What happened to premade lots ?
The new premade lots are so...empty. There is no atmosphere, they're barely even furnished.... Here's the charm family home (ROM) and the Goth family mansion (base game) for a comparison. The Go...
Forum Discussion
"Felicity;c-17264062" wrote:"Logisitcs;c-17263971" wrote:
They relegated premade houses to the interns and fired/got rid of whoever was doing it before. The way they're furnished, it just screams someone not familiar with build/buy mode.
In TS1-3, you not only paid for gameplay but you also paid for the new worlds with FULLY furnished lots that weren't copy and pasted. Now you pay for buggy gameplay and unfinished lots lol, what a time to be a simmer.
You know, I never really thought of it this way, but the gallery is an awful lot like mods, but with even more competition between the creators. Hiring a full time -- or even part time -- interior designer is very expensive compared to an unpaid intern ;)
An interior decorator isn't required. The team could have done one of several things in order to have nice pre-made lots in a pack without much additional cost. In one case, they can drive community interest and get lots of free publicity for the pack:
- Ask someone on the team who has some skill and enjoys doing it to decorate. Volunteers generally do a better job than someone who has been assigned. Done.
- Turn premade lots into a fun contest for the community's builders. Provide a rough floor plan, set a limit to how much it will cost to decorate, state that it can only contain base game objects and build items, and then set the community loose! So that non-builders don't feel left out, the team can pick the best homes which fit their criteria and submit them to the community in a blind contest -- no Game Changers, no names.
Once the community picks the winners, the team replaces some of the corresponding items in the winning homes with stuff from the new pack and then they publish it. The prize is that, after the votes, the names or handles of the winners will be released. The winners will have earned some celebrity within the community. In addition, as a bonus reward, winners get to pick the names of the pre-mades in the new pack. Or, they get to name their winning lot. To make sure that the contest is fair, winners have to sit out a couple of packs before they are eligible to compete again. Done!
Those two ideas just came off the top of my head. The development team can't do any better? They need to think out of the box, jeez.
