The Sims 2 - Gaming Nirvana

Games
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Probably because those meals are the most satisfying that your sim knows how to make. Smart AI from a (non) micromanagement point of view, less so from a role-playing point.[/quote]

I micromanage all of my Sims’ actions. That’s where the fun is in this game (my Sims also seem to do stupid things whenever they are on their own… SSX3 play on the computer is a big favorite for them). Omelettes and Chili Con Carne might be the most advanced breakfast and lunch meals, but Salmon and Lobster Thermidor are more advanced than Pork Chops for dinner. The problem is that they (seem to) take longer to make than Pork Chops, and the Lobster always requires oven baking which runs into the queueing problem. Salmon is more filling than Pork Chops, but I rarely run my Sims’ hunger down far enough to take advantage of it.

A good solution here can be to make certain foods add Needs points besides hunger. Lobster Thermidor, for example, can add Fun points to an eating Sim. This adds variability and complexity to the meal selection.

One of the game’s problems is its limited environments. The issue here with passers-by is that they are only on-screen for a short time, so obviously if you can’t run out to stop them in time they will leave. So we get the patchwork solution of the “Psychic Stop”.

The home is King in The Sims. Thus the Sidewalk must be Knighted. I guess they were shooting for realism in the quick pass-bys of the sidewalk sims. Realistically however, the Sidewalk is not a social playground anywhere in America, or anywhere in the world as far as I know. The reason it has to be here is that other aspects of Sim life are anti-social relative to traditional reality. Work, for example. In Sim world Sims occasionally get a relationship plus with a single sim in a work session. In traditional reality humans build relationships all the time at work. Many humans treat the workplace as their primary social grounds. Not so in Sim land… the Home is King, even for Fortune sims! The same issue exists with School for children.

The Public Lots are certainly a step in the right direction. Its the Bar, Mall, Social Center, Recreation, all wrapped into one. A nice way to balance realism with minimizing development resources. Now if only they’d fix the work/school model and cut back or eliminate the Sidewalks…

One problem here is that they seem to be going for a kind of Social Carnival atmosphere. It ties in with the Suburban Dream theme. Passers-by are like items behind sidewalk shop windows… you, the player, gets to look at them as they (you) pass by. Hustle Bustle, to mimic the activity going on inside the household. The Social Carnival might have to be broken to destroy the Sidewalks.

Yep. Even my non-Romance sims have no problem keeping 10+ lovers simultaneously, whether Married or not.

Rewards points are VERY easy to get for a Family sim, even easier than for Romance. Knowledge sims are bitches to play compared to those… Fortune is in the middle (Popularity should be pretty easy in theory but I haven’t experienced that).

The problem is that the Wants system doesn’t have proper limits, and is thus somewhat broken. It has Loops where the same easily obtainable and repeatable Wants are recycled again and again in Social situations, again and again infinitely, until a rest reset at least. Improper coding… its a big Balance issue as I see it.

One more issue, related to the Shallow Social Modeling: noone communicates with anyone autonomously from you. Strangetown, for example… very few eligible women compared to the first scenario (I haven’t played Veronaville yet). I’m playing a Knowledge sim with a 0 in Shy/Outgoing (100% shy). There are about 10 Adult women (preset) in this scenario, and all of them are my lovers. I have a wife, who is friends with one of my lovers and acquaintance to another.

The town has like 40 people, 50 tops. How exactly does my wife not know I have a HAREM going on? Its not like I’m a travelling salesman. I’m thinking about getting her some lovers just to make things fair… the only problem is that I work only 12 hours a week (Mad Scientist) so the patented “play while he/she is away” doesn’t work very well. Fucking at Community Lots is an Energy killer though I guess I can do it once and Hug/Kiss/Make Out from then on. Kind of a cheezy affair that way.

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Bah! All these points will be rendered useless when I finally design my Angel cast family.

Bwhahahaha!!!

Seriously though, what we want is easier to critique than what we get.

(All in fun BK. You do have some good points.)

63

Having had more of a chance to play with it now I find it hard to disagree with a lot of the criticism being levelled at it. Don’t get me wrong I’m enjoying it as a more than reasonable means of wasting several hours at a time but it does have, for me at least, significant weaknesses.

The relationships remain the biggest disapointment. Having married off young caliente to mortimer and had a couple of kids before marrying her off again to some guy she bought home from work it is dis-appointing to see her pick up the relationship with Don as if nothing had happened in the meantime. And that despite doing the dirty with his wife, new chappie seems to quite like Don irrespective of what would have to be a pretty notorious reputation for bagging the local ladies. The teenage daughter however did seem to be less than impressed catching mom in bed with Don (and I did notice that the option with Don and caliente jnr to try for kids exists, I might have to see if what happens when a sprog turns up in the household that bears a passing resemblence to Mr Lothario) but other than an immediate dislike for Don, the re-percussions seem to be minimal.

The relationship between non family adults and kids is actually pretty creepy, Kids ringing up adults at 10 o’clock at night to ask why they dont see each other any more etc. Though quite a lot of this does seem to stem from the inability of the non controlled families to age within the game. Having many of the teenagers I’ve let grow up offer massive bonuses for “first kiss” only to find out all the kids they are friends with are stuck as kids while they are trying to work out where the next spot is going to show up is a real pain.

My other annoyance is the lack of any real ability for the sims to learn either about each other in any meaningful sense, or about the world around them and how they interact with it. It remains more than possible to have a houseful of supposed adults wetting themselves on a regular basis, yet 4 or so years ago I was training a virtual monkey to crap in a field, grow crops, torture villagers and eat sheep when it felt hungry.

Members of families getting hungry in a house full of hungry siblings/parents and only making food for themselves or worse still trying to cook dinner for themselves right next to mom/dad who is plainly already making dinner, not adopting a specific bedroom or bed (or are all sims reincarnations of sailors and inherit hot-bedding as a way of life?) and the general lack of families/sims to have any kind of routine trained into them that makes a lot of micro-management once you get families bigger than two people an absolute necessity remain the one thing that really lets the sims down for me. There are times that I would really just like to sit back and watch them get on with it, but quite frankly, I just dont trust them even to handle their own basic requirements. Even the AI “help” such as nannies aren’t much better. I was struggling having inflicted two babies on one single (but rich) mother. The nanny turned up and picked up the sprog who needed attention (feeding and bathing) and then proceeded to change it’s nappie, stick it in a chair and do everything except either feed or bathe the thing.

At the moment I just dont feel like they have done a great deal to the relationships or the actual intelligence of the sims themselves. It feels very much like they bolted some extra options onto what was already there rather than make any significant changes to how it worked.

It will be interesting to see what the inevitable add-on packs bring to the game and whether they address some of the more basic “failings” in the title as it stands (I’d really like to see sims with the family aspiration be more inclined to actually attempt to take on running a household more capably than they do at present for example) .

For all that, it still remains a charming, entertaining title and I am very much looking forward to seeing what extras the community comes up with, as at a risk of letting my feminine side loose, I wasn’t overly swept away by the variety of makeup and clothing options available within the game by default.

64

I’ll start with an semi-apologetic preamble: This post is intentionally negative and doesn’t really represent my overall feeling for the game. On balance I love it and think I’ve definitely gotten my money’s worth out of it. If you haven’t already, you should buy it. Today. That being said, I wanted to point out a few (well, ten) of the shortcomings of the game and a few of the things I wish it had.

First, I wish there was more content. Three towns with only a few families in each were pretty easy to go through. I got tired of interacting with the same people over and over again, and if you want to wade through Koontz’s post he made some valid points about why those interactions are not that deep in the first place.

Same goes for the objects. I know they want to save something for the sequels, but there didn’t seem like there were that many things to play with. Part of the fun was the sense of exploration and discovery you got from buying your sims’ new stuff and watching what they’d do with it. But there just doesn’t seem to be enough stuff to buy or do. Sit in one chair or prepare one meal or talk to one neighbor or paint one picture and you’ve pretty much seen everything that object/action combo has to offer. I’d love to see more unique objects like the party game or the RC car or the computer that you can interact with, possibly differently when cooperating with other sims. Maybe we’re spoiled by the wealth of expansions for the original game, but there seems to be a lot less to do in S2 than even in The Sims Online.

Second, I wish they had implemented a “random wardrobe” feature. I got tired of watching my Sim in the same clothes all the time, and would have appreciated his/her picking a type of outfit at random out of the wardrobe I’d bought up to that point.

Third, the aspirations system is great, but it seems out of whack and pretty limited. There should be more detailed aspirations like “Play a pinball game with Mary at a community lot” or “Buy a new video game” as well as more really hard ones along the lines of maxing out skills, having babies, etc. And why not have aspirations that create real changes to the scene, like wanting to change jobs or wanting to move into another house? These should be worth tons of points while the banal ones like “eat cereal” or “talk” should be worth very little. As it is it’s not very challenging to get to platinum mood by racking up a ton of the “500 point” aspirations like giving backrubs or stargazing.

Fourth, the no aging for neighbors is a major irritant. I understand that there are technical problems, but for a game built around aging, generations, and interactions it seems like a BIG omission. I haven’t verified this, but I believe that it’s possible to have your sim have an affair with Woman X (mysterious and exotic, no?), but go on to marry woman Y, then have a child, raise that child to adulthood, then have that child have interact with and marry Woman X --the very same sim that his old man used to shack up with. And she’s not aged a day! Neighbors’ aging seems like it should be core to the game’s design as much as aging of whatever sims you’re currently playing with. Having neighbors marry and introduce new children (who grow into teens and then adults) would also solve a lot of the “not enough variety in the sims” problem I noted above.

Fifth, the incongruent time shift you experience when traveling to community lots is really jarring. Again, this seems like something that should have been fundamental to the design.

Sixth, I wish other sims could call me up to invite me over to their house. Have them throw parties. That would be fun.

Seventh, I loved the “work events” that told you a little story and let you make a choice resulting in different outcomes. There should be more of this! And in other contexts!

Eighth, the body type modeling that I mentioned before. I understand Union Carbide’s response, but I still want it. :)

Ninth, you should be able to assign rooms or at least objects to people. For example, autopiloting sims routinely sleep in their parents’/kids’ beds because they’re closer.

Tenth, I want pets. Didn’t one of the Sims expansion packs add this?

In terms of overall negative affect on my opinion of the game, the major problems are wanting more content, not having neighbors age, and the time shift when visiting community lots. The others are things that I could be happy just getting in an expansion. Still, as I said, great game on balance. I’m sure I’ve got a lot more enjoyment to get out of it.

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Clearly the most blantantly missed feature is the ability to “manage” the breast size of the female sims. My dream of Lara Croft living in a house with Indiana Jones and having Johnny Quest for a son has been washed away in a sea of B-cup women.

:wink:

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Hmmph. Not picking on THHHHHHHHHPT or whatever the hell your handle is, but just a convienient series of points to nitpick.

First, I wish there was more content.

There’s easily more content in the Sims 2 than the first game, especially considering that every “blue couch” not longer needs to be blue. As for wishing for more content … of course you do. EA fully expects you to wish for more content. It’s part of the design. The reason why is obvious.

Second, I wish they had implemented a “random wardrobe” feature.

Shrug. You lay out an entirely different outfit with a wardrobe. Close your eyes when selecting for a random one :)

Third, the aspirations system is great, but it seems out of whack and pretty limited.

You just want more of a good feature. The aspirations/wants/blarg system was specifically put there to throw us gamers a bone in the form of game-provided goals. I’m just glad that it’s there to begin with. The rest of it falls under the “I want more stuff” of #1. Gee, just like a sim, you always want more stuff! How true to life can you get?

Fourth, the no aging for neighbors is a major irritant

AGREED. This throws interaction consistency way out of whack. I am willing to give the simplified interactions a lot of leeway, but this is a bit much. The neighbors no doubt laugh at my poor sim as he becomes feeble and aged while they are immortal. Fuck them. I’ll set them on fire with my stove.

Fifth, the incongruent time shift you experience when traveling to community lots is really jarring

Integral to the sims and an old design decision carried lock-stock-and-barrel forward from the original expansion packs. It’s the only way they could do it.

Sixth, I wish other sims could call me up to invite me over to their house

I dunno…while a lot of sims do have pre-built houses in the sequel, in the old game most of the “by-players” had “houses” consisting of an end-table and a telephone :)

Seventh, I loved the “work events” that told you a little story and let you make a choice resulting in different outcomes. There should be more of this! And in other contexts!

Yep.

Eighth, the body type modeling that I mentioned before. I understand Union Carbide’s response, but I still want it.

The community will definitely rise to the occassion for this. If you’re quick, you’ll be able to get those bodies before they’re all stashed on pay sites, like the old Sims body scene.

Ninth, you should be able to assign rooms or at least objects to people. For example, autopiloting sims routinely sleep in their parents’/kids’ beds because they’re closer.

I thought Sims “claimed” a bed the first time they were directed to sleep in it. Worked in the first game.

Tenth, I want pets. Didn’t one of the Sims expansion packs add this?

Another one will. I have no interest in Sims pets. My real cat climbs over me enough as I’m playing already :)

–scharmers

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It takes 5 uses of an object before a sim’s ownership level is set to max, and preference for a particular object will be noticeable after you direct a sim to use it twice in a row. If a sim uses another similar object, ownership in the previous object will decrease.

A side effect of this is that if an object is destroyed by fire or stolen by the burglar, the sim will actually miss the object afterwards, depending on how much ownership they feel towards it.

68

I haven’t kept up the modding scene for the Sims, but is this really what happened? Does that go for custom objects and such? People are gathering them on pay sites?

I was browsing around for third-party content for The Sims 2 today (not much on in the official Exchange section yet) and I came across a few sites linked from EA that were charging for modded content. I reported them, since I think it’s in bad form, at best, and at worst a violation of whatever EULA I can’t be bothered to read when I install the game.

But I’d hate to see people charging for custom content, especially when it’s a game with as much widespread appeal as The Sims and now the sequel. Third party content wants to be free!

-Tom
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A lot of sims content could (can?) still be found for free. But certainly as time went on, more and more of the “quality” items, especially on mall sites started to charge for downloads. Thats not to say that in a few cases simply going to the designers personal site didn’t allow you to get the item in question for nothing.

I can see both sides of it to be honest. I’m personally not prepared to spend $x a month for access to the high end sites to download a few extra skirts and trousers plus a sofa or two. But certainly more than a few of the content providers evidentally had put a great deal of time and effort both into the content and the sites providing it and seemed to be getting the traffic through it (and presumably therefore bandwidth costs etc) to warrant slapping some form of time or item based subscription.

I guess in many respects its no different to the mindset that will pay $100 for +1 ears of spock worship or somesuch twaddle on ebay for some of the MMORPGs out and about.

I do think it is a bit “off” for the sites linked from EA to be charging though, especially if they are not making any distinction between the sites charging and those offering content/tutorials for nothing.

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I do think it is a bit “off” for the sites linked from EA to be charging though, especially if they are not making any distinction between the sites charging and those offering content/tutorials for nothing.

The links on the official Sims 2 site do say “Free site” or “Subscription site” for each of them…

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Tom Chick - Cybercop

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The links on the official Sims 2 site do say “Free site” or “Subscription site” for each of them…

Ta for the clarification, I’m still waiting for a BB connection to be installed in new house so not had a chance to pootle round the EA site yet. As far as I could recall there was no distinction made, at least for a while, on the original title, you’d turn up at a site and find all the gubbins required subscription to download.

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Oh yeah. Sites have managed to figure out that players will pay for this content. Something like $4-5 or more a month. The real kicker? From the investigations I did, artists see none of this.

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So basically the sites that charge for this content are committing commercial piracy by appropriating someone else’s works for commercial sale without a license.

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It’s pronounced like this, if that helps. :)

There’s easily more content in the Sims 2 than the first game, especially considering that every “blue couch” not longer needs to be blue.

A blue couch isn’t much different than a red one. I was speaking more to having more objects, not skins for them.

It’s hard to say this without sounding like a mouth-breathing forum know-it-all, but I can’t believe there was NO way to make it work. It would have made the game better if it, along with neighbors’ aging, were fundamental.

I dunno…while a lot of sims do have pre-built houses in the sequel, in the old game most of the “by-players” had “houses” consisting of an end-table and a telephone :)

More incentive to play and decorate those houses. Also, S2 has a “lot bin” with prefabricated houses you can plop down if you want to easily populate the neighborhood. (I also wish they had more prefabricated families to go with them, though.)

Really? Neat! I’ll have to try this out. Thanks for the info!

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Depends on the wishes of the works’ original authors. Many of them just want their stuff in circulation and grant anyone free rights to distribute it (c.f., FilePlanet and its ilk, GameFaqs.com, etc.). They’re probably honored to have it up on the pay sites, especially if it’s popular. Other sites, though, specialized in sets of objects/skins/sims that were exclusive to a particular site, and loaded their stuff wtih readme.txt files telling people not to post it.

By the way, I really dig the in-game browser for custom content. Just open it up, browse objects, download them, and WHAM! They’re ready to use without my ever having to leave the game. I hope that once the community starts pumping stuff out EA populates this service with more stuff, though.

77

Here’s why it doesn’t make any sense for the neighbors to age…at least not all of them.

You can play as ANY sim in the neighborhood. If all the sims aged at the same time, that would mean that you couldn’t really play more than one family “at a time.”

If you’re playing the Pleasants, then they age and the adults turn into elders and die, but Mortimer Goth dies as well, then essentially you’ve missed out on playing as the Goths.

This way, each family is playable individually.

There is no question that this isn’t “realistic” but it does give you the maximum ability to play a number of different families in the neighborhood without having other families die on you while you’re doing it.

The best thing would be if there was a cheat to instant-age some people though. Let’s say your teenage girl character is dating a teenage boy from another family. If you want the romance to continue when the girl moves to adulthood you could simply go into the boy’s house, instant-age him, then continue the romance into adulthood.

On a different note, something that I do find annoying about the ages is this:

If you try to create a large family with Elder parents with adult, teen, and young children you can’t do it. The relationship configurator will only let you set the elderly family members as the parents of the adults, and the adults can only be parents of the teens and kids.

:(

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It’s hard to say this without sounding like a mouth-breathing forum know-it-all, but I can’t believe there was NO way to make it work. It would have made the game better if it, along with neighbors’ aging, were fundamental.
[/quote]
It’s difficult to manage this sort of thing effectively. The obvious way to do it is to let those Sims and households be simulated at the same time as you simulate your own, but that’s prohibitively expensive in CPU time. And you can’t just age them, since without new children you will eventually have no neighbors at all. You also wouldn’t be able to get past the second generation without having at least some degree of simulation of relationships between your neighbors. You’d have to pick exactly the right degree of simulation to produce interesting results in your neighbors, while keeping CPU requirements to a reasonable level - and it’s not an obvious decision to make.

This also ignores the question of player control. What happens when one of those families that is aging and having children and having grandchildren and finally dying is one of yours? Will the CPU buy Elixir of Life on its own? What if you don’t want that family to live longer? What if you’re privately thinking of them as being barren, or maybe they don’t want children at all?

79

I did find one really really annoying bug in the game, though.

When your family moves out of a house, it’s supposed to sell all the personal possessions and give your family the cash. (Meaning everything you get through the “Buy” mode.) Trouble is, it sells all the personal possessions and throws the money away.

I was trying to experiment to find out how this worked when I moved my main family out of their house. (I’ve been looking to build or buy a new house for a while.) When you move out of a house, everything is stripped from it, even though the lot editor can add all of these things (and in fact all the default houses come with pre-outfitted kitchens and bathrooms). All of this stuff is outright lost, and since it immediately saves the lot in its new condition, it can’t be gotten back, either.

A little experimentation suggests that a typical house’s value is around 1/3 possessions or more, so make sure you sell every single item before you move out. :)

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How much different is that from developing a game based on another game and paying zero royalties?