Forum Discussion
7 years ago
"Erpe;c-16216458" wrote:
@Deshong04 When I am talking about the graphics I am comparing CGA, EGA and early VGA graphics with more modern graphics. The differences are about more details and higher resolution.
Simplified cartoony styled graphics is very easy and fast to make for artists and therefore cheap to make. It is what still is used in many games for children and especially by new game companies who don’t have much money or skilled artists with advanced technics to make more advanced and detailed graphics that otherwise would be required to make fantasy worlds with landscapes, characters and monsters with more varying colors and many more details.
I could be wrong but just because the graphics are simplified doesn't necessarily make it easy or cheap. One thing I do know is that animation is expensive and so is game creation. However, depending on the developers there are some ways to lessen the costs but usually by doing so you end up with less in-depth gameplay and/or visuals which falls short of its best and fullest potential.
I'm also thinking in terms of different methods of animation. Regardless, it's all hard work if you want to do it right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GILQ09KFUbA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8kR7-iN8PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=levlAXk4y_o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26v_zbCVhTY
The early games only had 4 colors and quite low resolution. Therefore their graphics was primitive. But especially in the 1990s games got graphics with much higher resolution, many more details and many more colors. Then in 2000 TS1 was released with only a small neighborhood, graphics without many details and sims who looked so simplified and ugly that an artist only would need a couple of minutes to make them. This wasn’t at all what I would expect for a game at that time because it much more looked like a game made about 15 yrs earlier.
Your expectations for the game seem so far-fetched it's illogical and unreasonable. I can see if the advertising made it out to be something more than it actually was...like I heard about No Man's Sky. But as far as I know...no that wasn't the case. As far as the game not having many details please. It's more detailed than TS4...did you see the grass and the textures on objects unlike TS4, a Sims game from 2014 vs 2000? But let's just include all TS titles in the series to see each game's graphical details.
2000
https://s25.postimg.org/hhib1iqlb/20020214-vacation-5.jpg
2004
https://s25.postimg.org/msx7m8kdr/291748-screenshot_5_big.jpg
2009
https://s25.postimg.org/tzywhtkxb/Screenshot-260_2.jpg
2014
https://s25.postimg.org/m3ef9uwov/1088-1.jpg
But compare TS1’s graphics with TS2 and it should be obvious what I mean because TS2 sims have all the graphics and details which I would have expected already for TS1. It also came with 3 much bigger worlds. You can also compare the primitive looking Sims 1 pets with the pets in later Sims games because they also were simplified to suit everything else in TS1. TS1 was a cheap game to make and the reason must obvious be that EA didn’t expect it to be very successful at all. (But EA probably had an agreement with Will Wright to make it anyway as one of the conditions about EA’s purchase of Maxis.)
"Game designer Will Wright was inspired to create a "virtual doll house" after losing his home during the Oakland firestorm of 1991 and subsequently rebuilding his life. Replacing his home and his other possessions made him think about adapting that life experience into a game. When he initially took his ideas to the Maxis board of the directors, they were skeptical and gave little support or financing for the game. The directors at Electronic Arts, which bought Maxis in 1997, were more receptive—SimCity had been a great success for them, and they foresaw the possibility of building a strong Sim franchise." -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sims
Other interesting information.Spoiler
"While he was at home with his daughter, Wright began to turn over the idea for a new game, a kind of interactive doll house that adults would like as much as children. “I went around my house looking at all my objects, asking myself, ‘What’s the least number of motives or needs that would justify all this crap in my house?’ There should be some reason for everything in my house. What’s the reason?”
"Three works helped Wright understand how he could turn these life experiences into a game. One was the book “A Pattern Language,” by Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure, in Berkeley. The book identifies two hundred and fifty-three timeless ways of building, which are classified as patterns—“Stair Seats,” “Children’s Realm,” etc.—and it shows how these patterns can create satisfying living spaces. The idea is that the value of architecture can be measured by the happiness of the people who live in it. The second was the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation,” in which Maslow described a pyramid-shaped hierarchy of human needs, with “Physiological” at the bottom, and above it “Safety,” “Love,” “Esteem,” and, at the top, “Self-actualization.” The third inspiration was Charles Hampden-Turner’s “Maps of the Mind,” which compares more than fifty theories about how the mind works. Putting these works together, Wright formulated a model with which to “score” the happiness of the people in his doll house by their status, popularity, and success, and by the quality of the environment the player designs for them—the more comfortable the house, the happier the people. Wright told me, “I don’t believe any one theory of human psychology is correct. The Sims just ended up being a mishmash of stuff that worked in the game.”
"The original Sims had eight motives or needs—hunger, hygiene, bladder, comfort, energy, social, fun, and room—all of which are affected by objects in the world around them. Life for a Sim is the pursuit of happiness, but happiness depends on social interaction and consumption, and consumption requires money. For example, the cheapest bed in The Sims 2, which costs three hundred “simoleons,” brings your Sim one point of comfort and two points of energy; a three-thousand-simoleon bed carries seven points of comfort and six of energy. Wright has said that he intended the game as a parody of consumerism, because “if you sit there and build a big mansion that’s all full of stuff, without cheating, you realize that all these objects end up sucking up all your time, when they had been promising to save you time.”
"Almost no dedicated Sims player, Wright included, actually follows the rules of the game, which force you to spend many hours working in menial jobs in order to be able to afford nicer stuff. Most players use the “cheats” that are widely available on the Internet and have been built into the game by the programmers. Cheats are short pieces of code you can type into the game that let you get around the rules. Typing “motherlode” into The Sims 2, for example, endows your Sims with fifty thousand simoleons. But using cheats doesn’t really feel like cheating, because playing The Sims doesn’t really feel like a game. It seems more like gardening, or fixing up your house. One of the game’s small triumphs is to make work seem like fun. As my fourteen-year-old niece exclaimed recently, when I asked her what she liked about playing The Sims, “You’ve got one Sim who you’ve got to get to school, and another who needs to get to his job, and their kid has been up all night and is in a bad mood, and the house is dirty—I mean, there’s a ton of things to do!”
"When Wright took his idea to the Maxis board of directors, Jeff Braun says, “The board looked at The Sims and said, ‘What is this? He wants to do an interactive doll house? The guy is out of his mind.’ ” Doll houses were for girls, and girls didn’t play video games. Maxis gave little support or financing for the game. Electronic Arts, which bought Maxis in 1997, was more enthusiastic. (Wright received seventeen million dollars in E.A. stock for his share of the company.) Wright’s games are so different from E.A.’s other releases that it was hard to imagine the two being united in the same enterprise. But the success of SimCity had already established Sim as a strong brand, and E.A., which by then, fifteen years after its founding, was becoming a Procter & Gamble-style brand-management company, foresaw the possibility of building a Sim franchise. Released in 2000, The Sims was an immediate hit; it went on to become the best-selling P.C. game of all time. E.A. has since licensed it to many other playing platforms, and issues regular Sims “expansion packs,” featuring new content, like Livin’ Large, House Party, and Hot Date. (Wright worked on The Sims 2, which was a major redesign, but he has had nothing to do with the expansion packs.) The Sims franchise has earned E.A. more than a billion dollars so far. E.A.’s only misstep was The Sims Online, the multiplayer version released in 2002, which failed to attract the masses of players drawn to other multiplayer games, such as World of Warcraft and Runescape."
"The Sims brought a huge new population to gaming—girls. That did not come as a complete surprise to Wright, since women made up forty per cent of his Sims development team, and his daughter Cassidy, then fourteen years old, had helped him tinker with the prototypes. When he was a kid, Wright told me, “I never played with dolls, which is more of a social thing than playing with trains—it’s about the people in the house. Cassidy helped me see that. She and her friends got into the purely creative side of the game, rather than the goal-oriented side, which really influenced me a lot.” Cassidy was traumatized to discover that the Sims could burn down their house, and die in the fire, if they weren’t careful around the stove. Wright left that feature in the game.
An unintended result of The Sims’ success is that Wright transformed the tactile experience of playing with dolls, which has been a part of children’s development for thousands of years, into a virtual experience. The enormous success of The Sims means that children today can grow up without having the hands-on model-making experiences that Wright enjoyed as a child, and that inspired him to make games in the first place."-https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/11/06/game-master
But TS2 got all the money it needed because EA then knew that young girls loved Sims games and EA probably expected TS2 to sell even much better than TS1 had done. But probably to EA’s disappointment this wasn’t the case anyway for some reason. It surprised me too. But maybe the main reason was that many girls refused to switch from TS1 to TS2 anyway?
You mean to tell me, that the reason was because "young girls" loved Sims when it's evident the game was targeted at EVERYONE, teen and up regardless of gender. There's no way it was because TS2 is the sequel, therefore, greatly improved and advanced over the first entry of the series? Also, where are you getting that TS2 was a disappointment for EA?
"The Sims was first released on February 4, 2000. By March 2002, The Sims had sold more than 6.3 million copies worldwide; and by February 2005, the game has shipped 16 million copies worldwide. By March 2015, The Sims had sold more than 11.24 million copies for PC, making it one of the best-selling PC game in history. Since its initial release, seven expansion packs have been released, as have sequels The Sims 2, The Sims 3 and The Sims 4. The Sims has won numerous awards, including GameSpot's "Game of the Year Award" for 2000.
In 2012, the game was one of 14 video games selected by the Museum of Modern Art as the basis for an intended collection of 40 games."
"The Sims 2 was a commercial success, selling one million copies in its first ten days, a record at the time. During April 2008, The Sims 2 website announced that 100 million copies of The Sims series had been sold. The Sims 2 was well received by critics, gaining a 90% score from aggregators Metacritic and GameRankings. By March 2012, The Sims 2 had sold over six million PC copies, and 13 million over all platforms, making it one of the best-selling PC games of all-time."-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sims_2
The higher sales numbers for TS1 compared to the sales numbers for TS2, TS3 and TS4 also makes me wonder if EA really was right about making the games easier and with a less challenging than TS1 was just because EA now knew that most customers for Sims games were young girls? I am not at all sure that most girls really prefer easy and trivial games over more challenging games anyway?
The only game that dumbed down what a true Sims life simulator is, is TS4. Have you tried playing with Darren and Dirk Dreamer? And even in TS3 the player has the choice to make it difficult, easy or anywhere in-between based on how they choose to play.
For TS4 EA has gone even farther by making the game even more about the looks and less about the gameplay. But even though some simmers seem to love this it seems to me like the majority don’t? So I think that EA likely should revise this strategy about making the Sims games easy and mostly just about the graphics and the looks because I don’t think that the young girls (who loved TS1) really agree. My experience as a teacher for both boys and girls indicates otherwise too.
No, TS4 is the only game that cut out major gameplay elements to the point there is no real point or advantage to move on when the predecessors far succeed what this newest so-called sequel can do. The only downfall of TS3 excluding poor game optimization and leftover glitches, is not taking a full advantage of the open world. In base game there is no open shopping and dining like TS1 and TS2. Also, no subhoods like TS2. Those are my major pet peeves besides wanting the best stable gaming experience with each and every EP/SP/All Store Content. Oh, and one more thing, the coding can be overbearing when Sims get way too attracted to something but I suppose all Sims games have this issue just like routing. But it seems by now it should have been dealt with or solved by allowing the player to fine tune every single feature possible to their liking. Such is the case with NRass Retuner.
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