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7 years ago
"TheHavocado;c-16240494" wrote:
Sorry, a bit late into the discussion.
> @Erpe said:
> The Sims games have always had low ratings in the reviews and among other gamers who never have understood why this game got high sales numbers at all when it in their eyes isn’t even a real game but more like a toy for mainly young girls (or a virtual dollhouse).
1. Where did you get that "low ratings in the review" ? Metacritic gave TS1 & TS2 a 90% Ratings, while 86% on TS3. Those Ratings never falls below 8.0 by any reviewers (well, officially used in most wikipedia pages anyway). Except when TS4 released. All reviewers gave it a score below 8.0.
I don’t usually get my ratings from Metacritic but instead from places like Gamespot and IGN.
Even if it's a dollhouse, it's still a game.
There is a difference between toys and games. If kids are playing with a real doll or a real dollhouse the normal word for such things is that they is toys and not games. SimCity and the Sims are examples of non-games or software toys as Will Wright called them. You can read more about this on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-game
2009-2013
The Sims 3 - I don't think I have to say much here. The only game that could rival this one is Grand Theft Auto 5. Even then, you can't have a family there. You cannot build a house. Well at least you can hold a gun and control a lot of vehicles freely. There is also story mode ! All the expansion packs are mostly a polished version of The Sims 2 packs, annnnnd some cash grab here and there.
The Sims 3 got more EPs (11) than Sims 2 did (8) and the first of the EPs for Sims 3 was World Adventures which was a completely new type of EP. So EA knew that it was especially important to start with an EP which people wouldn’t see as just a repetition of an earlier EP for the previous game.
2014-today.
The Sims 4 - In a general idea, it's the same as The Sims 1 & 2 combined. But with a much more less content. They scrapped Will Wright (in a sense) and everything from the previous game, with little to no improvements in the graphics, much less on accessibility, more on the little things (animation) details that actually gives the more casual players frustated to the depth of oblivion. Which makes the game looks awfully bad. And oh, they also increased the price.
They scrapped Will Wright already after Sims 1 and he soon left the Sims studio to work on Spore instead.
The improvements in Sims 4 wasn’t about the graphics and they never intended Sims 4 to be an improvement of an earlier game at all. The improvement idea is the usual here in the forum. But it has never been EA’s idea. Instead EA just wants every new Sims game to become a new and different type of Sims game. So EA wanted Sims 4 to be as different from Sims 2 and Sims 3 as possible. Therefore Sims 4 got much less focus on raising a family and more focus on multitasking, partying and happiness instead. The simmers just punished EA for this though and EA had to add toddlers to Sims 4 anyway to get the sales numbers up. But this was surely not a part of EA’s original plan.
Notice The Timeline ? Of course. The Sims 4 is indeed 100% harder to be created compared to the era of The Sims 2. The level of detail itself are different. But when you (again) consider the fact that after 4 years of development, we barely got half of The Sims 3 content, it's a lot lackluster and maybe, just maybe, did they bit off more than they could chew ?
You won’t ever get all the content from the previous games because that never was EA’s plan. EA doesn’t make repetitions of old games but new games instead. So EA just replaced half of the usual EPs with GPs and SPs instead because EA’s experience was that cheaper expansions sell better when they are sold as digital downloads. But if you buy all SPs, GPs and EPs each year then you still will pay EA just as much money as you did if you bought the same for Sims 3. So seen from EA’s viewpoint the same value of expansions has been released for Sims 4 as for Sims 3. EA doesn’t release even more because there of course is a limit to how much money most simmers (mainly young teen girls) can afford to use every year.
But this doesn’t in any way make the basegame younger or the amount of expansions smaller. So after 5 years EA will be in the same situation again: a too old basegame with so many already released expansions that sales numbers for new expansions have gone down. Therefore EA again needs a new basegame to be released after 5 years. So I will be very surprised if EA doesn’t announce the next basegame somewhere between March and August 2018 and releases it in the second half of 2019.
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