On Grants Tweets

"logion;c-17006258" wrote:
If they could, I am sure they would go back and change things differently based on community feedback and statistics, rarely game development studios have the time or the money for it though.

Definitely. Even as a modder doing relatively tiny things by comparison, I often wish I could go back and change something, or do it differently. Sometimes I can here and there since it's modding and it's more flexible, but sometimes I've already established something as normal in a mod and it's too late to change it without annoying lots of people. And it can be hard to know who all would get annoyed, if they would, and why. You can't just poll the people who are engaged and assume that's accurate cause they represent such a tiny portion of those who use what you've made (this is made all the more clear when you've got engagement numbers in the single digits sometimes, out of hundreds-thousands who are downloading).

That ends up meaning that toggles are king in this game, imo, more so than any other. Due to the vast amount of differences in playstyle and desires that a player might have, being able to flip switches as much as possible is best, so long as you aren't overwhelming them with too many of them, or too arbitrary, which is a whole other type of challenge in itself. And then there are some players sometimes who want more of a guided experience and don't want to be confronted with a morass of switches, so figuring out how to present them with something more guided while also providing switches to others is tricky. In the end, sometimes you're going to end up prioritizing one or the other (e.g. Strangerville vs. Get Together clubs). Then there's stuff like the Seasons calendar, which I think is a solid example of mixing the two priorities together; guided holidays/events experience by default, but can (mostly) be customized.

Edit: Oh and to make matters more confusing, using myself as an example, I talk a big talk about wanting sandbox tools and it's definitely true that it's something I get a lot of enjoyment out of, but me getting sandbox tools doesn't guaranteed translate to long, meaningful, fun play sessions. For example, the clubs system is one of the most customizable sandbox tools in the game's packs, so you'd think I would use it all the time, but due in part to my tendency to play a small amount of sims at once, I don't tend to use it that often. However, there have been times I really would have missed it, like creatively using it to find sims with a certain attribute, or using it to draw sims into the home of a vampire so they can be locked in and fed on. Neither of these things being features that were explicitly programmed in as a guided experience, but are made possible with it. And that feeling of doing something creative that wasn't explicitly intended is irreplaceable, but it can also be only one piece of the puzzle in terms of overall enjoyment.