Open Neighborhood Rather than Open World

"jackjack_k;c-16029849" wrote:

"@drake_mccarty;c-16022174" wrote:

"jackjack_k;c-16022062" wrote:
I don't understand the hate for backdrops. Every good game should have them.

Open World games have them too (Skyrim & GTA V both have them).
It's embarrassing and poor design when a world suddenly comes to a halt because the no one bothered to make backdrops. Your world literally stops as soon as you reach the playable area border.

The Sims 3 would have looked a lot better had their been backdrops surrounding the explorable area. The size difference wouldn't have changed. All they had to do was make the worlds bigger but keep the routable area the same.

It's grating to see a City like Bridgeport literally be an island the size of a small town. Had there been a city that continued around Bridgeport it would have looked a lot better.


The Sims 3 on Xbox/PS have backdrops in it's worlds alongside the normal world and it looks great. Not just distant terrain, but houses, objects, decorative pieces. Not just endless Ocean.

It was nice to play a Sims 3 world that wasn't a town on a random island.

Worlds in The Sims 3 had a 'distant terrain' object that honestly serves the same purpose as the backdrops in Sims 4. The 'playable area' did not extend to the border of the map in any world, nor did the camera. There was a point of collision between the DT object and the terrain that hid the connection.

Bridgeport wasn't an island, it was a peninsula. The distant terrain wraps around the side making the 'ocean' more of a gulf and continues backward.

I don't know what you were doing to see nothing but oceans in Sims 3, because that's not possible using the standard camera mode. Sure you can see that using camera-man mode and scrolling to the unroutable edges of the map, but you can see the same thing in 4 except it's not ocean it's nothing because Sims 4's world(s) are floating decorative pieces assembled to look like a world.

The distant terrain is what they used in the early days when games couldn't handle proper backdrops (I wish I was joking). There is no game in 6th gen of gaming onwards, let alone 2009 (mid 6th gen) that uses distant terrain as the only backdrop. It looks terrible.

The worlds in The Sims 3 that have hills in the background, still don't connect with roads etc as if there is more to the world than what you see, so aesthetically there's no difference. It's still isolated, it still is on an island. And no, I'm not talking about cheats, I'm talking about what you see normally.

The Sims 3 *should* have looked like this:

https://www.hardwareheaven.com/gamingreviewimages/simcitydestinations/pictures/destination5.jpg

Obviously graphics aside, in SimCity Societies, there were backdrops to the cities you made. So imagine the world where the Sim is is the playable area of a Sims 3 world, but instead of looking at really badly made mountains, or water, you saw a City or building like that.

https://www.hookedgamers.com/images/363/simcity_societies/screenshot_pc_simcity_societies009.jpg

Another example, where you could see the benefit of having a backdrop rather than just water.

http://pad2.whstatic.com/images/thumb/0/06/Be-Good-at-the-SimCity-Games-Step-8.jpg/670px-Be-Good-at-the-SimCity-Games-Step-8.jpg

Now even something like this, where there's a backdrop that allures to more (obviously replace the City with the Sims 3 world) I think would have looked better than nothing and staring at an ocean where you can see it end.



Now this isn't a "bash The Sims 3" post, this is literally me saying, that if Open World were to return (which I'm happy for them to do if they develop it with 64 bit SOLEY), it would need backdrops.

The Sims 3 failed because it was a 32 bit game, at the end of the day. The Sims 4 not having an Open World or CASt was a great decision, as they were building a 32 bit game.

You need 4GB of Ram minimum for an Open World game to run decently. Obviously they had to build The Sims 4 as a 32 bit game under direct orders. Now that everyone is updating to 64 bit, and TS4 will now only support 64 bit, I'm fine with them building a game to use that advantage.

A better version of The Sims 3 Open World design would look terrible, no matter how good the graphics are. They would need backdrops. You can only make mountains and water so pretty with editing tools, unless they made the mountains as objects which would be (surprise surprise) the definition of a backdrop.

@jackjack_k Sims 3 had backdrops. I already said that in my post, please don't tag me in stuff that deflects away from the original idea. You said Sims 3 didn't have backdrops and that each world is an island. That is false and I corrected you. Instead of typing out long posts that have absolutely nothing to do with that just take the correction and leave it be. You don't always have to try to have the last word, especially like now it's not making much sense on your end and it leads me to believe you don't even understand what you're talking about.