I’ve had a couple of games I’ve encountered that are literally unplayable at 21:9. You’re either stuck with textures stretched to oblivion or it cuts off a significant chunk of the screen. Admittedly this is mostly with older games that predate 21:9 displays but holy crap is it annoying when I can’t play a game because it can’t handle my display and stretches instead of displaying at the configured resolution
Any kind of pause or completion of loading should have a brief moment where you can see the action and get your bearings before it hands control to you. Like how Forza or Euro/American Truck Sim handle loading saves, its paused for a second or so with the player getting full view of the screen then continues so you have a moment to figure out what you need to do
The sad thing is enterable buildings is pretty achievable. They could have an algorithm to generate a generic interior based on a seed at the time that the player enters the building. It’s not exciting, and it would add complexity but it at least would make enterable buildings without massively impacting install size nor save size.
You can play with procedural generated cities and structures here for example to see the potential. Just imagine that instead of a top down map it generates an interior with generic furniture, clutter and possibly loot. Add in different sets of assets it fills in with based on building type and location and verify it generates the same interior every time it gets the same seed and you have a very efficient system for at least being able to enter every random boring building
Alternatively there is a gameplay argument to be made for only being able to enter buildings that actually do something gameplay-wise so you know what buildings you need to enter
One of the big reasons many companies go public is it’s naturally a really nice retirement package for the owners of the company. The owners of the company may have put so much time and money into building the company that they don’t have sufficient retirement savings, so by going public they turn a portion of their ownership into a boatload of cash as well as a boatload of wealth that can be leveraged, then simply elect a new CEO, retain their significant voting power on the board so they aren’t entirely abandoning their baby and then peace out
Remember, Skyrim was released closer to the first year you listed than the second one and the sequel is still quite a ways out. There are entire release day players of Elder Scrolls 6 who were not yet born when 5 came out.
I stole a book for a quest with a shitton of witnesses, ran away, got out of town because of the guards having patching issues, stopped at my home and dumped my mostly-stolen inventory and returned and turned myself into the guards paying 40 gold to redeem myself for stealing a priceless book. Skyrim is a masterpiece of realism I tell you!
Why so salty? I never claimed to be a genius who cracked the code, in fact at a few points I specifically said I lack the knowledge and skills to even begin to implement what i described.
What I was trying to say is that the core gameplay loop is pretty simple, so it’s surprising with the sheer number of game development studios and hobbist programmers that nobody has cloned it since the hardest part is the graphics.
Like just breakdown what the Sims into its fundamental components. The characters, the fashion, the homes, the skills, the jobs, social interactions, possessions. It’s a lot of work.
That’s the thing that gets me is the core life sim gameplay loop is actually pretty simple, mostly because it was originally an architecture simulator with people you could play house with and then Maxis realized playing with the people was a ton of fun so they built onto that gameplay.
Basically you just need several values which count down over game ticks for the needs, modifiers on how much it each goes up and down and then add a bunch to the value when the sim does something to satisfy the needs
Social interactions are purely plus/minus a few points with a bit of RNG and modifiers for the traits, mood, hygiene level, etc.
Careers are basically just bad quests from an RPG. Your sims happiness (is the average need level greater than or less than X) chooses whether their career performance value is increasing or decreasing per game tick while at work, skills and work style (working normally, working hard, etc.) will modify the value that’s added or subtracted per tick, add in a skill check when that value reaches promotion and you have rabbit hole careers
Tons of games have structure building mechanics which I won’t pretend to understand from a game engine level but I’d say that’s a pretty well solved issue
Really the hard part is the graphics but if games like Minecraft, Terraria and Stardew Valley can be such hits with 8-bit inspired graphics, I think a strong core gameplay loop can outshine average Steam shovelware-grade graphics
So basically, if you want to create a Minecraft mod to play the sims, there’s the recipe. Honestly if I was any good at programming I’d take a crack at it but I don’t have the patience nor skill to do that at this stage
I saw a tier list meme that some teenager made on Discord of every game they’d ever played. You know what didn’t appear once on the list? Not a single Grand Theft Auto game nor a single Elder Scrolls game. I asked them why and they said because GTA5 and Skyrim are “old”
They’re taking so long between releases now that they missed an entire generation of gamers
Like, make a series of games that are low budget, relatively short, and easy to pump out very quickly, but with a distinct series identity and maybe a consistent writer/artist across games. Then make a lot of them and get people hooked on the series instead of on 1 mega game.
Urban Games currently does this with Transport Fever. They flat out said while hyping the release of Transport Fever 2 (which was their third transport tycoon style game) that their goal as a development studio is to make the best transportation tycoon game they can. So they intend to continuously iterate.
N3V Games, who developes the Trainz simulator game was literally formed to buy up the property and talent from its original developer Auran and continue the franchise
There’s a third example I was going to give but got distracted while writing this comment and forgot
As far as I’m concerned, if game studios simply had ISOs/ROMs of their abandoned games available to download for a nominal fee that would be acceptable. Heck with the advent of browser based emulators Sony, Nintendo and Sega (plus many early PC game rightsholders) could simply sell access to play their back catalog on their website Netflix-style via these web-based emulators, much like how archive.org handles it
Honestly I think the most achievable solution is an abandonware law that basically permits the free redistribution of any software that isn’t available for sale in any standard format for x years. Basically just codify what many companies already practice which is turning a blind eye to abandonware/rom sites distributing the very old games they aren’t selling anymore