Simulators of life

The first Sims game is actually pretty difficult, due to a mixture of poor AI and demanding requirements for the game. The second title was still somewhat tough but was much easier in comparison to the first with the more forgiving AI and less requirements to succeed. The third and fourth titles are an absolute pushover for difficulty, as it's easy to go from being a homeless bum into the richest person in the neighborhood once you know the meta.

If you want tough, I'd go and find a collection of the first game with expansions (especially because it's only ~1GB) and try to succeed in it without spamming cheats or exploits.

Nah i am fine, i am currently addicted to animal crossing instead. But i did played it a little. Not like there was a lot to do though. It was buggy as hell for some reason, heads disappeared, bodies turned invincible. I think i tried bad build back then from here: thepiratebay.org/torrent/6878292/The_Sims_1The_Complete_Collection_[FULL]Games4theworld_

My greatest experience with the sims so far was playing with my own shop in sims 2 Open for Business, having a big laggy garden in Seasons and slowly getting rich, but even that eventually bored me. Maybe i'l reinstall it later to remember how it was.

Will Wright had a different vision for Sims than the expansion pack shitfest EA turned it into, since he was most involved with Sims 1 and the Sims 2 core game those ones play very differently than 3 and the abortion that is 4.

How were Sims prettier in 2? Chicks were even fappable unmodded. Those look fucking horrible.

2 aimed for a realistic art style. 3and 4 aimed for stylization
what's odd about this is that stylization tends to hold lasting appeal while realism finds itself outdated the next year, yet the reverse has happened here

The problem with The Sims is that while there is a very wide amount of content there is no depth. If you wanted to compete without having a ridiculous amount of content like EA pumps out, just pare it down and focus on something like careers. Flesh that out, maybe have a basic story generated by the game depending on who works where you work.

Sometimes the game feels like a soap opera where you're the only character that matters. Why not go full soap opera? Get people invested in the characters beyond attachments to their visible characteristics. Go for that X-Com attachment. But then don't kill the character off for no reason. Go for the CK2 level of attachment. But then don't stick the player with a character they've had little investment in developing.

4 is not completely terrible in terms of its style. Most sims in 2 looked very samey and low poly. Character creation actually divides between races and has touch controls. That's maybe the strongest part of the game. No more white niggers and black europeans.

that's been tried too

but yeah, an available but optional story arc would be nice in the sims.
maybe a town with scripted events leading to a World of Darkness plot if the player goes looking (why WoD? you've got vampires, werewolves, fairies, witches (mage), mummies, plumbots (stand-in for promethians), and so on. Get some actual use out of the expanded "races")

I liked the white-looking brown girls.

...

How you were able to extrapolate Sven Coop, STALKER and Crysis from Doom I'll never know.

They're all DOOM with vertical aim and other gimmicks

How you would be able to re-derive Doom from Sven Coop, STALKER and Crysis I'll never know.

Remove the gimmicks

Sims 2 has objectively the best content, it wasn't until the end that you had some really awful expansions and stuff packs though it did have an absurd amount of them. Sims 1 had only a handful of expansions and most of it was usable content. Another problem is that Sims 3 and beyond not only had a fuckton of content, but also an absurd amount of DLC. People bitch about Train Simulator being expensive when the pricetag to buy everything on The Sims 3 makes Train Simulator's pricetag look like a summer sale. It's about $300 for the game, expansion and stuff pack and then $75,000 for the DLC not listed on Steam.

shit. that would explain why the shop unlockers rank high on the popular mods lists

Sims 3's retarded lag makes it the worst by far imo

That's fixable in recent years due to research into optimization and advancements in computer hardware. Use Nraas' mods like Overwatch to help clean up errors in the game world and run the game with increased memory as well as a frame limiter at 30FPS. If you can, load up as much of the game onto an SSD if possible. It's how I'm able to run Bridgeport with all expansions and DLC content without too much slowdowns and that's with the DLC only on SSD.

Yep, along with all the shop content being very easy to find on the internet. Some of it like the Business as Usual Bistro and the Savvy Seller are actually pretty good and should have been included in a mini-OFB expansion but they never bothered to.

Oh, yeah, I could play Sims 3 now that I'm running on an SSD.

He said white looking brown girls not black.

Also is Sims 4 worth playing yet?

I just started replaying Sims 4 after i heard about the release of Parenthood and it still looks like a massive hipster gathering since launch day. None of the previous games had pre-made sims that looked liked they came from San Francisco.
Sims 2 is still the best.

Wait till the cats&dogs expansion comes out (November 10)

i haven't played sims since i was a kid, but in hindsight, could sims be summed up as a dollhouse + drama simulator + micromanaging+ homemaking ?

Who cares? Cities Skylines is a blatant Sim City clone, but it's better than the shitty new Sim City game.

It's terrible in its gameplay though. Getting rid of open world was a huge mistake.

It's really a shame no one remembers Creatures. It was Sims before Sims (highly moddable & more than 2 million copies sold)

funny that the thread has come up,
was thinking of going on a 'the sims' binge to compensate for my stale real life

how easy is to pirate sims 4? does it also have a lewd mod?
I've been lurking in the sims thread on /hgg/, not that a really want a porn game, but some lewdness really spices things up

also on the subject of games
there are some other games that really can considered life simu if you don't take the modern context
like, m&b, the guild is another, even stuff like skyrim perhaps, fable was an awesome one that you followed your character from its early days till death

I remember.

There won't be another reedition nor a good remake about artificial life.

Don't bother, go for Sims 3 instead.

Steve Grand (the original designer of Creatures) is working on a new game called 'Grandroids'.

that bad? really?
I do remember bingeing on 3 a fucking lot, plenty of mods, even shared some buildings,
but for I don't quite remember even though I think I've tried it once

>He said white looking brown girls not black animals.
Fixed it for you.

Also, there is a market for a Sim competitor that isn't a broken, buggy mess with poor optimization. Take what the Sims does well and improve what they don't do so well. People would pay out the ass for a Total War game with good AI, meaningful diplomacy and with load times you can calculate in seconds and not years of your life.

The Sims 1 has the best aesthetic and music while capturing the era it was in perfectly. It's my favorite to play.

4 also captured the era it's in perfectly. It's complete trash.

...

I like that game most too, it feels like it has the most features out of Sims games but not as polished as others

I think that's what they were aiming for with the Stories spin-offs and Medieval, shame they didn't take off.

It's not that bad it just started with almost nothing while Sims 3 has shit ton of content.

Nowadays Sims 4 is ok, the best thing is how you can make some actions at the same time like talking in groups, drinking and watching tv, shit like that. Once you try it out going back to previous games feels weird.

My main issue with Sims 4 is that "open world" system was fucking broken and had all kind of bugs EA knew were there and they wouldn't even bother. Shit like working as detective and being impossible to go up in your job because you had to wait for someone to go someplace and it would never happen.

Sims 4 goes back to lots so it's a lot less buggy, the art style is prettier and not everyone has potato faces. The only issue is that is has a lot less content but I guess it will just be a matter of time.

Of course ALWAYS pirate that shit, the game is full and easy to download in SKYDROW. Don't bother buying that shit because you need shit ton of DLC to make the game decent (and also mods like Whicked Whims if you want the kinky stuff).

My main issue with Sims 3*

good point, might as well stick with "lost in space sims"

Does anyone have a guide for modding sims 3? I literally have no idea and have never played a sims game.

thanks, that correction made more sense
really oughta try, can remember if I played 4 yet,
but I can remember the messy buggy open world of 3 indeed, if 4 has less bugs and is more polished, thats better even with less content

The only 'mandatory' mod is Nraas' Overwatch and maybe Story Progression, all other mods from him are good as well but not strictly necessary. Modding in The Sims is not as bad as in Bethesda games for instance where everything conflicts with everything, compatibility is guaranteed unless you're using huge script mods and even then it'll rarely cause a game crashing glitch.

Not that im defending Sims 4 but this wasnt a bad choice from performance point of view though they should've tried to go for a balance like say you could visit every lot on your 3-5lot neighborhood area without loading screen but going to whole new one would net a loading screen.

I still cant get 3 to work reliably for a long time in the same save as in multiple generations no matter how much i fiddle with Nraas and such unless i go for an almost empty small world but even those start experiencing major performance issues after a generation or 2 no matter how much i try to avoid using CaS and keep my sims inventories empty etc.

Nraas' Anti-Magic Scroll mod is also useful and so is the Build/Buy Restriction Choker. They're not mandatory like Overwatch is but it definitely improves the gameplay.

Fantasy Life is quite comfy. Also I guess Persona 3-5 could be considered life simulators but they're pretty linear.

thank you both

...

i've just reinstalled sims 2 with all the expansions from igg-games
for the most part it works, but there's missing textures and the models on some people/clothes/animals are fucked. thumbnails for sim faces are also missing/wrong
anyone got a clue how to fix it without reinstalling the entire thing?

also, not sure if this is a bug or not, but if my sim is hungry and sleepy at the same time, he goes to sleep, wakes up because he's hungry and goes to sleep again, looping infinitely until i tell him to go eat

Just play 1 or 3 instead.

but 3 is garbage

I just checked GGN and there's a long ass post by someone on how to install the game properly on modern machines. Thing is the copy there is old school though.

so the sims 4,
do you guys have any release to recommend?
how hard is to to crack and dlc?

also, definitely haven't played this one yet,
went to search videos for reference and found an overwhelming amount of girly and brazillians playing this, wth?

you mean like VIDEO GAMES

There's nothing wrong with Sims 3.

No. Still less content than 3 even after all these years.

actually found this bretty good review

Use the Mr DJ version, there's nothing missing on it.

Performance is what is wrong with sims 3. Still my go to sims game though.

I understand cutting the open-world but you'd think they'd at least let you visit adjacent lots.

design decisions, but think back on how it was on the first two games
but apartments concept of 3 was pretty neat indeed
thing is, most of their consumers are casual gamers, girls, and people who not likely have a beefy gaming pc

Dudes who play Sims play it for social experiments and porn. Girls who play it play it like how devs intend it to be played: digital dollhouse.

I installed that shit on my SSD and it barely did anything to the load times. That game is supremely fucked.

It's designed for laptops.

Just think, if they had put time into refactoring their code and fixing bugs, they could have skipped ts4 and ts3 would have both out-performed 4 and had more content without bloated loading times and frequent crashing.

Back in my day, videogames could be purchased physically at local retailers.

It reduced the amount of neat building exploits. Just having a floor limit is enough to piss me off.

The problem with The Sims is the difficulty and challenge in the game having gone downhill in favour of complete player control.
TS4 tries to address this by "gameyfing" a lot of things and it works to a degree but it's not really that good.

TS1 had expensive things and especially bills, plus you had to work every day and missing work twice would fire you.
TS2 was similar but with vacation days, more money and ways to reduce expenses.
TS3 was a complete pushover with money everyfucking where, almost no need for it, and almost no negative consequences for anything.
TS4 at least tries to make you work for those positive emotions and gives you goals for your skills and aspirations to work towards, but it's not that hard anyway once you figure the game out and it ends up limiting how you play too.

Then there are a lot of other issues related to the simulation itself. If you have 2 Sims rising to the top of their career, at least in TS3 one of them will be considered the boss of the other. But if you take over someone else's job, they don't seem to mind one bit! In fact, they can't do anything about it since competition quite simply doesn't exist.
Even for book writers or if you try to sell whatever you produce, nobody else competes with you.

This gets even worse when you notice that "evil" Sims (non-Nice for TS1 and TS2, Evil for TS3) don't acually do anything Evil on their own (nor can they do anything particularly Evil) or that once you incorporate the supernatural creatures, they don't do much other than walking around like it's Halloween 24/7.

In TS1\2, Sims with oposing interests would end upgetting severly upset talking with each other but in TS3, Sims will often get along just fine. Seeing 2 Sims fight or disagree or just not liking each other is quite a rare sight.
Forget having Sims that disagree enough they'll never get along, trying to establish their own cliques and keeping undesirables out, forget about Evil Sims trying to garner influence over other Sims to make them hate one target. Forget about Sims befriending their Boss and Coworkers for the explicit purpose of being promoted, putting up with people they dislike for that goal and then telling them to fuck off. Forget about vampires competing for livestock or Werewolves competing for area.
All the social interaction would need to be redone with this aspect in mind: "when people simply don't get along" and the gameplay would have to reflect this, giving you logical reasons why they are not getting along besides trait incompatibility.

On the other hand, I think the game would be better if jobs weren't static rabbit hole things. If there were actual companies\farms\factories started by other Sims you could join and their future depended on how good the workers were, as well as allowing for more than one type of company to compete with each other, it would help a lot.
For instance you could start the game in a town with 2 different Newspaper Companies and join either one. Your job involves writing about stories that happen around town and the better the stories\interviews\photos you produce, the better the quality of the newspaper, something that other people consume (if they like it enough)
Your job wouldn't just be about filling a bar up, you'd actually be producing something that other Sims can use, you're in direct competition with another company that's producing their own newspapers, you could also use this to slander people or bring focus towards a building\event of your choice and your job would be far less static. Perhaps the first few levels are about maintaining equipment in the company or accompanying experienced journalists, while the later levels involve you picking from a bunch of articles wrote by your peers and choose what to publish.

The same mindset applied to every other corporation would make for a far more live and interesting world, even if you're not taking part directly with this. Buying grocery or furniture for your house? The companies that produce\import those are gonna be affected and affect you in return. Trying to sell your vegetables or need a lawyer? There are companies that can help you with that. Want to modernize your business? Make a partnership with a lab!

Get sims 3 so you can get kinkyworld and play one of the better porn mods for a game. >>>/hgg/95889

LGR is a real human bean.

...

Ah user, i will be honest with you, he's a cuck. Last sims 4 expansion he didn't even say that EA are greedy jews. And that all stuff from kids stuff pack are available already free on the internet. With much more variety.

yeah I saw that one too,

its pretty obvious his opinion is meh and that he still prefers 3
but he tries not to be too critic so EA keeps sending free copies for him to review

I found embed related out of luck, wouldn't be surprised if most girls also play it for the porn
you'd be surprised how many want to be sloots but haven't got the courage

That cover is uber-pozzed.

Madness, how dare you speak this blasphemy?

What was his vision?

That's a man, baby.

The sims have always had tons of propaganda in them, at least since sims 2. There was that "romeo and Juliet" scenario, where of course Romeo is a nigger and Juliet is a white girl. Also, instead of two families of equal standing, you have the rich snooty sasshole white people, and the cool, hip and poor blacks. Then there was that other family that had the two red head daughters, both dating blacks. Then in the desert neighborhood, there's that story of the wife that left her military husband and kids for an alien. Of course, the dad is played off as a selfish.

This hardly qualifies as "nigger", he's supposed to be mediterranean.

Eric's not black

That's a different blonde actually, military guy's wife was killed by that old lady

At least do your homework before going full Holla Forums

And then you enter the hidden hobo mode where you must fight tooth and nail against upper-class gutterpunks who are "protesting the treatment of the homeless" while trying to shank you and steal what little food you have despite having a home, plenty of food and a warm bed to go back to if they'd just take a shower.

Actually for TS3, living as a hobo is far easier than having a job or a house.
You can find a lot of valuable crap in the trash, fish and gather lants around, even cook in public park grills.
There's a few portable beds and even tents if you don't want to constantly sleep in benches and there's also schmoozing with other people and sleeping in their houses or eating as much as you want in every party you are invited to.

You can even make your original property into a vault or a hobo hideout where you keep nothing but a very large collection of every crap you collect, including the few machines that let you multiply it's value a lot.
You can end up having ridiculous amounts of cash and free time without working a single day.

There's no way Romeo is Mediterranean. He may not be black, but he is some kind of mystery meat. I'd have to load up the game again to see exactly which boyfriend was the black one, it's been ages since I made the husband screw the maid and fix the relationship with his wife.

I had no idea about the military guy's wife thing, I could have sworn I saw a background screenshot of the wife leaving the family. I still hate the alien though.

I'm going off memories of this stuff pissing me off when I was in high school here. I still thought jews were the coolest back then.

shhh, they are not supposed to be smart, they are only to blatant shitpost biggotries

...

Nope, no thanks.

I totally agree with the first part. The most interesting aspect about humans is how they interact with each other, both good and bad. In TS social interaction becomes less of a simulation of human interfacing and just deciding who you want to be friends or enemies with. Sometimes it's more difficult to be friendly with some Sims but if you're willing to just grind it out any Sim can basically become best friends with anyone. It gives players a lot of room for expression and Roleplay but it's not really a simulation at that point.

However, I don't really agree on trying to simulate things more complex than just life on the individual or communal level. That's already complex enough and TS barely gets an approximation of it, starting to incorporate economic simulations would steer the game away from a simulation of people on the individual/familial level and more of a 'everything simulator'. TS should simulate the relationships that form in careers and occupations but starting to simulate production of goods that don't actively require face-to-face interface between people would take the focus off what's important, the simulation of relationships between people. Mixing focuses will just wind up with either a really shallow economic simulation with the simulation of people suffering imho.

Sad!

The Dark Souls of the Sims games

Nice try, Mark

Sims 3 was annoying until the Loner trait was introduced. Many of the xpacs only added into the shit dumpster by bloating the game in various ways EA obvs would not waste time fixing (ie Pets pathing issues)

Sims 4 is a pile of sludgey wet dumpster fire ashes.

...

the jews, am I right fellow white brother?
how mentally fragile do you have to be?

yea, now it works
now someone tell me, what the fuck am i doing wrong with my business
i tried selling shit i can buy directly, 3 employees (1 to restock, one to sell, one at cashier). products weren't making enough money and weren't able to pay for employee wages
i tried making one of my employees cook sandwitches and sell those, but then i run out of grocieries too fast and the grocieries alone cost more than my employee wages

All european "magic" has jewish roots. Playing as a mage in any "fantasy" game is literally playing as a jew. All fucking real alchemists were lying jews (who the fuck would promise to turn anything into gold except jews?). Nips love jewish magic because they had similar magical symbols in their religion (well, i guess devil leaves similar symbols in many cultures as a mark of his activity). You can thank Poland for allowing kikes to develop their magical circles and spread this disease around europe. All magic in any form is devolved from satanism. Not like catholic and orthodox heretics are any different from magicians and wizards though. All the same idolatrous filth.

Loner trait was in the base game, it was just really bad originally because you got a huge penalty on humor for being in community lots.

Thanks for the laugh.

back to your containment

Actually the jews stole magic from ancient egyptians and literally just name-swapped everything. The (Hermetic) Qabalah became the Kabalah. All of the names and terms on the tree of life did not use jewish names and letters. Then the (((church))) supressed any resurgence of magic in europe throughout the middle ages.

Wait. You can embed Vimeo now?
What else can be embedded?

Fuck just simulating life.
You can actually make pretty decent game by adding more options to you. Open world being first step and later not limiting player to a game with choices but rather just allow him to do as much as normal person could do in game's world.
Unfortunately game devs get more lazy. They are making open world games that are in no way sandboxes.

At least there is Elona.

i just wish sims 2 had a kinky mod tbh

...

BEGONE ICONOCLAST
t. orthodox

Is ghost master a "life simulator"?

I was half-joking. Of course I wouldn't literally let one bad screenshot prevent me from playing a game. But I guess your desperation to be the bigger man on the internet has stunted your common sense.

...

Shill harder, moishe.

I see your point and I guess I wasn't fully considering that that's indeed the focus of the game, inter-relationships between people.

However I don't think there's any problem with a shallow economic simulation if it's shallow by design. The idea is never to make the game about it but rather use it as context for everything else. It's something that should happen behind the scenes and change the stage in subtle ways so the player is never in full control of the world, just their own lives and how they react to it.

For instance, running a farm should be as simple as picking what you want to plant\raise and get to it. But the underlying market means that if you choose the same things as your neighbor, you're gonna be\have competition, setting the stage for justified rivalry and testing the morals of you both.
Or if the Science-related jobs are allowed to affect the world, you can have scientists creating their own hybrid corn or organ farming and Sims that opose that kind of stuff, etc.

The economic simulation is there but it's never something you have to even think about seriously (unless you're the CEO of a company and are pondering what to invest next), rather it's something that will make you go "Oh, this changed, well let's see what we have today?"

To not create infinite cancer.

And you call others not smart?

Only Will himself would be able to tell us that, but one can look at the expansions being released, consider the proximity with Spore and infer a few things.

For one, you'll notice that TS3 base game has both positive and negative traits. You could always try to make a well-rounded character with 3 upsides and 2 downsides, not unlike the previous games where you couldn't just max his personality. Bad parenting would leave traits at the mercy of RNG which meant you could end up with shitty kids too.
On top of this, a lot of traits changed how you played the game substancially as well.

Come future expansions and you see mostly only positive traits added into the game, to the point that, if you want to make a character to have some flaws, it's harder the more expansions you have. This really had no reason to happen except pandering to the players that want some simplified machinima tool with some gameplay. Late Night could have added a Drunk trait (or the equivalent for Juice) for Sims to be addicted to getting hammered, for instance.

Will Wright stuck with the game for the base game and the 2 expansions, moving on afterwards. These where World Adventures and Ambitions, with Ambitions still being a decent one that introduced jobs you did not used a rabbithole for while World Adventures was likely what made him decide to quit after Ambitions. What was supposed to be an expansion about vacations turned out into a prototype for Sims Medieval (same quest\mission system with visa being the standin for levels) and considering how Spore was being worked on at the same time with the problems we all know, he likely decided to quit because he just couldnt say no but also couldn't bear to see how his IP was being mis-handled.

Every single expansion after that centered around adding more content, but not fundamentally change the game or how Sims interact with each other. You have the entire Supernatural expansion that, when you look at it, it gives you different costumes and Mean interactions, it doesn't actually change how Sims socialize and deal with one another.
Same thing goes for pretty much everything else too.

Sims 4 hits the stores and what do we get? An attempt at distancing themselves from the train wreck that TS3 became by trying to make it more of a game, which was an honest decent effort but clearly made by people that don't much care about simulations. Playing TS4 isn't so much about simulating a family dealing with the neighbors and getting on with life as it's instead some MMORPG where you grind for emotions, emotion-boosting apparatus and skills for your jobs.
It's more of a game than TS3 was, it's just not the right game.

Had Will Wrigth worked on it, he'd likely still use the Emotions, but your job wouldn't be tied to a particular emotion or have Tasks outside of it, nor would you have 3 different ways to take a shower that all look the same but produce different emotions, instead your Sims personality would dictate what emotion he gets when taking a bath and different Sims would need different things to feel the same way.

Had Will Wright made TS4 and, instead of stacking Candles of Love for a romantic Mood in the living room in order to increase your odds of woohoo with that girl, you'd instead need to find out what your Sims and that girl find romantic based on their personality.
Will wouldn't just make a game you can play, he'd make an actual simulation you must understand and play with, not despite it.

Making a comical exaggeration means I was trying to troll people? You're really reaching now. I just assumed people wouldn't be autistic enough to take every comment on the internet literally, but evidently I was wrong.

Nice wall of text but the last Sims game that Will Wright worked on was the Sims 2.