"Kironide;c-17912220" wrote:
A question for those knowledgeable people out there with technical insight to game engines - How difficult is it to upgrade a game engine, if a game proves successful and it runs for a longer than originally expected? I noticed there was job advert for an engineer recently to extend the Sims engine's function.
@Kironide I think the biggest issue is that the fountation of the game has already been set. Let's use the worlds as an example. World design in the Sims 4 is part of its fountation and is fundamental to all the other aspect of the game working.
If the team wants to redesign and make worlds better, for example by making the districts open and adding trasportation they would have to re-edit so many things. They would have to redo the worlds to match the design, they would have to redo the roads to make cars be able to navigate trough them, they would need to redo the lot design in order for the cars, like carpool or services to be tied and correctly placed to the road and the corresponding lot.
If they make open districts for the worlds that would also affect sims massively, they would have to go back and reprogramm all the NPC behavior because as it is now, NPCs load their actions during the loading screen always according to what is available in the lot. If now the whole district has to be loaded they would have to take that into consideration, maybe load more sims to do more actions.
Every game is fundamentally a system, when one thing changes the whole system is affected. It doesn't mean changing the fountation is not possible or unachievable. It only means that changing the Sims 4 fountation so late into its cycle would require such a massive amount of work, it would be like designing a game from scratch and maybe at the end it wouldn't work correctly with all the DLC.
This is why there is no reason to believe that the Sims 4 has any potential to change and become better in its core. It will stay the same game forever. All that is ever going to be done is add new sparkly features on top of it to disctract from the root of the problems. That's all.
