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I'm not really that upset considering it was going to end up the same as The Sims (with its content in DLC piecemeal) anyway, coming from Paradox.
It visually looked like an asset flip simulation shovelware game you can find all over Steam by searching for the shit with the worst reviews, too.
My biggest complaint about Sims-likes is that the visual style always looks too serious. It gives me the feeling that whatever I'm going to do with my not-Sims, it's gonna be something that makes me regret my real life.
You wanna know what I did the last time I played the Sims 2 though? I repeatedly held parties at my Sim's house and then lured the guests into a room they couldn't get out of. I also used the moveobjects cheat to collect police cars whenever a cop showed up to shut the party down. By the time I was done I had amassed around 70 urns, many hysterical immortal Sims (Sims with households can't die while visiting someone's house in the Sims 2), 4 Police cars and a fire truck.
The Sims has a mischievous air to it that tickles the devil on your shoulder and begs you to listen to them. None of the Sims-likes I'm aware of seem to have the same air.
Edit: now I want to play the Sims again.
Honestly that's for the best, the game looked awful all around.
No surprise. I was really shocked when I saw the videos they released a while ago. Game ran like shit and looked even worse.
Yup... It looked like a really bad attempt at photo realism in 2024. At this point you either need to use cartoon-like graphics or some sort or actually pull off the photo realism.
It was pretty obvious that game was never going to reach either of those marks.
I was definitely excited for the prospect of a Sim's competitor, but this wasn't going to be it... I think they did the right thing pulling the plug.
It's a shame. But based on what I saw about it, it looked like maybe they had some delusions about using LLMs for character dialogue, which seems like an insanely complex feature to build into an already complex game.
Why? It can't be much more than using one of those chatbot girlfriends. I know there could be delays as it takes time to generate but it could have a local version that just is a stripped down version that just processes dialogue. Probably requires a beefy GPU though.
You'd need the conversations to be highly constrained in order to not break the game. Currently there are too many ways of "jailbreaking" LLMs. It was too much of a scope creep for a game which was already biting off a lot more than most studios could chew.
constrained in order to not break the game.
While that's true, I suspect that whoever gets there first will get a free pass in the court of public opinion, so long as it's a single player game.
"Look how awful my Sims are" is already a recurring gag hobby, anyway.
I wouldn't give it a free pass if it ruined the gameplay and would have been easier for them not to implement.
Well HECK! I have been advertising this game to every gamer I know, finally a Sims game that's not EA... :( I was very hopeful when they delayed without a new date, just take your time and get it right. Dang, I was really looking forward to this
Paradox is just as bad as EA with DLC. Look at Stellaris, or Victoria, or cities skylines, or surviving mars
Yeah, but having the games in competition would force then to try to win players to their side over the alternative, for both of the games. It would have been nice to have an option when playing this genre.
Yeah. Pdx went the same shit route as EA by now, even have subscriptions too. Doesn't matter if I have to through hundreds of bucks at EA or Pdx for a single game. It's both the same shitty principle.
All my homies hate paradox.
They sell you a product at a fair price without putting it behind a loot box, unless I missed something. I don't think that makes Paradox "just as bad" because they make a lot of DLC that you could choose to not purchase.
Realistically, at least for Stellaris, Paradox updates the game for free for everyone that breaks everyone's in-progress games and breaks key features of the game by fundamentally changing how the mechanics work. Then they sell the DLC that is absolutely necessary to fix whatever they broke for people who don't own the DLC.
Paradox creates the problem and then sells the solution.
They sell you 15 minor features for $10 each and then every tutorial/gameplay video you watch has 5-10 features you've never seen before. It fills you with fomo and when you do cave you end up spending $80 to make a $40 game slightly more interesting. It's predatory as fuck, paradox can go fuck themselves.
Sorry, I really hate paradox.
What am I fearing that I'm missing out on when there are 62 DLCs for Cities: Skylines but I only wanted 3 of them? I wanted Green Cities, After Dark, and Mass Transit, but I really couldn't care less about Airports. Why does this FOMO apply only to DLC and not the entire library of video games out there that you can opt to buy or not? I really don't understand it. If you buy one Paradox game, do you have to buy every Paradox game or else miss out on having the entire library? I hope that this doesn't come off as me being hostile. I just genuinely don't understand it. Latching on to gambling addiction in EA's Ultimate Team DLC is a concept that I can easily understand how it's predatory. Making a bunch of other products that you may not want to buy does not strike me as predatory but as casting a wide net to make the right content for the right customer.
Cities Skylines 2 launch is worse than any EA launch I can remember. Even that sense of accomplishment horseshite. They released a paid DLC 5 months after launch while not dealing with core functionality bugs.
In a hilariously circular way, EA has this beat still.
The Simcity 2013 launch was so terrible it killed Simcity and the studio Maxis, basically paving the way for City Skylines to take over the genre 2 years later.
It was online only, to the point where if you disconnected from the Internet you were booted out of the game. It also did most game rendering server side to force multiplayer/anti piracy/EA Origin store, and they only had enough infastructure for 1/10th of their player base on launch. That 10% isn't exaggeration, either. They underestimated server load by 90%.
It was also a severely buggy, local resource hog somehow, even with being mostly remotely rendered. Since only a tiny fraction of the servers needed for the game were online, the game just chocked itself to death.
It took months to get it to a "working" state, at which point people had discovered all the insane and dumb behavior by ingame actors like citizens just picking a random house to go to end of day/etc. The tiny city limit size caused by being always online was also a very sore point for players, as you could barely build anything in a city building game. You could finish buillding your "city" in just a few hours, at which point you had to buy another "zone" that was separate from your current one. They didmt seamlessly connect like old SimCity or city skylines, you actually entered another tiny city slice to build on. It was terrible, and the size limit was clearly one of the measures to reduce server costs, as each zone looked like it was a new small server instance.
By the time they actually resolved the server issues, the game was dead, ending a 20+ year legacy in gaming for the brand and the studio. EA hasent made a simcity game in 11 years because of its failure. It was a shitshow and a half.
I'm going to rate "exploits addiction to make billions off of legalized gambling for children" as worse than putting out a sub par, broken sequel with DLC 5 months after release.
Using the floor as a bar.
TBF, when it comes to The Sims specifically, that's the same as EA's model: a bunch of DLC/expansions you don't have to buy.
Until the next one is an always online live service that means it has an expiration date built into it by design, and that's not even conjecture; we already know this.
boo. Oh well, at least there's that other sims-like in development i'm blanking on the name of.
Paralives?
Yeah, that's the one!
I wonder how that's going. When the devs started they were clearly overpromising things that they thought would be cool to have without any idea of how long it would take to implement them. I always suspected it would remain in development for many many years, but apparently it'll be playable next year.
That also looks like it isn't performance like complete garbage. When I saw the first videos for Life By You I was kinda shocked that they even put that out to the public. I'm really not surprised they canned it.