace, Love, and Unity.
`•.,¸¸,.•´¯ ¯`•.,¸¸,.•´
The gurus have stated Sims 4 is different, they will continue to make packs for it until it doesn't make sense anymore. Sorry to those that dislike it.
Oh lord, did you seriously just say that. When was the last time you even bothered with Sims 1? If Claire the bear is your definition of what a real bear is, then you might want to reevaluate what the definition of real is.
I have explained this to you several times that the devs working on Outdoor Retreat didn't have the resources to make a realistic bear and in the end the overall costs to bring in contractors to make 1 animal outweighs the rewards. Though for some reason you always somehow jump to the conclusion of that they don't know how or they can't.
I didn't see @Orchid13 say anything about costs. All that was said was what we got....a bear costume instead of a bear. I too thought that was more of their just skimming the surface. Even one of the devs....Rachel maybe? said that the game was developed more with width than depth in mind. I translate that to mean surface appearance rather than depth of play.
I'm free to say whatever I want. To me the reason isn't that they don't know how or they can't. I actually think they can, but won't cause they just like to give us half baked games in the sims 4 it's their thing
Also if you are gonna participate in MY thread stop with the attitude cause you do this with a lot of simmers and it's annoying and extremely rude. If you don't like to hear bad comments about the game I suggest go to the happy sim thread or whatever
Supposedly there's a mention of a possible new world in the game code strings. We won't know of course until there's an announcement.
What? I never said you couldn't say what you wanted to. But whatever floats your boat I guess.
It's not like I can't stand dissatisfied simmers comments, I read them everyday. It's just some comments that I find a bit unreasonable makes me feel like responding to. It's not like I do this to a lot of simmers to, it's just a small group of them that makes these occasional comments. And I will admit that I was a bit harsh in my original comment, and im sorry, lack of sleep and food in body doesn't exactly work wonders for me.
And let's please not get into another 'my thread your attitude' argument again, it never goes anywhere for us.
Many times these leaks do seem to be correct, and another world wouldn't surprise me. Though if it's a supernatural themed world, I don't think it would be ideal for anything not specifically built for that world.
Just like a world? Or a world that will come in some GP. Cause up till now we haven't gotten any worlds except for Newcrest which I won't even get start with
Graham explains the Sims 4 is a live service - not like Sims before and why 1 ep or less - a year.
Quote:
Hey everyone, in the course of replying to someone on twitter yesterday, I see my comments have kicked off some lively discussion here on the forums. Twitter isn't a great format for detailed information on complex subjects, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to post here and shine some light on what I was chatting about.
To start with - The Sims 4 has always been what we call a live service. I was a bit surprised to see this blow up on the forums today, as I didn't say anything that conflicts with our approach to The Sims 4 since the game launched. Nothing about what I said was intended to indicate we're in the middle of changing the way we operate, or that there's any new process being introduced that'll affect you, the players. What I was conveying is that The Sims 4 is the first game that our studio is handling in this manner. The transition I spoke of involved changing our approach to development and to the ongoing support that we provide when we moved from active development on The Sims 3 to The Sims 4.
So, what does being a live service mean then? All it should really mean to you is that The Sims 4 gets more frequent updates to address issues, as well as ongoing free content additions so that players are interested in checking back in and seeing what's new from time to time. It's an opportunity for us to have a more engaged community that's aware of upcoming plans for the content our studio is creating.
The biggest change is for us internally, with the way our studio approaches development. If you look back at The Sims 3, we weren't nearly as responsive to issues, or nimble with shuffling pack resources as we can be with our current approach. For most of its life, The Sims 3 had one expansion team, and one store team - each group fairly siloed in the content it developed. For a period of time a second expansion team in Salt Lake was added, but the flexible schedule we have currently wasn't possible then. Back then we would develop our pack, they would develop their pack, and occasionally we would combine our code & assets together. Patches were relatively infrequent on Sims 3 - if there was a problem in an expansion pack, it wasn't uncommon for it to not be fixed until the update for the following expansion pack. That problem was exacerbated with the addition of the Salt Lake team, where alternating expansion packs between the teams meant it could sometimes take a year for an issue from a pack to be addressed.
Operating as a live service removes a lot of those challenges I described in The Sims 3 for us. We have an expansion team, a game pack team, a stuff pack team, and an engagement team (engagement = the free content in game updates). We all sit together intermingled in the same studio, we develop multiple packs simultaneously between our teams, and our code and assets between those packs are integrated together daily (super important for facilitating simultaneous development of different packs). Some people in the studio even work on a few of those teams at the same time (that's actually one of the major things we've been trying to adjust to and create better development practices for.) We're able to be far more responsive to unexpected issues that crop up... the most recent example being we released Dine Out in early June, released a patch with fixes for Dine Out in mid June, and then included even more fixes for Dine Out in the Kids Room update that came out in late June. The gallery is an important feature to us as well; maintaining those servers so that they're always up and running to support sharing between the community requires ongoing attention.
For a producer like myself, treating the game as a live service can be a huge help. When we're planning a pack, production is like taking oddly shaped puzzle pieces and trying to fill up a box as much as possible without spilling over. In this metaphor, imagine that the box represents our schedule & budget, and we're filling the box with features and the people that will build them. In the past, the size of that "box" had to remain very rigid - as we filled it up, we couldn't easily make it larger if we felt it needed a bit more. With our live service approach, all of those resources are much more flexible in how we use them. If we get surprised by an issue and need to get an update out quickly, or if we feel that an upcoming pack could use a bit more added to it, we can divert resources in sensible ways so that we can release great content as well as being responsive to the live game that you're playing.
On that note, let me also try and dispel some misconceptions... Operating our development with a live service mentality has nothing to do with which types of packs are released or the cadence of their releases. Being a live service also has nothing to do with which themes or features get developed - the selection of content is completely unrelated. Finally, being a live service isn't related to how you acquire content, or how it's delivered to you. Your choice to purchase a digital copy, a retail disc, or a retail bundle isn't impacted by this.
Certainly the biggest change for us compared with past Sims titles is the addition of Game Packs. Stuff Packs evolved to include game play, which means they also draw additional resources when developing them. The engagement team is another brand new thing for us, and they create their own fully realized features to add in free updates. Expansion packs, game packs, stuff packs, engagement features, and other outside factors all impact how we allocate internal headcount (who develops what, and when they do it), and where we fit each of those pieces of content in a yearly release schedule. Adding game packs and engagement features to what you've traditionally expected from The Sims has been an ongoing learning experience for us - both in terms of our development process, and in terms of understanding how each of these offerings are valued by players. Relatively speaking, a year and a half is a small sample size to fully see the impact of what are fairly significant changes for us at the studio. We'll continue experimenting, trying new things, and listening to your feedback, which is why some of you will recall me saying in the past to not look for patterns in the content we release.
Hopefully that helps clarify what a live service is to us!
UNquote.
"Games Are Not The Place To Tell Stories, Games Are Meant To Let People Tell Their Own Stories"...Will Wright.
In dreams - I LIVE!
In REALITY, I simply exist.....
Well if it is some of supernatural GP (which I have no doubt with animations found that specifically mention vampires and an animation for death by sunlight), it will probably be a world in it that's made for the GP.