I’ve been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don’t mind so much the fact that it’s different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I’m bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
The Sims. They keep changing things and making it worse.
The Sims will be a great case study for some future game design student, in how to take a massively popular IP and ride it straight into the fucking ground. It’s like EA intentionally makes the wrong choice at every single turn. You’d think that eventually they would stumble across the right thing to do, but somehow they seem determined to keep making bad decisions.
I loved The Sims, especially with expansion packs like Makin’ Magic. I still think that was one of the best expansion packs in the entire franchise. I’m firmly a The Sims 2 gamer, though I haven’t played in years, because it’s too addictive. The Sims 3 always performed so poorly for me that I never played past 3 minutes on each install. I was looking forward to The Sims 4, so I was so disappointed and shocked they managed to fuck it up. How are the freedom and customization worse than any of the previous versions, like wtf?
I recently bought Paralives, but haven’t tried it yet. It might scratch an itch, however, probably not in the right way. All EA had to do was take the best of The Sims 2 and 3, improve performance and expand on customization. But I guess that would make them actually competent, and we can’t have that.
I really don’t get the sims. Everything you do in it is stuff you can make yourself do in real life. It’s a life inside a computer simulator. Except for easily getting a job and designing a house freely. That’s certainly not tue case for real life me.
I do however really love The Sims Medieval. That’s a game with epic replayability.
That depends which of them, and the style you play it. I have played the Sims 2 for twenty years, and do not remember when was the last time I played some boring everyday life with a single family. I do things, like create huge family trees and play the entire neighborhood as one, tangling the relationships, and making drama and whatever I feel like. Murder mysteries, cults, monasteries, a nursing home for the elderly, fill big graveyards with a serial killer, build random stuff like an opera house or an art gallery, and run them as a businesses… Adding mods especially lets you play however you want. I even played a genuine Zombie Apocalypse scenario, with mods, that made the zombified sims npc’s, that would attack everyone on their own, and infect the attacked, who would then soon die and turn into another zombie.
I’m glad that you enjoy playing with it that way, I’ve also started to enjoy role-playing and story writing elements more as I get older.
I would have loved Sims Medieval if it didn’t have that roguelite meta progression where it expected me to restart my game from zero all the time and repeat the same quests over and over to progress the “god” unlocks. In every game I like long campaigns that I can sink my teeth into and build up meaningful progress, so this one aspect just sucked the joy out of any replays after the first run.
But I remember I loved the graphics (and music!) bc they used my fav Sims 3 engine, just made the textures prettier.
You looking into Paralives? I’ve enjoyed it in early access.
Weird, I got Paralives on launch and asked for a refund after 45min because it was nearly unplayable with bugs for me. It took ages to load, I couldn’t edit my para because the sliders were covered by something, and I couldn’t edit the buildings without the editor just deleting random stuff. My para also refused to do anything because she had low fun, but a bug was keeping her from filling her fun needs.
I might check it out again if it ever leaves early access, but I don’t typically have high hopes for early access games.
Yeah I mean, they were pretty clear that there were gonna be bugs, but I can understand the frustration. For me it’s about building houses, and playing as your character is just a minor annoyance needed to get more money. XD
I also had bugs on launch, but only a few and they were minor. Software is weird.
Yeah, they were pretty clear about having bugs, but at that price point, I was expecting a game I could actually play with some bugs on the side, and not a game that was broken at every turn. It seriously soured me on the whole thing.
I couldn’t even build houses because the editor kept randomly deleting stuff, so I tried reloading an earlier save, but the roof and some walls vanished and parts of the house were no longer “inside” the house somehow?
Gave up on Sims too, I don’t even care enough to pirate it no matter how trivial it is at this point.
I got Paralives. It’s still very early, but it could get somewhere.
For now my main problem with it is it’s very light on autonomous simulation. And though I like the idea of storytellers, at this point they barely do anything. I want freaking chaos in my game, and it should be more varied than just “Hey, what if sudden crush on that random person?”.
The cards and progression system are good ideas though. Again, they need nore variety.