What Happened to The Sims?

SketchStone

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Aug 8, 2012
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What Happened to The Sims?

Fans of the popular The Sims series have had to make due with less and less.

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DRes82

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Apr 9, 2009
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Blah blah...something about EA. EA is the devil.

Who even plays the Sims? Microtransactions are commonplace these days, anyways. All F2P MMOs have them and even the monthly-sub monster itself has quite a few of them.
 

itsthesheppy

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Mar 28, 2012
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DVS BSTrD said:
So your problem with the Sims...

...is that it's run by EA.
Yeah, as usual, the first comment gets it right. The problem with the Sims franchise is that EA is at the helm and, oh look, all the same complaints from their other titles are here too.

And they wonder why their stock is tanking.
 

orangeapples

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Aug 1, 2009
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Don't worry Sims fans. There is a legion of people dating back to the mid 90s (and probably before) who have seen their favorite franchises destroyed by EA. You're not alone.
 

yuval152

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Jul 6, 2011
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DVS BSTrD said:
So your problem with the Sims...

...is that it's run by EA.
/Article, EA is the devil, blah, blah we already know the procedure for those articles.
 

Basement Cat

Keeping the Peace is Relaxing
Jul 26, 2012
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I haven't played The Sims since the first edition. Making Magic was one of only two expansion packs I'd bought.

I got into The Sims when my friends were getting out of it. They complained (with acknowledged irony) that their Sims had better lives than they themselves did.

I'd like to buy the newer series but every time I turn around I hear complaints about the studio milking the game through newly refinished updated expansion packs for all they were worth. I acknowledge the business logic to this, but I agree that they're stingy when it come to basic systems after spending years building expansion packs.

The fact that the mod systems offer a viable alternative to buying official expansions might serve to stimulate a change of habit on the studio's part in making new basic and expansion packs richer and more rewarding.

Unfortunately they might only decide to do so after the game starts losing so many repeat customers that it's too late.
 

Fasckira

Dice Tart
Oct 22, 2009
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Nicely written article, great one to pop your Escapist cherry with! I remember meeting some of the Sims community managers at GamesCom a few years back and while they were thrilled with the new Sims stuff, they all had that haunted look about them of people who knew they were on their way to getting fleeced.

They did however get free head bands that had the green diamond floating above it, so at least they got something for nothing!
 

I.Muir

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Jun 26, 2008
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Yep the cheap answer really just is EA happened
EA was supposed to have been different at some point but I can't remember that
 

Aikayai

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May 31, 2011
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Took me a while but ノー(iie) and EA sound the same. ノー (iie) is Japanese for no.

So they knew all along...

On topic, good article. My partner will be happy to hear that she hasn't wasted her money.
 

thedarkone316

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Jan 7, 2010
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you complain about ea doing this with the sims why not complain about ever other game company sending out 50 and 60 dollar half hearted games then expect you to pay 10 to 15 dollars more for content that should be in the game this is par for the course and it is only the gamers and the people that casually play these games fault because we throw our money at them
 

Callate

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Dec 5, 2008
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I appreciate most of the article, but I have to disagree with one point:

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 they can't. It's a poor position for EA to hold, both ethically and from a business/financial stand-point. I've said similar things in the past, but EA's business tactics are increasingly ravenous (must... eat... successful... studios!) and scatter-shot (Facebook! Flash Games! Mobile! AR! Go, go, go!...) These are the maneuverings of a company that sees no future without growth, but is eating its own tail. Without generating loyalty in one's customers, the prospects for long-term growth are bleak, even if today's sales numbers appear rosy.

I may understand that you (mistakenly) think kicking me is in your best interests; that doesn't mean I'm obligated to forgive the malice or the stupidity.
 

Bloodstain

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Jun 20, 2009
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Here I thought the EA hate period was finally over here on the forums, and then this article brings it back...

Personally, I enjoyed and still do enjoy the Sims. I have never bought an expansion pack, but I used mods frequently.
 

KeyMaster45

Gone Gonzo
Jun 16, 2008
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I picked up the base version of The Sims 3 in a steam sale a few months back.(if only because I had a few weeks to kill and $15 burning a hole in my pocket) The amount of technical problems I had to deal with was staggeringly annoying to say the least; I spent the first two days trying to figure out why the leaf textures on every plant had inverted visibility. Something happened though about 4 days into my first family...I was done. Like seriously I had accomplished all the stuff which took forever for me to do back in the original game; my family wasn't in the red, everyone with jobs was at the highest tier, and their needs bars were actually staying full.

It just had so little content to explore, and I didn't really see a reason to buy one of their many expansions. (and refused to spend a dime at their micro-transaction store) Frankly I think that's the biggest crime of this particular iteration of the games. It can be beaten, that's just something that shouldn't happen.
 

jbm1986

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May 18, 2012
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My thoughts on DLC in picture form:




EA is a soulless monster that eats good/popular franchises and spits out turds(at $15 a pop.) Now that they're going almost entirely multiplayer, I wouldn't be surprised if they made some kind of forced DLC.
 

INVALIDUSERNAME

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May 23, 2012
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Once EA took hold of Maxis and the original creative minds behind the first iteration of the Sims fell to the wayside, I've become more and more disheartened with the franchise as a whole. I remember buying Vacation and House Party, along with the base game, on a whim one day while snooping around a shopping mall and the game absolutely blew me away. The music - each composed to match the expansion pack - the humor - some of it lowbrow and some of it subtle and undercutting - and the general atmosphere of the original Sims is something that both the Sims 2 (later on in its life cycle) and the Sims 3 (right around the time of Ambitions of Generations) failed to recreate.

I originally enjoyed the Sims 3, but it keeps going down the exact same path the Sims 2 went down. It starts off building upon the core mechanics of the original while introducing something exicting - for the Sims 2, age and families and greater interactivity, for the Sims 3, that plus the open world - but they slowly and surely decline into some ridiculous hodge-podge of expansion packs introducing gimmick after gimmick, as the things people WANT fall to the wayside, all while nickel and diming us for furniture that doesn't look like absolute ass from the microtransaction store (as of writing this, no Sims 3 copy I own - and I own all the ones up to Showtime - has ONE fuckin' ceiling fan in it - and the one from the store doesn't even work spin).

My main problem with the newer iterations is that they're increasingly homogenized. The orchestral flares and tropical music, jazz rhythms and organ pieces of the original, Vacation, Hot Date, and Makin' Magic, have been replaced by identical sounding by-the-books techno/pop garbage that is one strike against the game.

Looking further into the mechanics, while I don't expect much to change, the games in and of themselves fail to ever add anything new. While the open environments are incredible in the Sims 3, there's so LITTLE to do that it's almost disheartening. How the Sims had more to do in 3 expansions than the Sims 3 has enabled us to do in like 6 is ridiculous. By this time in the original, I could go to a tropical, winter, or temeperate get away and do all sorts of weather specific activities, I could hit it up in a jazzy, '60s inspired city filled with restaurants, clubs, and hangouts, and I could even go into a parallel friggin' universe, fighting wizards and magi, brewing alchemical potions, and building amusement park rides.

The plain and simple of it is, it's not even the items or the scarcity of things the Sims 3 and all subsequent games are going to have that worries me. It's the fact that the soul of the game died a long, LONG time ago (right around the time Apartment Life was considered a legitimate expansion pack) and what we need, instead of a return to roots orchestrated by a bunch of conglomorate suits sitting on a board room lauding the introduction of someone like Deadmau5 in the Sims 4, is a new company to come along and build their own iteration of the Sims, without stumbling into the pitfalls of greed and big business.

And for any game franchise that has been summarily ruined for that matter.

Basically, (here comes the dramatic, maudlin tone) we need to keep dreaming.

And before I have hell rain down on me for saying I'm feedin' the machine by buying the games and givin into EA's sales-pitch maaaaan, I don't actually BUY them. My brother does and I play them when he's done.

And I'm not gonna get preachy on his ass.
 

Roofstone

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May 13, 2010
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I complain a lot, but I am also a hypocrite. I love the sims, and I have it all. Except that weird Katy Perry thing... o_O

I just love games that lets me manage lives. Be it city builders or simulators. Seeing my little avatar smile makes me smile.
 
Feb 28, 2008
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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? I'm afraid you've lost me as a customer. And no amount of EPs will change that ...
 

DeepComet5581

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Mar 30, 2010
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I like the Sims 3. I still play it. I download a lot of fan-made content and I use most of NRaas' mods, as well as all Expansion and Stuff Packs up to (But not including) that insufferable Katy Perry crap.

My only problem at the moment is that they've stopped selling new titles on Steam.

This means that I have to uninstall it from Steam and then reinstall it on Origin if I want any of the new expansions.

No Thanks.