Would you buy a “Shopping Mall” GamePack?

"Dannydanbo;c-16593691" wrote:


With all due respect to you, you can build a "mall" and divide it up into different stores. As many stores as you like, but it would still be considered one store on one lot. You can place a food cart(s) in your store, however, currently, you must pay for someone to man it. Hopefully, this will be fixed in the future.

Also, you would be limited to a max of three clerks per lot, so a huge mall divided into stores would be a waste because sims will congregate in one or two spots near the register no matter how big your store is. If a sim does wander off to purchase something far from the register, if you see them, by the time your clerk reaches them, they are angry and walking off in a huff. Retail is meant for small shops, not huge malls.

If they gave us a mall building shell with several separate lots inside it (similar to apartments in CL but horizontal) they would still be separate lots with loading screens. Plus, with the limited number of lots allowed in a world, a third to a half of your lots are in one spot. However, the numbers tell the devs that retail isn't played enough to warrant building a mall of any kind, so we are back to MP.

You assume a lot in the bolded portion. If a shopping mall venue were created, what makes you think that the present restrictions would remain? New features should and do mean adjustments to preexisting norms.

My whole reason for wanting a shopping mall venue is so that those restrictions will be abolished. IIRC, since the original game, TS4 is the only game in the series to be so restrictive regarding NPC spawn points. In addition, the community has been begging for proper cash registers and queues. (The way that sales are made now probably has a lot to do with why retail isn't so popular as it was in TS2.) A shopping mall venue would be a prime opportunity for EA to create cash register objects and to allow a register for each "store".

Finally, a shopping mall shouldn't have loading screens between stores. A shopping mall with loading screens would be anathema to the entire idea of a mall in the first place.

I was able to build functioning malls for TS2 and TS3. If it was possible over a decade ago, if the team is willing to put in the work, it should be a possibility now.

As for shells, I'm opposed to any kind of shell that resembles what we got in CL. I want options of how malls look and where they are located. Shells like those that were introduced in CL won't provide either option.