Games

Mmhmm, Paralives looks like it’s going to take the world by storm. I’ve been following their development and they’re doing really good things.

paralives is so slow development though, and the lack of teaser releases concerns me about the quality. I have high expectations for it as well but starting to grow concerned

That’s how I’ve felt about The Sims since the first one. It was so boring making my Sim go to work, come home, eat, go to bed, shower, etc. I bounced off it hard and never went back. If someone likes it, good for them, but I’ve never gotten it.

To be fair, that’s always been a reasonable description of games like Sims

I disagree with you here. You're making it out to be that this is the extent of it, and that's not true. Sims 3 had a HUGE amount of content aside from Building. There were quests/tasks, lineages for families, hidden objectives, you could wander around your entire city/neighborhood. None of these are possible in Sims 4. Every "neighborhood" has like 5 housing plots. Some have more than that, one of the Vampire ones has literally 4 homes, you can't scroll over or have your sim walk next door and make a new friend nope. If you/others haven't played Sims 3, seriously... Go try it, try to 100% it by experiencing all it offers, especially the Future DLC. It's insane, really. Every S4 DLC by comparison is hollowed out and has like 5 things to do total. Most of the traveling ones, the university ones. They slashed the content in Sims 4 by 75% and kept the price for the DLC the EXACT same. It's criminal.

Steam link for the lazy

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2456740/inZOI/

I have really big hopes for this game, I’m worried to be disappointed. The character creation demo seemed good.

I agree. I play demo creator character. Was fun! Hope game fun!

no, that's the problem, there won't be a new Sims game. Sims 4 has been a zombie of a Sims game since it came out 10 years ago and EA just announced that they're more than happy to let it's corpse shuffle around for the foreseeable future, rather than make a Sims 5 that people actually like.

But did you buy the hundreds of expansions to bring it to feature parity with Sims 3? Only costs like $1065 for all of them! So cheap /s

The Build Mode features in 4 are pretty good if you're into virtual dollhouse building, and there's a ton of custom content for it (as long as you're on PC).

Live Mode is not very good, but it's functional enough to play dolls in the houses you built if you're willing to do all the story writing to make up for sims not having very interesting personalities/desires/autonomy.

Do people still play The Sims 4?

Yes, it's widely streamed on Twitch, most of them are just chicks doing house builds. It's pretty much a PC game version of HGTV to build homes with absurd amounts of customization. Most of them don't even play the game, they just give themselves tons of money and build a "dream home" like some Ikea home builder simulator. Which is fair, btw, I just want to say that... Completely ok if they like that, not to bash them. But it's not really playing the full extent of the game, building a family and a career and life simulating.

I play sims 1/2/3 only look at 4 because it free.

l haven't played Planet Coaster, but my impression was it's more of a coaster builder than a theme park manager? A lot of "hardcore" players play OpenRCT 2, and for a slightly more modern take on the genre there's Parkitect. But classic RCT hasn't been replaced

Now would be a great time to make a new simcity since city skylines 2 got greedy and bombed

Relative to its time, yes, but Sims 3 is peak Sims. It improved on 2 in every way, but the thing they did the best and left out of 4 was the create a style tool, which allows you to make any surface any texture and colour you like. You could have a wooden sweater and metal carpet. No limits. You could make uncanny replicas of most homes, furnishings and all.

I think 3 was, I guess it's subjective though.

Maybe the base game of 2 had more features or something, and with 3 you needed add-ons

I stopped with the NHL updates back with NHL 99 even they were basically just roster updates over NHL 97

It's only been "irrelevant" because of the poor reception to Sims 4. The Sims was the first great "life sim" game, and the 3rd installment added a crazy amount of content. That's all we wanted. More stuff to decorate with and places for our Sims to explore. Nah, Sims 4 took away the variety and added paywalls and multiplayer and was just generally a poor experience.

For anyone holding out hope for #5, this is on par with Blizzard announcing their smartphone diablo game. EA killed this franchise, and yeah I'm a little sad about it.

The fact that there aren't many alternatives likely means that making a Sims-like game isn't as simple as it looks. That being said, there are a bunch of life sims under developement right now (probably because EA is doing a terrible job) such as Paralives, Inzoi and Alterlife.