Neighborhood Stories OFF button

"Triplis;c-18020286" wrote:

"cyncie;c-18020250" wrote:
Except that a lot of people don’t like or want MCCC or S3 story progression in their game. Yes, I know. The Magic Word “toggle”. But it’s been indicated that the number of toggles in S3 contributed to that game’s instability, so the devs are trying to bring in a type of story progression with player control through in game action.

I can't imagine why toggles would inherently lead to instability in a computer program, that sounds like a design problem. They already have tons of them and they keep coming: packs. Of many sizes.

Why they are using the drama nodes feature I don't know, which seem to be in desperate need of actually working filters/tests that many other parts of the game have. Like how many times have people complained of phone calls not filtering for sims and relationships between them properly? And then there are reports that's happening with the stories prompts too. Go figure.

It seems like the route they have chosen would be unnecessarily hard to turn off on a global level. Maybe they were supposed to figure it out without reaching out to a gameplay engineer or something (or it was pitched as something easy-ish to do "because we can use an existing system"?), but this neighborhood stories thing should probably be its own system and tuning type, so it can be easily turned on or off (or blocked or whatever) and so it won't suffer from the same problems that have plagued the phone calls system for I don't know how long. It seems like their choice here has to lead to that separation or a serious look at the entire phone call system.

If I'm being charitable, maybe doing it through the phone system is just for prototyping to get a feel for how people react to the general concept, but if so, they should have been upfront about that.

This seems to be the way they update some features now. In steps. I think that is asking quite a lot from players to use not fully supported features in their saves for several months.

If I had to guess, the reason why they are doing it in steps is because they want figure it out how it can work best with the game's architecture. This is probably because they have to think long-term for everything. Modders have seen in the code that it looks like there is more to the likes/dislikes system for example so they will probably do more with that in the future.

And this is also probably because the game is 7 years old now and a new story progression system would have to be compatible with 40+ packs, so working with an existing system, the phone system makes it a bit more feasible to implement.

But with that comes other problems because the phone system is so integrated into the game, they are going to have to figure out how to make the game work without it if people want toggles for specific story progression things now. But they said that will come in a future update so they will probably find a way to do it.

Maybe we will see an update to the phone in 2022 or 2023.