What Happened to The Sims?

[1337mokro]

It's a very simple matter to me.

The expansions in the Sims 2 were all (mostly) new stuff that we didn't get to see before. Sims 3 expansions are just Sims 2 expansions ported to Sims 3. For overblown prices. The entire online store is just disgusting. It is the most horrible way to monetize items I have ever seen. A modder could have made that stuff for free and they are charging 10$ for a fucking table.

That is sickening. Not being a big Sims fan already (Sims 3 was the first I bought) mainly because of the expansion pack whore of a game it was and still is Sims 3 basically put me off the franchise for good. It was my first game and my last simply because I would never reward EA for ripping me off.

They already did with Sims 3, why should I allow them to do it again with every expansion or online content update?

Sims 4 can go suck on a rock, I will keep my eyes focused on SimCity 5.

 

[aceman67]

I will keep my eyes focused on SimCity 5.

And you Honestly think that Simcity 5 won't follow the same route as Sims 3? EA already has a tried and tested marketing scheme in place that earns them boat loads of cash, regardless of the vitriol they get from the fan-base, do you think that they won't do that out of the goodness of their hearts and actually care about gamers?

I don't think so.

CAPTCHA: for the gipper

 

[1337mokro]

I will keep my eyes focused on SimCity 5.

And you Honestly think that Simcity 5 won't follow the same route as Sims 3? EA already has a tried and tested marketing scheme in place that earns them boat loads of cash, regardless of the vitriol they get from the fan-base, do you think that they won't do that out of the goodness of their hearts and actually care about gamers?

I don't think so.

CAPTCHA: for the gipper

I said eyes. Not my wallet.

I'll see and wait. If it blows giant godzilla chunks, then I'll just keep my eyes fixed on SimSomethingelse.

 

[Tiamat666]

A publisher releasing the same-ol' over and over again, milking the blood out of the franchise with addon packs and DLC is not exclusively a Sims problem. It exists with many mayor franchises because it's an obvious way to make money. I have given up on these types of products.

And, fittingly, the captcha I have to enter to post these words is "no regrets".

Welcome to the Escapist, btw. and you have an awesome name. Are you a starfighter pilot?

 

[Covarr]

In terms of the vanilla game, without expansions or microtransactions, I do heavily prefer The Sims 3. Just the simple fact that they made aging more reasonable so it's actually feasible to complete career paths makes the game miles more fun, IMO. I find this to be much more of a dealbreaker in The Sims 2 than The Sims 3's technical issues.

P.S. Thanks

 

[Warlokk]

I was a rather compulsive modder for Sims 2, and have had over 2 million downloads on ModTheSims alone... I spent hundreds of hours working on models for the game and fine-tuning them to perfection. I was, quite frankly, obsessed with it, and spent entirely too much time on it.

When Sims 3 came out, I tried it for a while... but it just seemed so lifeless and empty for some reason, and I completely lost interest. The modding was far more difficult, and the store just seemed like it killed the soul of the game and the community, so I quit and never looked back. Haven't touched a Sims game since.

 

[tellytoy]

"No matter how great the volume of complaints, they will always be dwarfed by vast sales figures, so EA can be forgiven for thinking that they just don't matter."

No, no this is not an excuse. No company should get away scott free for ignoring customer complaints, just because they are not universal. There are dumb things to complain about, yes, like the Sims not being a FPS. But when people have legitimate criticisms, they should be listened to and dealt with.

Something I was recently reminded of: EA said they won't publish a game without a multiplayer component. Imagine how much that could mess up Sims 4.

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

I love The Sims 3 <3

Anyway I think the expacs have gotten a little out of hand but if anything it shows how goddamn adaptable this game is, and frankly you don't have to buy them all to enjoy the game.

I wouldn't buy the Katie Price thing if Dean Winchester crashed through my window topless with it on a silver platter...but expacs like generation's which added so sooo much to the legacy (fanmade) game play of the game was amazing.

I'm not disappointed with the sims and frankly the community on sites like The Simmers Society have been the friendliest I have experienced in gaming so far.

It is a shame is has the dark shadow of EA over it but frankly I think the core team know what they are doing and the gimmicky stuff is easily avoided.

Something I was recently reminded of: EA said they won't publish a game without a multiplayer component. Imagine how much that could mess up Sims 4.

The community is already pseudo 'multiplayer' it wouldn't surprise me if in Sims 4 they introduced a way to hold comps etc for houses you have built, between players, since they are very supportive of this part of the community

 

[Nantucket_v1legacy]

I won't lie.

I never fancied the expansion packs such as Showtime and Supernatural but I bought them regardless because I have always had my Sims games complete.

The main issue with Sims 3 is the towns. If you buy an expansion pack, you have to sacrifice the one before to play the new one unless you create a massive town to accommodate all the packs. I hate that - I am not patient enough to build massive worlds!

The Sims had it right regarding the holidays. You booked into a hotel and you stayed there - there was no random quests or Indiana Jones type games. You just went and had a holiday and I really enjoyed that.

EA are putting in mini games where they are not needed! If you play The Sims, you play The Sims.

 

[Jeremy Monken]

Sims 4 is going to be free-to-play, but in the free version you'll just be a penniless beggar, trying to get enough simoleans to eat.

 

[Nurb]

Overall, a little more respect and far less exploitation would go a long way toward healing the rift between publisher and fan-base.

You won't see that happen. Paying customers don't exist to them, to them everyone is a potential theif that they try to shake every dime out of while telling them to shut up and go away if they don't like it.

It won't change until
A)EA goes bankrupt
or
B)Gamers stop giving big publishers money

B probably won't happen.

 

[LetalisK]

This article made me adore my wife even more. She loves anything and everything Sims 3, rarely complains about it. Her innocence is so cute. I'll rue the day when it finally breaks her heart, if it ever does.

 

[nickpy]

I owned the original Sims and some of the expansion packs for it, which I always found a blast, but it reached a point where there just wasn't anything left to do. I had always been there, done that, before, so I stopped playing it.

I never did get the Sims 2, so I have no idea what it was like or what was in it.

The sims 3, however, even the base game, really blew me away. I was definately impressed. I loved it, and still do. The only real qualm I ever had was that the amount of furniture/etc in the base game was a bit sparse, but the actual mechanics of the game are brilliant. For a while, I bought every EP making the game better every time. Then I realised what was happening with the stuff packs and so on - furniture and the like which in the Sims 1 would have been included in the base game, where now being sold to me no top for £10 extra. And then the latest patch shoved the Sims Store inside the game so it's difficult to avoid, where before if you so chose you could ignore it's existance. Naked commercialisation.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love The Sims 3 as a game, and I will continue to buy such expansion packs as I think will genuinely add to the game, but I am certainly done with "buying every pack they release" especially stuff packs, and I passionately object to the insertion of the Sims Store inside the game in a way that makes it so easy to accidentally spend real money, not to mention how much it tries to force you to sign up for facebook linking or some other social media rubbish (not my thing at all).

Just let me play the game already! I'll pay you more money if and when I feel that you have produced something I feel is worthwhile buying, not because you have shoved it under my nose.

 

[Frozengale]

If you expect EA to make The Sims 4 less of a game sold in bits and pieces then I think you have horribly misplaced hope. The Sims series is nothing BUT a game doled out in small chunks. I like the first Sims game. Second was okay. By the third I had recognized the patterns and didn't buy it.

 

[Little Duck]

My main problem with the sims 3 was that for a game you could do more things in than any game before it, there wasn't a lot to do. Like you said, most of the content just wasn't there, but that wasn't what I missed most.

I enjoyed the walking around town side of things. But I do architecture. I LOVE building towns and designing bridges and creating history. In the sims 1 and 2 I would spend more time building up the infinite details of these towns than I would spend in game. I find it depressing that this iteration has the weakest variety in what I want to do most.

I played with sims and built them houses around their careers and enjoyed it throughly still (I even re-created a few projects of my own in game, which helped me iron out problems in them) but I never really felt I was doing what I love most. I want to build stadiums and see people walk in and out and around them. I want to design police stations and themes and libraries for people to walk in. And I miss these aspects so much, they're the bits I love more than anything else and I miss them honestly in my gaming life more than anything else.

 

[Rad Party God]

I made the huge mistake of buying The Sims 3 back in the day (3 years ago actually). I loved The Sims 2 and I definitely loved how meaty it was without any expansion and how every complaint I had with the first game was adressed with the second game and it added some new and neat stuff along the way!.

Sims 3 felt... empty... barebones even. What happened to the aliens?, why is my fraking sim taking so much time to do the most menial of tasks?, I wanted to give this game a chance, but it just left me incredibly dissapointed and hating the entire Sims franchise because of it.

It's still lingering in my shelf, reminding me of the huge mistake I made whenever I look a it. I'm thinking about giving it to my neece, just like I gave both Crysis games to my nephew.

I hate you EA and thanks for Mass Effect (not for Origin though).

Captcha: Tea with milk. Sounds delicious.

 

[clockworkmonkey]

The Sims has always been popular in my family, both me and my mum have loved them since the beginning- they're kind of a very guilty pleasure to me, but an amazing time-sink.

I've had issues about where the Sims has been going since the second or third expansion pack for the 3rd gen. I was kind of accepting of the fact that they were basically updated versions of what you got in the previous gens, but as soon as the Sims Store reared its ugly head, I began to smell a rat. Why should I have to pay an extra £3 for an imaginary sofa set that should be in the game to begin with, when I can just get something similar from ModTheSims.info (awesome site btw) Meanwhile EA gets to slap a £15 price-tag on the expansion packs.

The last straw for me was when the Sims Store started invading the game itself, instead of just being a pop-up that appeared before you launched the game. All of a sudden, whenever you'd go to buy some furniture, extra items would appear, advertising things that you COULD own, as long as you coughed up the necessary £12 for the 2000 Sim Points you needed to buy it. The first time I noticed it, I didn't even realise it was a advert until I clicked on one and it took me to the Store. EA aren't just trying to make a little more cash, they're being crafty about it.

It's not about the content- the 'rabbit holes', the glitches, the rehashed expansion packs. All that stuff can be modded easy enough. When you've already paid your money to play the game, but the game tries luring you into buying more at every menu screen- that's a: greed, and b: selling what could pretty much be called an incomplete game for full price.

The advertising the Sims does for other companies? That's not so new. Anyone remember the IKEA stuff pack? It made a bit more sense than Katy Perry, but it was still an advert. I guess I can see the half-baked reasoning behind charging people money for what is simply an advert for Diesel or IKEA or whatever it is- "We spent money paying people to make it, so why should it be for free?". Doesn't make it right though, especially when the advert packs for the Sims 3 look really half arsed. At least the IKEA one was rammed with new furniture.

This is all obviously EA's tactic at the moment - they've done it with the Sims, they did it with Mass Effect 3, and I have absolutely no doubt they'll do it with SimCity 5. I don't think they've produced a complete, no-dlc game for a while (maybe Alice Madness Returns? Don't think that had any add-ons)

Anyhoo, I can't kick my Sims habit- no matter who is in charge of the development nowadays, I still love the games. I actually got the latest expansion a few days ago - but let's just say EA hasn't been making a profit from me for about 2 years

 

[Rad Party God]

Sims 4 is going to be free-to-play, but in the free version you'll just be a penniless beggar, trying to get enough simoleans to eat.

Somehow, this sounds more enticing than what The Sims 3 turned out to be.

 

[MissGinaKid]

I consider myself a pretty big fan of the sims 3 in particular and while I can agree with a lot of the stuff your saying, things are starting to get better. Starting around last year The dev team seems to be filling the expansion packs a lot more content with things more people want (Katy perry editions not withstanding). The towns sold at the store are incredibly overpriced but they too have been getting better too with more thought and effort put into them. Thanks to twitter some of the producers even answer questions the fans have and acknowledge their complaints. It's just a shame that the games took two years to get to this point but i plan on sticking around and hoping sims 4 will get the bright start that the sims 3 deserved.

 

[immortalfrieza]

As someone who bought The Sims 3 from its release (and bought all previous games), I found this a really good article. I've already stopped playing the original title and haven't bought any of the EPs. I've finally been broken by the lengths that the developers go to withhold content to the player.

As you rightly say, weather and seasons and a multitude of other features should be part of the original title, not continually repackaged as EPs -- they had an excuse with the The Sims 2: Seasons, because it hadn't been done up till that point. But to just release the same content with each new generation?

Exactly. EA should've had all the EP and base game content from the Sims 2 in the Sims 3 base game from the start, and the EPs for Sims 3 should have been new stuff and things that expanded on the previous stuff.

Not to mention sell the EPs for what they're actually worth. Even the best Sims 3 EPs were only added in about 1/5th of the base game's amount of content and they're sold for 4 times what they are actually worth. I liked it better when they charged $30 for their expansion packs and at least gave buyers 1000 points simpoints($10 worth) with each expansion so people felt much less ripped off.

The rabbit holes are one of worst parts though, even if the player wasn't able to affect things directly the rabbit holes should've actually shown what your sim was doing in them, instead of just showing some text boxes every few minutes. Haven't the Sims 3 development team heard of "show don't tell?" Besides, they could have made the rabbit holes stuff as involved and interesting as the world adventures tombs, the time machine especially would have been fun to do.

Now, I love the Sims 3, but I haven't gotten all the stuff packs and skipped that weird singer who's name escapes me right now's pack. There's quite a few things that they really dropped the ball on that would have been incredibly awesome, but they charge way too much for everything.

Captcha: First Post! Way too late Captcha.