Managing Betrayal - making games sequels
#21 10-07-2014 
Quote:If you asked an employee to make coffee for a thousand, and several hours later you come back to find no coffee, because they made sandwiches for 2000 instead

To be fair what's happened here, is that the employer has asked the employee to make sandwiches for 1000, and several hours later they come back and say where's the coffee, and actually it's 2000 coffees and now you have to make that in an hour with a kettle that holds 3 cups. It's not the employee's fault - but the employer who hasn't actually grasped what they wanted in the first place and didn't bother to find out before asking.

Actually it's been clear from Sims 1 that there are at least 4 different groups of simmers: Builders, modders/creators, players, and story tellers. There was actually a proper study on it - not just a silly article like the one from dorkly - but I can't find it. And of course almost all of us are downloaders.

For a Sims game to succeed it needs to satisfy all of these groups.

There needs to be good tools for Builders to build everything their hearts desire - have they come through with this for Sims4? I don't believe so. the limitations of no pools, and 3 floors makes this less than Sims2/Sims3. Sims 3 had a lot of great tools for builders. automatic 1/4 tile placement, basements, etc. It started off not so great because they didn't allow the placement of lots on the hood - but that changed with expansion. But for Sims3 builders - that wasn't a show-stopper. For builders, automatic window placement, and being able to build it by room has to be worth the losing of building multi-storey lots, water features, and not being able to choose where they place windows.

It needs to be open for Modders/Creators. In a base game, the least that it needs is the ability to create decent sims and to decorate the home with wallpapers and floors of whatever colour and texture the player wants. Both sims1, Sims2 had Homecrafter and sims3 had Cast. We know we've lost CasT, but it's not been clear what it's been replaced with because they haven't shown us. MTS smart guys are starting to work on the DBPF's from the Sims4 Demo with some progress - but it won't be clear about how easy it is to mod the game until after the game is released and up to 1 year afterwards going on past experience. Sims3 was harder to mod, and because of the rivalry between TSR and MTS we ended up with 2 different creating systems. (I returned to TS2 because of the difficulty I found in Modding). However you can't market for this group, so it's a matter of wait and see.

Players are the group that is getting all the marketing love - and what they are getting is emotions, emotions, emotions. And Cas. There hasn't been a lot of game play - just a lot of pre-game renders and animations of the same. But what they're losing is toddler stage and heights. This means that there is a discontinuity in the life cycle stage. And it's there because they spent too much time on the on-line version that was scrapped. It's interesting if you compare this with Simsville (remember that?) which they scrapped about 2 years before Sims 2 was brought out because they worked out it was too ambitious for the technology. If you look at Sims 3 - many of the components of Sims 3 reflect what they wanted for Simsville. Just a side thought. The problem with emotions is that they are marketing as this is something completely new - which it isn't. The way it may be handled in sims4 may be different to 1-3 but it's not new. And marketing it that way, means they think we are stupid enough to think all of a sudden that our sims in 1-3 were bland faced automatons. Legacy players have problems with the missing life stage.

Story-tellers also lose things, but it's unclear what they gain.

And for all of us who are downloaders - if the smart guys can't mod the game - then whether to buy it or not at (90-120AUD yes, I looked it up) is a no brainer - the answer is no. EA/Maxis have NEVER been good at giving complete sets of furniture in all the styles that people need.

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#22 11-07-2014 
(10-07-2014 02:08 PM)celebkiriedhel Wrote:  if the smart guys can't mod the game - then whether to buy it or not at (90-120AUD yes, I looked it up) is a no brainer - the answer is no. EA/Maxis have NEVER been good at giving complete sets of furniture in all the styles that people need.

From what I've seen so far this week, I think there will be recolor mods (at the very least ) out well before the CAS demo is fully released Wink Possibly within days, or hours even. Kuree has already released a package editor that will open the demo files. Granthes has hacked out the intro videos Smile http://sims4.the-prof.net/?topic=get-rea...the-sims-4

Lot of similarities with TS3, file encryption is simpler than TS3's, scripting language is known to be Python which is probably more accessible than C#, XML is still used to control game behavior (I think).

Some stuff might be harder than TS3, as TS3 was compared to TS2, but the smart guys have gotten well into it within the first 48 hours or so Wink

As for all the rest... *shrug*... what's it like controlling a sim household through a day of work and play? That's what drives my response to the game. I'm not worried about stuff that was in any previous Sim game. It's about playability and fun, and none of the so-called "omissions" are in anyway critical for fun and playability for me. The proof of the pudding is in the tasting, and I haven't tasted it yet. But that's just me, I know Wink

Edit: http://ww.modthesims.info/showthread.php?p=4440913 for anybody wanting to get involved Smile
(This post was last modified: 11-07-2014 03:43 AM by Srikandi.)

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#23 11-07-2014 
The proof of the pudding... now you mention it. There's a company in the Netherlands (Mona) that used to sell Chocolate Pudding, among others. They no longer do. Their entire spectrum of products is as it has always been, except that they've taken Chocolate Pudding out, and put Brownie Pudding in its place. So they lost me as a customer!

Now one may wonder what's wrong with Brownie Pudding? Well, probably not much. But to me it is NOT the same as Chocolate Pudding, which was the only product of theirs that I bought, because I liked it so much!

I see a very clear analogue here with the development of the different 'tastes' of Sims.

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#24 11-07-2014 
Re python - what helps is that you dont have to compile it first to add it as a script. So that is a plus.

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