"Writin_Reg;c-17285612" wrote:
"LiELF;c-17285165" wrote:
I honestly didn't care for the open world design in Sims 3 at all. It came at the cost of playable venues (rabbit hole buildings) and completely lacked a decent rotational play mechanic (which was wedged in later and turned out just awful and unmanageable.) It bunked my entire play style. The worlds were also too big to be manageable so I got annoyed trying to play in them, and it was extremely time consuming for a Sim to go anywhere. Plus, there were hardly any Sims showing up at public venues so these great, giant worlds turned out to be ghost towns and really fell flat. And finally, I really couldn't stand being imprisoned in one, single world environment and unable to move my Sims to a different one without giving up everything and everyone they knew. It felt like a downgrade from Sims 2.
Sims 4 has its problems but I'm actually pretty happy with the world designs. I love the backgrounds, the variations of the towns, the open neighborhoods, the ease of being able to move them around to live wherever I want, and the simplicity of managing my households and populations. I don't think I'd want fully open households in each neighborhood because it's not necessary. Since I fill the neighborhoods with my own Sims, I don't want a heavy story progression that's going to alter and marry them off. I already get really annoyed when the game randomly selects my Sims for filler jobs like bartending or food stands.
But I think a future game could be designed to have slightly larger neighborhoods with more lots and a story progression that only affected non-played households. Something that works like the design of Jungle Adventures with the gates could make it feel more open and eliminate some of the load screens by only 'activating' lots when your Sims are near them.
You can not make the lots visit-able in a partially open world so if you want lots to visit you have to make the whole game open world - it is just the way open world works as the lots are sort of all or nothing. But you can make the neighborhoods open like they are in 4 - but could not really make them too much bigger with out opening up all the worlds. This game engine would not have the same issues with routing Sims 3's engine had because routing is handled very differently in the fact sims should not get stopped - of course people complain because sims walk through things but that is the way this engine works.
I don't think that's necessarily true. That was how Sims 3's engine was designed. But look at Jungle Adventures. There isn't a load screen to get to segments of the map, but there is a pop-up adventure. I just think that with today's gaming tech, something like that could be expanded on with a proper game engine that's built for it, and it would allow for more open lots, particularly community lots. Sims sharing a household could be in different segments of the map, but depending which Sim you controlled at the moment would determine which lots were "open", so to speak.
Now, I'm definitely not a game designer, but I just think that it's something that could be possible for the future. And I'd also like to add that they most certainly need to bring back world editing tools. Even if they want to put routing restrictions on them, I'm willing to compromise, but I can't stand that we currently cannot edit our neighborhoods. That's just wrong.
