My favorite is the Sims 3, and I’ve spent a lot of time on it! It’s a very addicting game for me, but only by spells. I’ll play it every chance I get for a few weeks, then let it sit for a long time. I’ve also played 2 and 4 as well. 2 was good, and 4 was disappointing to me. The overall gameplay wasn’t as good in my opinion, and losing the open world aspect of 3 was a negative too. Add to that the launcher and additional login requirements and I quit playing it fairly quickly.
I think the main reason I like 3 better than the others is because of the open world aspect. I can quickly switch back and forth between two sims at opposite ends of the map, and the world itself feels more real due to not having loading screens. I also like the graphics style a little better, but that’s a minor thing.
The way I normally play is to create a sim, either by picking traits or randomizing, and drop them into the world with a starter house. From there I normally have them get a job or learn a freelance skill to make some money. I generally let my sims find their own friends and spouses by finding who they get along with and going from there. I generally get at least a few generations in before I move on to another game or start over. I rarely do the challenges and things that many people do, but I have done games where I tried to keep a generational line going for a while.
I was really looking forward to both Life by You and Paralives, but the publisher and/or devs of Life by You just blew through their third release date, and have now delayed it indefinitely. So maybe Paralives will be good!
Sims 3 was my favorite for the open world and freelance jobs too. Was nice to be able to secure an income without disappearing off the map for 8 hours a day. Was surprised 4 didn’t follow through on that as much but I only played it a little.
My wife plays Sims with cheats all the time and I get that it becomes a fancy interactive dollhouse in that case, but to me the game is all about that progression from bachelor in a one room box to old family man in a mansion.
That is my primary playstyle in a nutshell! 😂 I really like the painter and writer professions, but I sometimes don’t even go that far! I’ve had sims that have never had a job and have made every simoleon by picking up rocks, playing guitar, and selling random things they found in the dumpsters around town. That’s the great thing about it, you get more freedom to do what you want.
I can’t think of another game that I like so much and enjoy playing so little. I will spend countless hours creating families and houses and then five minutes playing the actual game before I’m like “oh, right, I hate this” and then I start making another family.
The thing that helped me felt very counterintuitive, but I ended up just picking one family member as a ‘main’ character, and letting the rest run on their own.
My instinct is always to try and micro-manage everyone in the household, which gets stressful quickly. If I focus on one person and let the rest just generate their own stories I tend to last a lot longer.
I loved the building, but I find the other half of the gameplay quite boring. Some of the more focused games i thought were a bit better, but it’s been quite some time since I’ve played them.
I loved the building, but I find the other half of the gameplay quite boring.
i would spend hours using cheats to create the perfect house for the sims family and then lose interest within 30 minutes of letting the family do its thing.
i would rinse and repeat with each house becoming more elaborate and strange each time; they should make a game that focuses on that aspect of it more
Have you seen any of the youtube previews of Paralives? I’m very curious if the building in that title will be better. They have a couple features that seem really nice
I absolutely adored the Urbz game for DS. Pretty sure it’s the same game as the GBA version, but it had an added post-game minigame. I loved maxing out friendships and having bonus areas to decorate!
When I was 12 my Mum gave me my first PC, it was a second hand work PC with a tiny HDD.
There wasn’t enough space to install The Sims, so I deleted the Program Files folder, thinking I don’t need any programs, only games.
I bricked my PC lol. Needed a tech to reinstall Windows. Thankfully, I could tell him I needed enough space for the game and he debloated it as much as he could. Legend.
Reminds me of my younger sibling inheriting my first PC - 486 with a 500 MB hard drive that I had assembled from several scrap computers - and trying to install this game to it. It did just about fit and there was even enough RAM (48 MB instead of the minimum 32), but the CPU wasn’t compatible, since the game required the MMX instruction set.
I only played one The Sims many years ago. I wonder if it was the first or second.
It certainly was a good game with good mechanics and content.
I’ve only seen a little bit of how it evolved in videos. I wonder how much EA is reiterating and republishing the same content and mechanics, and how much has evolved and changed? Did the products warrant regular and many releases and DLC?
Each Sims game is quite different. The biggest difference is between Sims 1 and 2 simply due to the change from isometric 2D to 3D graphics. Not the first game in the genre to have 3D graphics and they weren’t even particularly impressive for the time nor good compared to its competitor, but the charming animations and attention to detail make it a far more enjoyable experience than the comparatively sterile predecessor. Sims 2 ended up becoming an evergreen with very long legs, to the point that people are still playing it, although it helped that EA distributed the complete version with all add-ons (the game is older than the term DLC) for free for a while (you can still find it if you know where to look).
Sims 3 was fundamentally different from Sims 2. Gone were the isolated homes of the predecessor (initially in Sims 2, you couldn’t even see your neighbors’ homes unless you were on the map screen; later they added in low-res stand-ins) and instead, it’s an open world game where you can see your Sim commute to work in real-time. Neighbors can be visited without going through a loading screen - it all feels more organic as a result. Customization saw a huge upgrade as well, the AI was improved, etc. Sounds nice in theory, but the problem was that it was too ambitious for PCs of the time. This series has traditionally attracted non-gamers who don’t deeply upgrade their machines all that often and instead play on laptops bought for homework or old rigs inherited from big brothers. Sims 1 ran on a toaster, Sims 2 on a pizza oven with some kind of GPU grafted to it - whereas Sims 3 was one of the most demanding games of its time in order to facilitate gameplay changes that few people actually asked for and rounded, bloated looking Sims that are somewhat offputting. It was still a massive success and a huge hit with modders as well, but Sims 2 remained popular due to its more focused nature, the fact that it ran on anything and the fact that it was complete with a massive library of add-ons that took years to be replicated in Sims 3.
Sims 4 reset the series back to Sims 2, but went too far initially, limiting player freedom in regards to neighborhood creation. Instanced homes returned, customization features and open world of Sims 3 were cut, the AI saw a massive improvements, Sims didn’t all look obese anymore, hardware requirements were modest again - but at the price of having incredibly intrusive DRM, an attempt to monetize the proud modding community and being very bare-bones in the beginning, requiring years of DLCs to reach feature-parity with Sims 2 and 3. IIRC, even pools - an absolutely essential part of Sims lore - were missing initially. All of the improvements to the building mechanics in particular were overshadowed by EA’s corporate nonsense. It’s come a long way since though. Just like with the predecessors, buying all DLC at once will make you poor - but the base game is free now and the actual intention is that you only buy the DLC that have features or items you care about. The modding scene is as vibrant as ever, making any non-feature DLC unnecessary anyway.
This series is an interesting and unique phenomenon. It’s a prime example of something that only ever truly works on PC. All of the many console, mobile and browser spinoffs and ports were nothing but mere blips on the radar, because fundamentally, it can only work on a platform as open as the PC. It primarily attracts female players who rarely play anything else, yet dive deep into modding and modifying every little aspect of these games like the most hardened PC nerds. It started out and still is in many ways a faksimile of ideal American suburbia, although enhanced by both some quite subversive humor and subverted by an astonishing level of player freedom that goes against the conformity of the real world - while at the same time replicating the fads, consumerism, cliques, feuds and other less wholesome aspects of the real world through its behemoth of a community. It’s ultimately a platform for individual creative expression and the worlds (both in-game and outside of it) that emerge as a result of it, a sandbox that was only ever bested by Minecraft, which literally broke everything down to its individual building blocks. Each game and its DLCs become more like car payments to seasoned players, something you pay for so that you can travel where you want to go, which in turn keeps the experience fresh, finances further development and prevents the community from getting stagnant as it has to learn to adapt to changes from the developers.
I’ll end this here. This wasn’t meant to turn into an essay and now my fingers hurt, because I typed all of this nonsense on a touchscreen.
Been playing TS4 again, lightly modded to facilitate poly relationships. I’m not a fan of the shit storm of DLC that’s basically the staple of the game’s monetization at this point, but that’s nothing that can’t be solved on the high seas. Otherwise, I still enjoy the series a lot. (Also, shout-out to the various weird spinoffs like Castaways.)
I know multiple women who mainly got themselves a PC to play Sims back in the day and who are now in senior IT roles because once they got the PC they kind of “sticked with it”.
That is something we indeed should thank The Sims for.
When did you last play? I literally just played the game and sometimes just didn’t place some services- I think a good tip rn is just advance from a small city quickly, as later in the game it’s broken and gives you unlimited money as your people somehow make insane amounts of money. But in the early game advancing is your friend to gain cash from the advancements
That’s what I meant with at the beginning. As soon as I started making more profit than losses, it became very easy, which also made it kind of boring.
Looking it up, it doesn’t sound like it. Looks to be planned for later this month.
My understanding is that they are making the economy harder and completely removing the government subsidies that small cities get that make them absurdly easy. Other changes include making utility exports less lucrative and roads etc more expensive.
While that‘s true right now, a big patch called „Economy 2.0“ is expected to drop this week (more on that here and here).
I really hope this will be a successful first step of making the game actually better than its predecessor. Unfortunately the economy simulation is only one of many issues which make me want to play something else after a few minutes of gameplay. I think it‘ll be at least another year until they‘re able to fix all these minor annoyances, which sum up to one very big annoyance. Like not being able to place stuff sometimes without any obvious reason. Or those ugly, steep pathways on lots, when the connecting street isn‘t completely flat. Or missing animations for firemen, which currently only have to drive up to a burning building in order to stop a fire.
Cities Skylines was a better Sim City (2013) and was justifiably loved for that. For now, Cities Skylines 2 is unfortunately just a worse Cities Skylines.
Building a pedestrian over or underpass is another story entirely, had to force the game to do it and even then I somehow managed to place a path that looked like it was going through the roundabout, but somehow it wasn’t
It’s been a while, but here is another “Let’s discuss” post! I hope everybody is doing fine and these posts are still appreciated :).
I haven’t played this myself, but I know so many people who are extremely passionate about it that it felt like a good candidate! Looking forward to all of your musings!
Hmm…440 hours on Steam…probably another 125 on the Switch…
I love this game. It’s so cozy and comfortable. I found SDV after my divorce just when it had originally released and I was drawn into the cute world and how much character oozes from every corner. Every person you meet has something going on or you can just be a weird hermit building out your farm in peace. There’s enough of a story to propel you forward but never overbearing and it gets out of the way when it’s “done”.
As time has gone on from my first playthrough, I’ll typically dive back in when the itch strikes or a new content update comes along. The last few playthroughs I’ve done a lot to mod the game and introduce new things into the world to discover, some of which just feels indistinguishable from the official content and others that just help reduce barriers that I want to skip over (like fishing).
Stardew Valley is a game I will likely always go back to. I’m sure it will eventually eclipse my current most played game (Team Fortress 2 @ ~800 hours). I’ve tried other games like it and while they’re fun, none seem to have the staying power that Stardew has over me. While I will absolutely check out his next game, I’m hoping Stardew Valley never really stops being updated over the years.
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