So, earlier this week there was a presentation on the totally-not-The-Sims-Title
Life By You. I just watched through the presentation:
(skip ahead to 7:20)
The Sims comparisons abounds, which is not surprising given that the head honcho at Paradox Tectonic, Rod Humble, used to work on
The Sims 2 and
The Sims 3.
The step between
The Sims 2 and
The Sims 3 was marked by two features.
1. You can customize EVERYTHING in the latter title, just by telling the game that "I want this object with this texture" and the game allowed it, as Yahtzee pointed out in his Zero Punctuation review.
2. The world truly is open world now, as opposed to how it was in
The Sims 2 where you had to call a cab, the game would load the map, you'd pick a lot(but only a commercial one; never a neighbour), wait for it to load, do the activities there, return home and the clock was reset to when you left. In
The Sims 3, you truly could zoom out and the game would let you seamlessly leave your house.
The Sims 4 I am less familiar with, but they basically removed those features, and when I read Wikipedia I see that
The Sims 4 was meant to be online before the
SimCity backlash forced them to make it single player offline, despite their engine being more optimized for online play.
I bring up the history of
The Sims and the step from 2 to 3 for a reason, since in this presentation those are the two main things that stuck out to me as being copied from
The Sims. They emphasize that you can go anywhere, and customize everything.
Apart from that they appear to actually have real conversations in
Life By You, no longer are the people speaking nonsense Simlish, a tool that they are proud of and they liked the emergent storytelling of it. I am a bit doubtful. I have played
Crusader Kings II, another game with emergent storytelling, but there the conversations were rather static, it was the dynamics and the underlying personality behind the standard conversations that led to emergent storytelling. Time will tell if it turns out to be a killer feature.
They also emphasized that their tools are *really* mod-friendly and they cannot wait to see what the community will create and share. The cynic in me wants to see that as they wanting their userbase to make the game for them, but the fact still remains that a fun creative tool can be as much fun or more than an experience professionally designed.
Finally, I want to point out something I found a bit interesting that was not part of the presentation:
The Sims is made by Maxis in Redwood Shores, California.
Life By You is made by Paradox Tectonic in Berkeley, California.
That's 51 minutes travel time by car. I suspect workers on either studio upset about their working conditions can apply for a job at the other place. That is good for the workers. I suspect Paradox Tectonic is hoping to pick up some talent that might leave/have left Maxis.
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