Aliens game pack suggestion
Just a pack idea that could bring justice to aliens and explore more of its background and aesthetic. Feel free to give your suggestion and discuss mine or other ideas. • Cyberpunk City on Sixam ...
Forum Discussion
Just as the title says, I think Alien Sims should have something to do.
All the other occult sims, besides mermaids, have aspiration paths. But with the mermaid pack, you at least get Sulani and there’s a lot of stuff to do there; in addition mermaids have slightly different needs and animations. I wouldn’t mind a Mermaid aspiration path but that’s for another discussion.
For now, let’s focus on Alien Sims. Besides having a human disguise and alien form, there isn’t much appeal to making one. They can Empathize and Detect Personality with Sims, along with some other curious interactions; but that’s about it.
This leaves virtually nothing different from playing a human Sim besides the fact that they can’t tan. You don’t need to be an alien to go to Sixam, you don’t have special interactions with other aliens, no special moodlets from eating alien fruits, the only thing that differentiates is the embarrassed moodlet when a sim finds out you’re an alien which affects almost nothing.
Indeed, this leaves you with an incredibly similar experience to playing a human, as even the needs are the same. Having two forms does give you an opportunity to make a lot of different outfits for them but you can do that with a human also.
To improve the gameplay experience for Alien Sims, I would suggest some new actions in the interaction menu, some altered needs, quirks, and skill tree and aspirations; similar to the Vampire or Spellcaster skills, you have to do various things to gain experience points and level up to gain different abilities.
Off the top of my head, I think it would be cool to have a “Beam Me Up” sorta skill, where you can call a UFO to beam up the sim and drop them off somewhere; like how Vampires, Werewolves, and Spellcasters can fast travel with their respective abilities.
With the aspiration path(s) I think there should be one where your Alien Sim has to study humans so they can blend in more effectively, and the reward trait makes it so you rarely get discovered as an Alien or something like that.
To study humans you can abduct humans (like how it can happen to you), cows (classic), and many other things. You can learn human culture by watching TV, listening to music, etc. The less “human knowledge” your Alien Sim has the more weird stuff they should do: wearing clothes backwards, sitting in chairs the wrong way, etc.
I could come up with some other stuff but I wanna see what y’all think.
@bluehope9 Great ideas! Really love the idea of Aliens "learning" how to human, LoL.
There are so many possibilities for Alien gameplay. Aliens deserve some love, and so do Mermaids (and so do playable Ghosts).
The problem with introducing Occult Sims in an expansion pack is they are shortchanged and overshadowed. The main focus of the expansion pack isn't the Occult, it's the world (Sulani) or gameplay (Active Careers) they came in. There are some realism players who would prefer to disable Occult Sims from these expansions because it breaks their realism play-style. Occults are a style of gameplay for a specific player type. Game Packs are the perfect vehicle to put full focus and development on Occults.
This begs the question, if there are no refreshes planned for the future (which I hope isn't the case), would it be possible for Aliens and Mermaids to get their own occult Game Pack (GP) independent of their respective expansion packs?
Actually, it begs a few questions:
Would Get To Work (GtW) be required DLC for Aliens to appear in a separate dedicated Game Pack (GP)?
Could a GP-Alien appear without Get To Work?
Would the code of a GP-Alien conflict with the GtW-Alien if both of these packs were installed?
If Get To Work is installed after an Alien Game Pack, would the GtW-Alien override/conflict with the GP-Alien?
The expansion packs that gave us Aliens and Mermaids only provided a small glimpse of these fun new life states. Mermaids and Aliens are just too interesting to leave to obscurity. We shouldn't ignore these Occults, we should explore them.
If you remember back with Sims 3, they actually did something very similar. Vampires were introduced with Night Life with the lore of Bridgeport surrounding the various vampires that shipped with the city, then introduced again in Supernatural alongside werewolves, witches and fairies. There was no functional difference between the two, though the two packs added different aesthetics that were available to any vampire if you had both installed.
Now that they're including a bunch of stuff into the basegame that only needs the EPs and GPs to unlock, they could move the basic alien code to basegame, have GTW unlock it since GTW aliens are honestly pretty bare-bones, then have the GP that focuses on aliens expand their powers, equipment, technology and add neat stuff for CAS and BB.
The only problem with this is that there's no precedent for owning a lot in a "secret" world that your stalker swarm can't access. Considering they can access a lot more than you can. When Noah Kane can run up to you and propose that you go to prom with him while you're in the middle of trying to unlock the third trap door in the Selvadoradan Temple (I'M AN ADULT, NOAH), or when three paparazzi are surrounding you with cameras while you're trying to talk to the First Order about a lightsaber, the idea of playing an extended game on Sixam with Geoffrey Landgraab doing a walkby once an hour just doesn't seem like it'll be very fun. At least I'm safe from them when I go to "secret" areas like Magic Realm, Sixam, Mt. Komorebi Peak, and the hermit's house in Granite Falls, but I can't actually live in those areas (technically I can with tents and all that, but I mean buy a lot and build a house without cheats). For the vision I'm seeing in this pack, we'd need a residential world that is only accessible as a secret area in order for it to work, lest your newly-generated alien wake up one morning to see Malcolm Landgraab and Wolfgang Munch trading insults on your lawn. Because unless steps are taken to stop this from the start, I guarantee you it'll be an issue.
Just in case the team doesn't have any answers for this yet:
For Aliens we could go for specific species of alien that doesn't co flict with what we already have. We have unknown planets like Ilustria and Bloodwar, and they could introduce us a new type of alien, Ilustrians and Bloodwartians/Bloodwarriors. The Get to Work aliens could be renamed to Sixamians/Sixamites.
For mermaids i like to think that they could be reintroduced as faeries since mermaid are commonly described as a being part of the fae folk or having similar creatures like nixies, kelpies, naiads, nereids, ondines, etc.
It'd also be wonderful if we could have the collectible alien as interactive pets. And if you ask me how they would move around i'd say: Flying/Floating.
