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Life by You vs. Sims 5 (Rene)? Rod Humble and Paradox's Life Simulation Game
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I agree with your comment about Sim City vs Skylines. However, I think that was more an issue of EA destroying its own franchise. But regardless, I do agree that you're right about Sim City no longer being a viable competitor. It was a bad example.
Some may disagree with you on the part about Sim City and Paradox Cities:Skyline, EA/Maxis dissolved the Sim City franchise and after that happened Paradox created Skylines and actually Paradox had other iterations of city simulations prior to hitting it big with Skylines.
The fact that Paradox is the publisher is good news since I love playing Crusaders Kings which have some vibe that I loved in The Sims with an emergent gameplay and a story, but I keep in mind that the team, developers are not the same, it’s a new studio and it is Rod Humble behind it.
And it is maybe one on my first concern, because Rod Humble is not associated in my mind to the best of the franchise to me. He was mostly behind The Sims 3 which was ugly in comparison to Sims 2, lost some good gameplay features from Sims 2 and had a lot of technical issues. Yes, he works on Sims 2, but most of the original game design choice at this time was still from Will Wright’s team.
I am not deep into graphics if the game follows (I can play even Dwarf Fortress… For people who does not know the game, just type that on Google, you will become blind how ugly it is), but for a game where I enjoy to have the character to stand out from the others, with pretty unique genetics traits, it was pretty bland when I got the feeling that all the sims were similar.
Someone said that it is better to have gameplay than graphics. It is true. But also the Artistic Direction is not independent of the gameplay. What a game is able to convey visually in a convenient and intuitive way has an impact on the feedback loop. Typical example, if you see visually that the character is happy by his behavior, you don’t need to tell it. Some people complains about Sims 4 cartoony faces, but at least it was more visible in comparison to Sims 3.
For the moment, the game seems to be unable to show clearly some facial expression or some animations which give this feedback. Maybe later… or not, if it follows the same path than Sims 3.
Talking about animation and feedback, my other concern is the seriousness of the game. I guess one of the reason that Will Wright’s team decided to make the Sims goofy during Sims 1 was because it makes them very expressive. They look the camera and complains in exaggerate way, they use a lot their arms. Back in time, it makes sense, the resolution and the graphics didn’t permit to show emotions easily.
I am still not sure what is the goal of the game in this matter, but it seems the game doesn’t go in this humor direction. That’s fine. But because of of all of that, for the moment, I lack a lot of feedback when I watch the videos and it gives me a feeling of.. boredom. It doesn’t seem to be fun to play the game… yet.
I know, I know, still one year approximately of development. However, some game can be fun to watch even in early stages.
My other concerns are about the gameplay features announced as main features which do not excite me that much.
No rabbit holes. I guess it is an unpopular opinion, but I don’t care that much that there are rabbit holes if it is used intelligently. Even if it would be nice to follow the character to work/school. Gameplay-wise, it is often something we look one or two times and we are tired of it because it is not that interesting. No rabbit hole is not a selling point for me because it depends of what they will implement for making it fun. It didn’t bother me in Sims 3 at least (the problem was more that it was very buggy there sometimes).
The conversation tool. Wait and see. More informations to come. I am afraid that it is one of this feature which seems good on paper but will be disabled really quickly in the option when I play. The last video shows the character going outside to socialize and, automatically, the game comes in pause with the dialogue text. That could be annoying for me because I don’t think I care to really read it. But maybe the lines are really funny or interesting with the community involved…
Quest, skills, collectibles made by the community ? There, also, wait and see what are the possibilities. If it becomes really generics quests, collectibles where it asks you to go somewhere to find object A to give to character X, how different would it be to Fedex quests ? I am always suspicious when a game is promising you to generate quests or objects because it follows often a same pattern, just the text is different. It is rarely interessant. What is interesting is, again, the gameplay it could offer. If your character will do something which is radically different from the other quest ? Or will it be just just [insert name of item and icone] ?
Transportation personalization ? Well, ok, if it is not just a new skin of the object that the character use when it goes to A to B. I would feel the gameplay very limited if it just that. Driving the car directly… I have not interest yet when it could be done automatically by clicking somewhere.
Of course some stuff are promising :
- No loading screen (selling point of sims 3 but this times, computers are powerful and I hope they avoid the common technical traps)
- Budget is individual and no more linked to the household
- Managing and controlling everybody as we want in one click.
- Every job from a NPC is doable by us since the NPC can become PC.
- Rumors system (if a character is late to work and a colleague talks about that to the boss…)
- Skipping time button with a 10 years option : really nice, it happened often in my game session that I would like to skip some part which I feel less interesting
The features not announced that I am waiting which could persuade me are :
- Deep genetics with dominant and recessive genes (the surprising influence of the grand-father or great grand-mother is always good)
- Memories, Fears, Personality traits which matters and game mechanics which encourage the player to adapt his play for each personality
- Influence of the characters on the environment of the neighborhood over the generations which conveys a mood of historicity and impacts (for example, a growing tree that a character planted by himself decades ago, a broken wall because a character made a mistake when moving his car, the collective memory of a really bad mayor even after several years)
It seems like you're more informed on the timelines; I'm not trying to pretend anything.
The reboot flopped so EA shuttered the franchise. Then Paradox was able to absorb all of the fans.
With 60 million+ installs of the Sims 4 (a recent milestone I read), I think objectively they haven't killed off the franchise. Although it may feel like it. What the data point doesn't tell you is a story of many disaffected fans, a frustrated and angry fanbase on the socials, Sims 4 burnout, and other problems.
Thanks for sharing.
I pretty much agree with every sentence of this.
What sticks out is the point about the lively idle animations of the sims in Sims 1 and 2 (waving at the camera in distress, reacting to other Sims even when not commanded by the player, expressing their needs). Idle animations of the Sims 1 and 2 made the sims resonate with me. The lack of it is in my top 3 worst problems of the Sims 3, along with a lack of aspiration meter with wants/fears and general performance problems.
Unfortunately, LBY's humans don't seem very expressive or animated. Instead, Rod Humble seems going full-in on deep gameplay systems...think the depth of World Adventure quests and tombs, the depth of Ambitions active careers, etc.
I loved all of that from the Sims 3...but if I play LBY will I continue having that itch to turn back to Sims 2? Probably.
Ideally, we can have rich, animated characters along with the gameplay. As Will Wright was often quoted as saying: "More is more." There are no clever trade-offs or compromises. More is more.
What I would say to Lyndsay Pearson, Rod Humble, and Alex Massé if they're listening...
Don't skimp on the Sims/humans/paras. They're foundational to Live Mode gameplay.
Agree completely!
On the face of it, the core fanbase of The Sims (the ones who have been around for twenty years) are saying yeah, I'm going to check out the new game. If LBY you can peel off even half of those players, Maxis will have to work harder to find those new players easily impressed, to replace their core base who has hung around waiting to be impressed again. LBY is very smart by marketing to Maxis core, older, long time players.
Where Maxis failed to 'listen' is with no multiplayer, please open world, no rabbit holes, please create a style again, memories system again, stop the pandering, and please no kits and GPs at EP prices etc. A whole slew of things people who even love TS4 have been telling them the last nine years. LBY comes along and says alright let's do this.
ETA: I saw TS5 buildmode in their sneak peek preview however, Paralives showed us all that three years ago...so for a company that has been around for more than twenty years, long time players aren't all that impressed with what we already seen coming in TS5, that looked like Maxis borrowed some ideas since we already saw all that with Paralives. We literally expect more, bigger, better from Maxis. And it seems they can no longer live up to those expectations.
I really, really hope they listen. You have nailed 90% of gameplay.
Interestingly, the minimum and recommended specs for LBY are a fair bit higher than for Cities Skylines 2, which comes out a month later by the same publisher. So, I don't yet know what they will accomplish with LBY, but the intention seems to be ambitious.
I appreciate that they think of custom content and make allowances for it, but it's very lazy of them to not do anything decent when they ship the game. Some people don't have the talent or inclination to do their own custom content and why force people to trawl internet sites to get some decent looks for their characters? They put too much emphasis on player created content, and we all know that there will be a lot of bad content out there because everyone will be able to create something, there will be no quality control and no unified aesthetics. There will be also lots of nudies and furries, and other weird stuff people fantasize about and anything half decent will be paid for content.
I agree that there will be people who would prefer not having to customize anything, but I disagree that anything half decent will have to be paid for. I personally prefer to just be able to play the game and not have to customize anything. Time spent customizing things is time not playing the game.
Having said that, I believe I will be happy with what I get "out of the box". I will also most likely use some mods like I did with the Sims. Not a big deal to me. Far as the nudity goes, I'm an adult and have no problem with it. Actually, looking forward to it as I do love to look at nude women.
Everybody seems to be criticizing LBY's graphics before even seeing the final product in a year or so. My thoughts on the graphics are this, if I have to have a little less quality graphics to give me an open world, color wheel, and endless customization options while giving me great gameplay, I'm all for it. I'll take better gameplay over better graphics every time. It's not like the graphics these days are all that bad anyway. Especially, since my first "computer" was a Commodore 64. I guess it's all a matter of perspective.
To each their own. I feel pretty confident that LBY will have something for most people. There's always those who will criticise, but I think most players, builders, modders, etc will be pleased with LBY unless they are really picky. After all, the name of the game is Life By YOU.
YOU get to decide how you want your game to be. That's my two cents worth.
Paralives has not impressed me this far.
Project Rene I'm still waiting to see more, but after investing so much time and money in TS4, I don't want to jump to another maxis game & DLC rumba yet. This far I've seen that the customisation will be better in Project Rene, but I'm not convinced if AI will be better and how it will work for rotational play. I'm more interested in gameplay than aesthetics.
Updated with Werewolf Diaries (1)
I'm somewhat optimistic about the game. However, the character models in that video are terrible. If that turns out to be an accurate representation of the game art when early access goes live, then it's not going to do well. Seems like every new reveal has worse graphics than the ones before. It's just bizarre.
I don't care that much about the graphics; after all I enjoyed Sims 3 the Human Potato Game
It will be great if there are more reaction animations to conversations.
But the second point, those animations/movements really, really, really, need work in my opinion. It's a little concerning since they have been working on this game for four years already. I hope they polish up movements. Oh, and the shorter one doesn't look like they have any soul. It's important in a life simulator to me that the 'human' looks like they connect with eyes. The mirror of the soul. It's a very robotic animation. Please spend some money on movements and soul.
That is weird if I say so myself and nothing natural about it and hope they revise that.