Open Neighborhood Rather than Open World

"jackjack_k;c-16029781" wrote:

"@Cinebar;c-16022103" wrote:

"FloppyFish;c-16022098" wrote:
What is the alternative to having backdrops? Blank, white space? xD LOL. Every game has backdrops.

Yes, but they are usually much farther away. :) Not the house next door.

Yeah, but if your house is at the edge, it will always be the house next door.

I feel like Simmers especially, don't really understand why backdrops exist (and should exist). They kind of want a game where there's no decoration at all, which is why The Sims 2 & 3 have aged terribly by todays standards.

Say what you want about 4, but it will still look as fresh in 10 years as it does now. Bustin Out is proof to that. Detail counts.
Decorations made Bustin Out the incredible experience it is.

The Sims 3 suffers majorly from looking like a playable City Builder map instead of an Open World (even then, I would have taken SimCity Societies over TS3).

Having Sims 4 type backdrops would have made the game look fresh for much longer, because it feels realistic that Sims 3 maps are a small area of a larger city, not a remote island in the middle of the ocean.

I'll throw in something I posted in another topic the other day, hope it will explain the difference where it comes to backdrops and backdrops.

"JoAnne65;c-16024821" wrote:
I think my main issue with Sims 4 is that I'm constantly confronted with the edge of the world, which is not the case in Sims 3. I love to pause the game sometimes, press tab and then just look around what's happening outside my sim's bubble. So she's exploring a tomb and then I decide to see what time it actually is (we both tend to forget while exploring). So I play:

https://i.imgur.com/A5GbvCd.png

And then I go up.

https://i.imgur.com/1TNhcD4.png

I play.

https://i.imgur.com/PV2SitV.png

And I check it out outside.

https://i.imgur.com/aZpTXIA.png

https://i.imgur.com/u441UsN.png

I use tomb/Egypt examples now because that's what I'm currently doing, this is hot off the press, but I do this all the time, constantly. Looking around, making a 360° turn, getting a broader picture of where my sim is living for me is important. The set up of Sims 4 hinders that, which I guess makes the world so dead for me. I went into my game this afternoon and took some pictures that look quite pretty to me.

https://i.imgur.com/PtKXVgW.png

https://i.imgur.com/nSUrcZS.png

https://i.imgur.com/0uNRvrI.png

The art style is a matter of taste but I can very well live with this. But then I start playing with the camera, just looking around, and I see this.

https://i.imgur.com/9XA3rAV.png

https://i.imgur.com/jDIMcvY.png

It actually looks better here than in the game, because in the game you can really see those mountains are flat, billboards. That way my sim's no longer part of a world, it's as if he's on a stage in a play.

For me playing the game is more than turning the camera in ways that makes it look nice, it's the whole experience. I also feel this backdrop thing causes the environment looks more static, it's always the very same view. In Sims 3 there seems to be more variety, probably because most of what you see isn't stage but actual interactable world.

My problem here is, that I didn't look for the edge of the world. It was just right there and it never is with Sims 3's open world. In fact zooming out with tab in Sims 3 can get you amazing pictures.