Very surprising. The game looked like it had a lot of potential and could’ve been the most popular sims alternative, but it’s suddenly been cancelled.
It’s a shame. But based on what I saw about it, it looked like maybe they had some delusions about using LLMs for character dialogue, which seems like an insanely complex feature to build into an already complex game.
Why? It can’t be much more than using one of those chatbot girlfriends. I know there could be delays as it takes time to generate but it could have a local version that just is a stripped down version that just processes dialogue. Probably requires a beefy GPU though.
You’d need the conversations to be highly constrained in order to not break the game. Currently there are too many ways of “jailbreaking” LLMs. It was too much of a scope creep for a game which was already biting off a lot more than most studios could chew.
constrained in order to not break the game.
While that’s true, I suspect that whoever gets there first will get a free pass in the court of public opinion, so long as it’s a single player game.
“Look how awful my Sims are” is already a recurring gag hobby, anyway.
I wouldn’t give it a free pass if it ruined the gameplay and would have been easier for them not to implement.
There already are a small number of games utilizing LLMs. Yes it‘s immersion breaking from time to time but the worst part is the credit system many of them use to pay for the API. If you go past your conversation limit, you‘ve got to pay extra.
That sounds awful
Oof. Wasn’t this the one that was going to have in-depth object customization? I was looking forward to it from a dollhouse-building perspective. Even if it wasn’t great, having some competition might convince EA to allocate more dev resources to the Sims, which has ruthlessly embraced the “minimum viable product” philosophy for a long time.
i dont know if its MVP or if they are just taking as low a risk as possible on their investments. they have no financial incentive to try anything new
Well HECK! I have been advertising this game to every gamer I know, finally a Sims game that’s not EA… :( I was very hopeful when they delayed without a new date, just take your time and get it right. Dang, I was really looking forward to this
Paradox is just as bad as EA with DLC. Look at Stellaris, or Victoria, or cities skylines, or surviving mars
They sell you a product at a fair price without putting it behind a loot box, unless I missed something. I don’t think that makes Paradox “just as bad” because they make a lot of DLC that you could choose to not purchase.
Realistically, at least for Stellaris, Paradox updates the game for free for everyone that breaks everyone’s in-progress games and breaks key features of the game by fundamentally changing how the mechanics work. Then they sell the DLC that is absolutely necessary to fix whatever they broke for people who don’t own the DLC.
Paradox creates the problem and then sells the solution.
I haven’t played that one, so that’s news to me, as I didn’t experience that in Cities: Skylines or Surviving Mars.
Ck3 with the plague mechanics does this. The base game has some default settings that absolutely wrecks everything once plagues get going and only having the DLC can change those settings.
I only played Stellaris off and on, but I went years without buying an expansion and always thought the new systems were complete and better than what they replaced when I returned. Breaking current saves is frustrating, so I guess you would need to delay an update if you had one you planned on returning to.
If you didn’t know, you can roll back to older versions of steam games with some work. A few games have a built-in system, but most of the tile you have to manually replace files after redownloading the old versions.
They sell you 15 minor features for $10 each and then every tutorial/gameplay video you watch has 5-10 features you’ve never seen before. It fills you with fomo and when you do cave you end up spending $80 to make a $40 game slightly more interesting. It’s predatory as fuck, paradox can go fuck themselves.
Sorry, I really hate paradox.
What am I fearing that I’m missing out on when there are 62 DLCs for Cities: Skylines but I only wanted 3 of them? I wanted Green Cities, After Dark, and Mass Transit, but I really couldn’t care less about Airports. Why does this FOMO apply only to DLC and not the entire library of video games out there that you can opt to buy or not? I really don’t understand it. If you buy one Paradox game, do you have to buy every Paradox game or else miss out on having the entire library? I hope that this doesn’t come off as me being hostile. I just genuinely don’t understand it. Latching on to gambling addiction in EA’s Ultimate Team DLC is a concept that I can easily understand how it’s predatory. Making a bunch of other products that you may not want to buy does not strike me as predatory but as casting a wide net to make the right content for the right customer.
Just because you’re able to spend $60 on 3 DLCs instead of whatever the 62 DLCs cost, doesn’t mean those DLC are worth what you’re spending. I can buy a single banana instead of the full bunch if I want but if they cost $10 each I’m not getting a good deal.
The fomo is because I’ve already invested in the base game. I can ignore content about games I haven’t bought yet but if I want to watch tutorial videos that have every DLC I have to filter out all the content I haven’t paid for. I can’t engage with the community on equal footing unless I spent 4-5x the price of the base game on overpriced content. That is not an enjoyable experience and has left me with a bad taste in my mouth when it comes to Paradox games. I don’t want to navigate the cesspool that is their monetization strategy so I simply don’t buy their games (I pirate them :^) ).
Well, first I’d say that those three DLCs cost a maximum of $45 and not $60, if they were MSRP, with current MSRP being a little less than that, but I don’t know if they ever got a price cut. Second, Steam sales happen like clockwork, for DLC as well, and there’s no way I spent $45. Third, the right feature to the right person might be worth that price, and that’s the benefit of their model. Over the course of so many years, they can keep working on the game and add niche features, some of which might be up your alley, rather than putting out a base game that lacks features important to you and never expanding the game.
I’m not sure why the tutorials for features you don’t have are a problem, because then you wouldn’t be doing the things they’re doing anyway, but I’m sorry that ruined the experience for you. It’s really hard for me to call that a cesspool though. They just put out a lot of product where you can decide what’s important to you, and I’d say that’s exactly what it ought to be.
$60 CAD and sales do not justify the base price. Nothing you’ve said has remotely convinced me any of their DLC is worth what they’re charging.
You’re not going to convince me this shit isn’t predatory and vice versa. Later.
They added an option to subscribe instead. Pay a monthly fee, get access to any and all dlc.
I dont love their monetization model either but I understand the need for financial return on the investment of continued development.
Plenty of developers continue to develop content for years after release without selling overpriced DLC. Y’all are coping.
TBF, when it comes to The Sims specifically, that’s the same as EA’s model: a bunch of DLC/expansions you don’t have to buy.
Until the next one is an always online live service that means it has an expiration date built into it by design, and that’s not even conjecture; we already know this.
Cities Skylines 2 launch is worse than any EA launch I can remember. Even that sense of accomplishment horseshite. They released a paid DLC 5 months after launch while not dealing with core functionality bugs.
I’m going to rate “exploits addiction to make billions off of legalized gambling for children” as worse than putting out a sub par, broken sequel with DLC 5 months after release.
Using the floor as a bar.
In a hilariously circular way, EA has this beat still.
The Simcity 2013 launch was so terrible it killed Simcity and the studio Maxis, basically paving the way for City Skylines to take over the genre 2 years later.
It was online only, to the point where if you disconnected from the Internet you were booted out of the game. It also did most game rendering server side to force multiplayer/anti piracy/EA Origin store, and they only had enough infastructure for 1/10th of their player base on launch. That 10% isn’t exaggeration, either. They underestimated server load by 90%.
It was also a severely buggy, local resource hog somehow, even with being mostly remotely rendered. Since only a tiny fraction of the servers needed for the game were online, the game just chocked itself to death.
It took months to get it to a “working” state, at which point people had discovered all the insane and dumb behavior by ingame actors like citizens just picking a random house to go to end of day/etc. The tiny city limit size caused by being always online was also a very sore point for players, as you could barely build anything in a city building game. You could finish buillding your “city” in just a few hours, at which point you had to buy another “zone” that was separate from your current one. They didmt seamlessly connect like old SimCity or city skylines, you actually entered another tiny city slice to build on. It was terrible, and the size limit was clearly one of the measures to reduce server costs, as each zone looked like it was a new small server instance.
By the time they actually resolved the server issues, the game was dead, ending a 20+ year legacy in gaming for the brand and the studio. EA hasent made a simcity game in 11 years because of its failure. It was a shitshow and a half.
Yeah, but having the games in competition would force then to try to win players to their side over the alternative, for both of the games. It would have been nice to have an option when playing this genre.
Yeah. Pdx went the same shit route as EA by now, even have subscriptions too. Doesn’t matter if I have to through hundreds of bucks at EA or Pdx for a single game. It’s both the same shitty principle.
All my homies hate paradox.
Sad. In a way, it is amazing that The Sims 3 is 15 years old now and still, no game is able to match it.
There’s some ageless classics. HoMM3 came out 25 years ago and is still pretty much the top of its genre. Freespace2 more or less shut down the spacesim genre 25 years ago, as well…
Well, this is fucking depressing…
No surprise. I was really shocked when I saw the videos they released a while ago. Game ran like shit and looked even worse.
well we still have paralives right as an upcoming"sims killer"?
im interested in it but i don’t know if it will kill the sims
Honestly that’s for the best, the game looked awful all around.
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Do by chance mean Stardock not Paradox? I was unable to google anything about Paradox and the Star Control IP but lots about Stardock came up. But if it was them could you pass me some links I was unable to find anything.
Do you mean Stardock?
Whoops you’re right!
Haha no worries. Did you see the Kickstarter for the sequel to Star Control 2?
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pistolshrimp/free-stars-children-of-infinity
Hell to the yeah! Put in my pledge and tried to spread the word as far as I could too.
((Happy Camper))
I get those two confused all the time too
Before you go spouting off the mountaintop, might want to make sure you know what you’re talking about. It’s clear that you have no clue.
Probably because it would be the death of Sims is why it was canceled this way.
What in the actual fuck are you on about?
Wow people here don’t comprehend the third order calculation
Ea regularly buys out or pays off anyone who makes sim competitors.
Look it up.
In order to buy out Paradox, EA would have to make an offer for their entire existing share float, which would then have to be accepted by the shareholders. This means that they would almost certainly sell their stock at over market value (because why would they accept less?).
From their point of view, this would be a good thing. So why then would the shareholders allow this project to be cancelled if it was about to net them a huge payout, according to your theory?
Holy fuck I think the bots here cant fuckin read
