Rene Speculation: Lore and Narrative Design

"LeGardePourpre;c-18199947" wrote:
It becomes like Marvel and Star Wars universes with Canon and non-canonical timelines.

The starting point of The Sims Universe (TSU) was SimCity and Malcolm Landgraab.

The problem is that Sims "lore" is some Frankenstein monster that is made up as they went along.

Malcolm Landgraab, as you cited, has been through three or four "reboots" by now. First, his debut as the pale skinned, dark haired, bespectacled property developer who has no qualms about bending a city government to his will.

He makes no appearances in the main Sims 1 outside of references, however in the console version, this is vastly expanded with a compatible introduction of Malcolm's family and personality, including his children Dudley and Mimi. (As an aside, it annoyed me immensely that history graduate and self proclaimed Sims lore advocate Plumbella did an "entire history" of the Landgraab family and had no idea Dudley and Mimi Landgraab existed because she didn't personally didn't play the console games, but decided not to scroll down the Sims Wikia page she was reading off word for word and actually did some research).

While referenced in the Sims 2 base game, along with other Sims 1 and SimCity references, the concept was completely abandoned any notion of sticking to "lore" after the base game. Malcolm, for example, was changed to a tanned skinned blonde childless playboy who inherited his businesses and saw them more of a burden. You could say the previous Malcolm Landgraabs were one of the previous Malcolms in his family tree, however, none of them have Dudley and Mimi as children.

By the time Sims 3 rolls around, they decided to reboot him again, this time as a pale skinned blonde kid and essentially a secondary character to his own mother that was newly added to lore, meme-boss Nancy, who the community and content creators seem to view as the main Landgraab.

The reality is, when it came to lore, the Sims 4 did the same thing as 2 and 3 when it comes to the separate universe thing, just the difference is, they said it out loud and didn't restrict themselves to one loose time period.

The Sims 2 didn't so much as continue with Sims 1's lore as much as as it did kill everyone with a resemblance of a story and replace them with their trashy soap opera children who have zero concept of a healthy relationship, and pretty much ignored a fair bit of the limited lore the Sims 1 established.

For example, they gave Jennifer Pleasant's one interest to her brother Daniel, and gave her a desire for a dream job that isn't even in the game (I guess because only boys can like sports, girls like fashion and shoes!).

Michael, despite being a fresh college graduate and starting his life in the Sims 1, dies of old age 25 years later (I guess Maxis think people in their mid to late 40s are so old they may as well be dead, which I guess tracks with their target audience).

And speaking of Michael, and Bella, I find the whole whitewashing scandal of the Sims 4 a bit ironic, when the Sims 2 arguably did something worse. While not established as siblings, both of them in the Sims 1 had heads in game files listed as Asian as the textures. Michael even goes one step further and has a head with a mesh labelled Asian, and even with TS1's limited graphics quality, and the distance from the Sims you played the game at, you could clearly tell he was supposed to be Asian. Meanwhile the Sims 2 rolls around and makes Bella a generic tanned European/Latina woman, and since they decided to make Michael her brother, changed his entire ethnic identity to fit Bella's new generic one, giving him a face that is completely different. This was further compounded by the Sims 2's CAS being so limited that you couldn't really deviate from the default face 1 and 2 too much without looking like a distorted inhuman mess (see default faces 3 through 32 that generated NPCs spawned with) that creating a convincing looking Asian sim was extremely difficult.

And this is before we get into the Sims 3, which abandoned the lore of the previous two games to create its own. In my opinion, the Sims 4 deviates as much as 2 and 3 did, just with the characters they perceived as the most popular (Bella and Mortimer, the Caliente sisters and Don, Nancy Landgraab, the Pleasant sisters, etc) all as young adults even though they exist from different eras, and due to social media being much more present, having to say what practices they have done before out loud. Not to mention being magnified by the Sims 4 other failings at launch.

I'm going to stop here for now as this topic of lore gets me wound up too much and I get bitter and go on too many tangents that makes my posts unintelligible. It is clear that my personal opinions differ greatly from the wider community's.

I'd personally wish they'd go back to the TS1 period, perhaps the period in between TS1 and 2 before seemingly the entire neighbourhood collectively kicks the bucket at once.