TS3 2.0

@Uzone27 -
1 - "Is the idea to publish another game just for high end computer users?" You're right, I jumped to a conclusion there. But usually when this is said with respect to simmers, it's to create a divide between high-end rig gamers and the general users. That isn't what I meant at all.

2 - Doubling the overhead, well increasing it anyway, to bring in more sales. Some from those who walked away for a while, some from existing players who will want both of these fictitious versions. One might have a store associated with it, the other might have other forms of DLC. It's a gold mine that hasn't been fully tapped yet I tell you (drools) ...okay, not being serious now that I'm sounding more like Daffy Duck. But I never meant this idea to be divisive either. We are all simmers and if it's too much of a challenge to come with one current product that makes more of us happy, it just seems like the next logical thing to try might be two products.

For Sims 4, I was hoping that it would build upon previous iterations. Not stripping things away, taking the game in a new direction, yet slapping a 4 at the end of the title. They had a new vision and I personally don't see how it builds upon what we've had in the past.

That's not me asking for a Sims 3 2.0 - although basic weather in base game would be nice - it's just me asking to build upon the great features that were already there - CASt, Open World, memories, fears and wants, etc not getting rid of them completely.

For example, I think some of the build tools in TS4 are fabulous but the lack of customisation is terrible. I just want to see a successor where 'You Rule' holds true and to me TS4 falls flat.

Now I do like the push/pull features of the TS4 Sim Creation tool which allows you to manipulate the facial features in a way that the TS3 sliders can't really do justice, other than re-meshing, but is that so groundbreaking that one should eliminate the color palette and everything else that went along with it.

I'm not a fan of the new maps and I like being able to customize my lot as well as my house...and not just have it sit on a levelled flat piece of land. I want terrain differentiation and the ability to create depressions and raised land on my lot. Was it too much to ask to have more than one lot in a neighbourhood or be able to move about freely within the neighbourhood. Perhaps I wouldn't be so plummed off if I was able to go visit my neighbour in TS4 without a plumming loading screen.

Let's see what they have...

Streamlined Build Mode (hacked and slashed to nothing...very limited variety of options)
Click-and-Drag + Create-a-Sim. (hacked and slashed to nothing...very limited variety of options and colors)
Direction Manipulation - it's great...I think it's wonderful that I can click and drag to create a Sim's features...That's worth it, but they
could have used the same meshing as TS3 and still had the Direction Manipulation feature.
Custom In-Game Gallery and Content - Meh, same as what we had in TS3. And even if it was out-of-game, all it took was a few clicks. Is it that much of an inconvenience to go out of game to get content? Sure you can "drag and drop" rooms and other items with Custom In-Game Gallery and Content, but for some players, it's a part of the process of designing and building the rooms that you want that made up the enjoyment. All it seems with TS4 is that the main objective is to get through the process in order to "play with your Sims like you would with dolls" For some of us players that isn't the be-all and end-all of playing the Sims.
Persistent Worlds & Neighborhoods - "When leaving your neighborhood in past Sims titles, you character wouldn't be able to build on their skills or retain the relationships they developed. " - FALSE. No, what you have a single world divided up into neighbourhoods which is more restrictive than the "open world" map concept in TS3. Secondly, would you be able to retain the relationships that you had even with family in real life...because when your Sim moves to a different city, your relationship changes, just as in real-life. And your skills if you use the move feature, stays the same. "The game will allow you to move a family out of their house and place them in the family bin. This will not sever any relationships or remove any memories. Moving the family this way will create duplicate sim files which will clog up the neighborhood you move them into, contributing to neighborhood overcrowding, which can eventually completely ruin the neighborhood you're moving them into." It just means that you have to go back into your previous save - which hopefully you have named differently and remove every trace of your Sim in the previous town. That procedure shouldn't detract from your gameplay...just think of it as the extra procedure you have to do in order to keep everything running smoothly. And perhaps, they could have done the PW&N in an actual open world concept by cogitating on it a while longer instead of producing something that alienates at least half or more of the Sims gaming community who play a certain way and then trying to shove them all into one type of gameplay like you'd shove a square peg into a round hole. It's not possible.
Emotionally Driven Activities - Not all people in RL wear their emotions on their sleeves whereas in TS4 every Sim excretes their emotions all over and that's what made TS3 a great game. You wouldn't know the reaction that you were going to get when you interacted with a Sim. If you put a trait where your Sim was over-emotional, then perhaps he'll react when he sees a Sim that he dislikes by sneering quietly or by an aggressive animation just like in RL depending on the character trait. Have you ever seen a quietly angry Sim in TS4?

No, for what little we get with Sims 4 and the cuts made to content control, there's no way that I'm putting out $49.99 to buy TS4. I'll happily stick with TS3 until they put out a worthy successor.

"Uzone27;c-15768908" wrote:

"igazor;c-15768887" wrote:

"Mazakeen;c-15768868" wrote:

"igazor;c-15768852" wrote:

"Mazakeen;c-15768794" wrote:
Yeaaaah. -To that new idea that popped up. - I wouldn't touch it with a hot poker.
Its a pandoras box of... ...challenges.
Microsoft tried it for years with OS' and Office. Neh it just cannot(?) work for games, unless you subscribe at the game. These days, subscriptional games only do so and so. -and if you subscribe, microtransactions will propably get renewed attention. -Today, only free2play can get away with microtransactions. Just saying.

Edit: With the exception of Eve Online.

I have no idea what you are talking about. My suggestion was to split a popular line of products into two popular lines of products, with both of them being actively developed more less in parallel. No one said anything about subscription models.

True. I said that about subs. -I just built on what you said, like thee devils advocate. -Nice idea, but there are but's with all ideas. I'd love all Skoda's being handcrafted with a Ferrarri-engine, but it would be rather toooo costly.
Just splitting a franchise on several platforms is plum. Imagine multiplying it (production) with two?

Sounds like exactly what they are doing with Sims Mobile right now. There is no reason that a company like EA can't do more than one thing at the same time. But in the case of my idea, it's only just a fantasy... ;)

I'm trying to wrap my head around how two different products on the same platform would distinguish themselves?
The features that were removed which make the game seem less "sophisticated" were removed for performance reasons, not to punish Sims 3 fans.

Is the idea to publish another game just for high end computer users?

In short: No. Its for multiple platforms. -Thats the whole problem.

TS3 was wayyy ahead of its time. Even if npc-sims are wonky, their AI is awesome... ...AND it can be modified on a PC. ...consoles? -Not. Hence, the fun disappared for more static bots, with a 'better' look, and simplified control options... ffs. plum. See it. Just, see it.

But today heavily modified TS3... Plum. Its beyond what the devs a decade ago dreamt about.

"Mazakeen;c-15768614" wrote:
@JoAnne65 - Fair enough, fair enough.
Maybe(?) we are getting off topic, but TS3 2.0 is rather irrelevant. -It is the best bait to turn anything into a fire and brimstone-talk. It'd be better, imho, to clarify why people might have such aversions to either game. Then, maybe then, zealous TS4's could actually 'talk' with equally zealous TS3's (and previous iterations). -and mayyyyybeee be able to convince future devs how a future iteration of TS should/would/ought to be.

I think the whole set up of this topic was screaming for going off topic really ;) It appears the OP has left the building anyway, but nevertheless the subject does interest me. I can honestly say that they couldn't have gone much further from what I would have loved for a successor. But I really wouldn't want a remake of Sims 3 either. I have Sims 3 ;) And even though I love 3, the flaws are very frustrating at times and I also wouldn't mind a bit more Sims 2 spirit in there. And a lot of I-don't-know-because-I'm-not-a-game-developer-but-surprise-me ;)

"igazor;c-15768605" wrote:
Maybe. But as long as we're making wish lists, here's an idea I haven't seen expressed before.

How about if they split/spin off the series and give us both a TS3.5 and a TS4.5 (or 5.0) at the same time, from different development teams, in the future?

That in fact sounds like a very good idea to me. Not as literally as you put it here of course but yeah, I think there's more room in the world of life simulation games than just the vision of one company. One of the most frustrating things for me personally is that I don't have a choice.

"Uzone27;c-15769106" wrote:

"Nikkei_Simmer;c-15769026" wrote:
Now I do like the push/pull features of the TS4 Sim Creation tool which allows you to manipulate the facial features in a way that the TS3 sliders can't really do justice, other than re-meshing, but is that so groundbreaking that one should eliminate the color palette and everything else that went along with it.

I'm not a fan of the new maps and I like being able to customize my lot as well as my house...and not just have it sit on a levelled flat piece of land. I want terrain differentiation and the ability to create depressions and raised land on my lot. Was it too much to ask to have more than one lot in a neighbourhood or be able to move about freely within the neighbourhood. Perhaps I wouldn't be so plummed off if I was able to go visit my neighbour in TS4 without a plumming loading screen.

Let's see what they have...

Streamlined Build Mode (hacked and slashed to nothing...very limited variety of options)
Click-and-Drag + Create-a-Sim. (hacked and slashed to nothing...very limited variety of options and colors)
Direction Manipulation - it's great...I think it's wonderful that I can click and drag to create a Sim's features...That's worth it, but they
could have used the same meshing as TS3 and still had the Direction Manipulation feature.
Custom In-Game Gallery and Content - Meh, same as what we had in TS3. And even if it was out-of-game, all it took was a few clicks. Is it that much of an inconvenience to go out of game to get content? Sure you can "drag and drop" rooms and other items with Custom In-Game Gallery and Content, but for some players, it's a part of the process of designing and building the rooms that you want that made up the enjoyment. All it seems with TS4 is that the main objective is to get through the process in order to "play with your Sims like you would with dolls" For some of us players that isn't the be-all and end-all of playing the Sims.
Persistent Worlds & Neighborhoods - "When leaving your neighborhood in past Sims titles, you character wouldn't be able to build on their skills or retain the relationships they developed. " - FALSE. No, what you have a single world divided up into neighbourhoods which is more restrictive than the "open world" map concept in TS3. Secondly, would you be able to retain the relationships that you had even with family in real life...because when your Sim moves to a different city, your relationship changes, just as in real-life. And your skills if you use the move feature, stays the same. "The game will allow you to move a family out of their house and place them in the family bin. This will not sever any relationships or remove any memories. Moving the family this way will create duplicate sim files which will clog up the neighborhood you move them into, contributing to neighborhood overcrowding, which can eventually completely ruin the neighborhood you're moving them into." It just means that you have to go back into your previous save - which hopefully you have named differently and remove every trace of your Sim in the previous town. That procedure shouldn't detract from your gameplay...just think of it as the extra procedure you have to do in order to keep everything running smoothly. And perhaps, they could have done the PW&N in an actual open world concept by cogitating on it a while longer instead of producing something that alienates at least half or more of the Sims gaming community who play a certain way and then trying to shove them all into one type of gameplay like you'd shove a square peg into a round hole. It's not possible.
Emotionally Driven Activities - Not all people in RL wear their emotions on their sleeves whereas in TS4 every Sim excretes their emotions all over and that's what made TS3 a great game. You wouldn't know the reaction that you were going to get when you interacted with a Sim. If you put a trait where your Sim was over-emotional, then perhaps he'll react when he sees a Sim that he dislikes by sneering quietly or by an aggressive animation just like in RL depending on the character trait. Have you ever seen a quietly angry Sim in TS4?

No, for what little we get with Sims 4 and the cuts made to content control, there's no way that I'm putting out $49.99 to buy TS4. I'll happily stick with TS3 until they put out a worthy successor.

Sounds to me like even the most minute differences in behavior between the games sticks in your craw...making you the exact archetype the OP is on about.

Any new features they could have added which offered any deviation from the way TS3 Sims behaved is apparantly unwelcome in your book...making it very unlilkely that you would have ever embraced anything other than a reboot of TS3.

ad hominem, it's extremely doubtful that you have read the entirety of my post without jumping to conclusions. I'm just stating my opinion of what I see as the flaws of the game and why I don't feel like the developers did the game justice judging on how much features they added versus cutting away.

I have suggested that they could have done a better job of integrating their new features with the old features of the previous iteration of Sims and I have stated the points that I liked about the Sims 4, namely the push-pull drag features of the new CAS as well as the PW&N. However I feel that they could have retained the open-world by spending a little longer on the development phase.

As far as the emotion driven activities criticism was concerned, it's well evident in play-throughs that I have seen on-line that your TS4 sims emote all over the place which is unrealistic. If this is supposed to be a "life simulation" you will get a variance of different reactions based on the traits that you choose. It's not evident in the shown game-play. As far as emotion affecting skill level as evidenced in one video, that may be a plus benefit in quicker achievement of physical goals but to tout that as "realistic life simulation" is erroneous.

"JoAnne65;c-15769105" wrote:
One of the most frustrating things for me personally is that I don't have a choice.

Exactly...and that's why I think we need two iterations of the game: one for base specs users and one for high-end computer specs users (perhaps one in 32bit and one in 64 bit) and bring back the open world for the higher-end users. My computer isn't considered high-end but barring a few hiccups and lags, I find that it runs TS3 without much problem. And the problems that I do have, I don't consider enough of a pain in the plum to complain about. It works...sometimes my Sim freezes in place for a few seconds (but I don't mind it...because I can wait...)...it just takes patience. I grew up with WWII-era parents in the 70s who kept preaching the concept of ever-lasting patience so waiting a few seconds isn't a chore for me.

The simple fact is that the TS4 players tend to keep wanting to do is shove TS4 down our throats and scream and yell "LIKE IT...LIKE IT...LIKE IT!!!" No we don't have to.

https://cdn.meme.am/cache/instances/folder627/500x/21585627/y-u-no-its-a-free-country-you-can-do-what-you-want.jpg

Apparently it's hard to accept there's not necessarily such a thing as an 'archetype'. I understand it may be tempting to continue this topic the way it started, by placing simmers in a corner and kick them back if they dare to crawl out, but I prefer a discussion about the game myself, rather than about simmers.