"LeGardePourpre;c-18181084" wrote:
Will Wright was the creator and Rod Humble was a follower.
Decades later, both did nothing amazing after The Sims.
I mean the way I see it is this.
I find The Sims 4 lacking. I'm not a hater. I've bought a bunch of packs for it. I love it. But it's not what it could be.
Right now we know of three potential upcoming life sims.
1. The Sims 5
2. Paralives
3. Unannounced Paradox Tectonic Game
1 is still going to be an EA game, and so will absolutely be plagued by the soulless money-grubbing user-experience ruining problems that plague all EA games. If there's a corner to cut, they will cut it, and if there are nickels and dimes they can tease out of the playerbase for scraps they will, because that money belongs to the big hungry businessmonsters upstairs.
2 is a first venture for many of its creators, being paid for by patreon and social media hype. I don't think it's a scam, I just think it's very big game for a very green team and they still have dozens of gameplay systems they need to build and test against each other, and the road is long and fraught and hopefully their wagon train makes it to California and they don't get lured by the call of Hasting's Cutoff.
Meanwhile 3,
3 is being led by a man who has worked on not one, not two, but three major life sims. He worked on the Sims franchise for years even before he took it over. He worked on the game during the period when I personally liked it best: The latter part of the Sims 2 and all the Sims 3. And while there's a lot of things that can be said against 3 in terms of optimization and performance, in terms of scope and ambition and character it was top notch. But even if you don't agree with that, he has still shown the ability to lead a succesful life sim game from beginning to end. And then he was CEO of Second Life.
So that's an entire career to think about, work on, practice with, hypothesize about, talk about life simulation.
It's not that I think he's the greatest coder or developer of all time. I don't know him from Adam. But if, as it seems, this is something he's doing because he really wants to? Because he had ideas and it was really exciting to him? And he seems to be being given a decent budget and free reign to follow that passion by one of the less sinister major studios out there?
IDK. That just seems like easily the most promising one. The most likely to both actually happen and actually be fun to play.
