My fiancee doesn’t like it (she was a huge fan of the Sims series) because she no longer gets to play god for an entire household, even to the point of accelerating time to get through the boring parts.
I have a feeling that only reasonably hardcore gamers are going to be interested in paying a monthly fee to play, and it probably sucks if you don’t have broadband, so that kinda distances a lot of the Sims’s original audience.
For the hardcore types who don’t mind the fees and the broadband prerequisites, the graphics engine (appears to be unchanged from the original release of the Sims) has got to be a slap in the face.
Also, I’ve heard that your skill points deteriorate over time, so if you want to be a master telemarketer, you’ll have to spend REAL TIME every week watching your character practice his smile in the mirror to keep the skill points up. I realize that’s good in that people aren’t all striving to hit level 50 and have everything like a typical MMORPG, but it’s still a jump from the offline versions.
“My fiancee doesn’t like it (she was a huge fan of the Sims series) because she no longer gets to play god for an entire household…”
That’s the thing I always questioned about TSO. It’s not really an online version of The Sims, which the legion of Sims fans would naturally expect. My daughter and wife both played The Sims a lot, but when I told them you only get to control one Sim in TSO and the Sim is really just an avatar and not a semi-independant character, they both expressed no interest in TSO.
But which adds the non-real-world bonus of lag. Anyone can hang out in his or her living room. But if you want to live in a laggy living room, you can pretty much only do it in TSO.
The #1 thing that kills it is its awful chat interface. The word bubble thing is just awful.
#2 is framerate/unresponsive feel from poor framerate and lag.
#3 is the needs are too intrusive. Nobody likes eating in an RPG; in TSO, you have to do it every half hour, plus go to the bathroom, sleep, stay clean…for a social game, way too many requirements draw you away from what you want to be doing.
Those are about equal, and every other issue is far far behind in importance, just because those three completely break the game. Any one of them alone would, all three together…I don’t know how Will Wright is going to follow through on his AIAS acceptance speech.
It’s like the team who made the game wanted it to shoehorn the Sims design into an online game instead of making an online game with a Sims sort of feel. Terrible, terrible design and awful project management happened here.
Why does it suck? Because as someone said earlier - you no longer get to control everyone in your house - it’s a giant chat room filled with real people walking around doing goofy things. What fun!
I’d rather watch paint dry.
It’s very easy to simply say “it sucks” and be done with it, but it’s actually fairly difficult to make a serious, in-depth description of the game and keep it brief, because there’s a lot to the game, and a lot of reasons why it went wrong.
If you’re not content to accept the various reviews of the games or the comments of your fellows here and on other message boards, give it a try. You’ll see what everyone meant.
For me, it sucked because it took far too long to do everything. You want to level up? Stand infront of a mirror for twenty real-time minutes. That’s SO BORING. There’s a couple of money-making games that’re interesting, like the maze that you play cooperatively, but they’re few and far between.
A waiter in a restaurant something something, efficiency expert mumble mumble, string is to pull it out when I have to go to the bathroom, something mumble hrrmmm, hmmm, something, punchline=I use the spoon.
