"Naus;c-17911665" wrote:
"ACruelButLovingGod;c-17911352" wrote:
The moral of the story is that you're guaranteed to anger someone whenever you have to deal with a super long-running game that's active many years after you launch it (heck, look at World of Warcraft, which came out in 2004 and which Blizzard has to keep current so it doesn't feel and look like a relic today compared to other MMO games). Keep it accessible and people complain about the technical restraints. Keep up with developments in tech and game design and older players feel left behind or like they have to buy a new computer. You're pretty much boned either way.
Sorry, but the moral of the story is that games SHOULD NOT run for so long. This Games-As-A-Live-Service model may work for MMOs like WoW, but it's a terrible idea for single-player games. They should be released, expanded for a few years, and then move on to a new version.
I don't believe should be made to buy the same basic stuff such as weather over and over either. A basic weather system should be part of the base game like it's part of MOST games nowadays. Just because The Sims has been doing something for years, it doesn't mean it's a good thing.
If they keep up, they're going to end up killing the franchise, especially if competition comes out such as Paralives or whatever game Paradox is developing with Rod Humble.
See, I disagree with that idea. I love single-player games with massively long tails that are nearly endlessly expandable and get new content support many years after initial release form a good chunk of my actual gaming time.
I think of it as being like in the old days of stuff like model railroading. You'd buy the "starter set" which was usually a small oval loop of track and a small train (maybe even just a locomotive) to run on it. But if you went to the hobby shop or bought stuff by mail-order from magazines like
Model Railroader you could get layouts like the one my stepfather had in the basement or that formed the backbone of the intro to
Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, itself loosely modeled on Pittsburgh, where the show was filmed. Rolling stock, scale model houses and civic buildings, as much as your imagination and floor/table space would allow.
Indeed, Steam will happily sell you something like Train Sim World, which is basically model railroad meets computers, and there's a good reason flight sims have been a pillar of PC gaming for just about as long as home PC games have existed—the very first
Microsoft Flight Simulator came out in October of 1982; the first MS-DOS based PC launched in 1981, and in the 40 years or so since, both officially supported and fan-made expansions have been part and parcel of that franchise. Simulation gaming did it first, but Paradox figured out you can do it pretty well with strategy games too.
Crusader Kings only got a third installment because they reached the absolute limit of what the engine could do with CK2 (initially released in 2012) and it finally had to be rebuilt; I'm not sure Sims 4 is at that point yet (then again, neither were 2 or 3 when they were done.)
What's more, it's pretty obvious that model is wildly profitable—I wonder how much DLC the average player of such a game actually buys, but I know the enthusiasts (like me) can and will spend a ton of money on them, like hundreds of dollars, over the game's lifetime. As long as it's singleplayer and doesn't have mandatory online components (grouses angrily at both
SimCity 2013 and
Fallout 76), bring on the long-runners!
