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Author Topic: So I spoke with an employee of EA Sims 3 team today..  (Read 74976 times)
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HappyThoughts
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« Reply #105 on: June 17, 2010, 07:19:44 pm »

I just finished reading all 7 pages on this topic.  LOL at alot of the sarcastic banter, very funny stuff. I did not buy the S3 game.  I pirated S3 and all its EP's instead, and I won't complain about how hard that was considerring none of the installing instructions were up to par.  Also I do not encourage pirating, only as a means to preview playability before buying any hard copies.  I did this with expansions for S2 also, and yes I own all the S2 ep's now.  Lord knows I luv my sims2 bugs and all!

  My opinions of the S3 are as follows, the music is good if your trying to fall asleep while it loads your town.  It run's pretty smoothly without the DM.  No problems so far that I've seen, had one instance of an error during saving, so I did the 'save as option' and overwrote it and seemed to fix itself.  My version is 4.0.87.006001.  I've only ran the standard updates during the installation of both expansions, refusing the DM installer when it asks and am too terrified to try any patches or cc and/or mods.  Trying to make a slightly attractive female/male sim is unrewarding.  I've made 3 so far that I'm not overly proud of.  I spend most of my time using their create tool to change the color of EVERYTHING. Which I do like because now I can make everything pink.   
  If you are a younger teen playing this game (I am not) then I see why this game is the way it is.  Try looking at the game in that regard, I really don't think it was meant for us freethinkers.  Its directed more towards the 'flock' of bebops.  No insult meant, we were ALL bebops once, I'm not too old to remember that. Grin  The less realistic skin means less 'sexual' atmosphere yes?  Gotta keep that teen rating for easy sales and happy parents. 
  The free roaming aspect is nice, no waiting for seperate towns to load.  Changing the 3 voice pitches is a nice add, never understood why S2 never acquired any new voices during any of the ep's or stuff's.

  I was under the impression that the Ambitions expansion was going to enable cc and mod's to be easier installed tho? Is this not the case?  I have only let a day pass in the game, because I'm tiptoeing thru every interraction and allowing the game tutorial to walk me through the game play. The longest I've actually stayed seated playing is an 2hours. 

  In a nutshell I agree with alot of you, there isn't much in Sims3 that they couldn't have just added to Sims2.  Greed is no substition for Intelligence, S2 is still bringing in the bucks, and we would all happily pay for more Sims2 ep's anyday without a second thought.  So why abandon a gold mine like that?  It doesn't make sense.  I thought milking it till its dead was how the industry works?  Look at the final fantasies lately, they're the same game recycled over and over yet their making bookoo bucks.  You don't see them changing anything so drastically that you have to stop and think about buying it.  If ain't broke don't fix it EA DUH! 
  As for a Sims4, in a perfect world and a person wanting to make a fortune in money and fans, this would be the smartest move to make.  Let them try to recover their losses with 3, thats their business, but on the side they should be taking the time to review sites, fanbases, and all the stuff that DID work for Sims3+2 and show us what they 'really' meant by realistic!  I'll gladly wait for something that costs too much and is going to make me as giddy as the sims2 did back in '05.
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caffeinated.joy
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« Reply #106 on: June 17, 2010, 07:40:11 pm »

Careful about talking about your pirated games. We don't condone it here, nor do we support illegal copies of any Sims game or any copyrighted material. Now that we know your games are not legal, you will not be able to get support here if they give you problems.
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HappyThoughts
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« Reply #107 on: June 17, 2010, 09:42:46 pm »

yes I read that in the blogs caffeinated.joy, which is why I elaborated on the why I do it and don't suggest others doing it without atleast contemplating a purchase of the genuine, I will post someday well that I'll leave you speechless.  My registry keys are always in the end my purchased versions.  I just really needed to make sure I wasn't misjudging the game by popular opinion, and wow did anyone else notice that all S2 + ep's and stuff pack's in total are 14gigs, while S3 +two ep's and loft stuff's pack are 12gigs.  Sad. 
  But in another week or month, I may find something I really like about the S3.  Who knows, atleast i've another way to kill time while thinking of how my new restaurant will be themed for S2. lol. Gotta look on the brighter side of playing it, or not. rolleyes  Cheers  Coffee2
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kaoz666
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« Reply #108 on: June 17, 2010, 11:03:50 pm »

What urks me most about game developers in general, not just EA, is with the new era of internet connectivity in games, be they PC or console, and the invent of add-on content, developers have become lazy and inclined to release buggy, craptastic games with the notion of "we'll fix the glitches with a patch later on". What ever happen to releasing a complete, bug free, beta tested game that requires no patching? Don't answer that, I already know. The all mighty dollar. Back in the late 90's when the gaming industry was still growing, there wasn't the pressure of releasing big time, blockbuster games. Developers had the time to iron out the kinks in a game because there wasn't any pressure to bring it to market. But once gaming reached the level when it became a medium of entertainment on par with movies and TV, it all went to hell. In the case of The Sims series, it was a matter of progression. TS1 was a ground breaking piece of gaming history. A game about living a normal life through a virtual avatar. There were "God Games" before it like Sim City and Sim Earth long before it, but never something that emulated day to day life of a living "person". TS2 improved upon that formula tendfold, ramping things up 10 levels and adding to the experience even more. Granted, there were technical issues the game had. But those issues where fixed either by Maxis or the community itself. In this day and age, you can tailor make your TS2 experience to whatever you want using the various mods available (Some harder to find the others, but if you want it, you can find it). That's the core reason why now more then a year after TS3's release, and over 6 years after the TS2 base game was released, it still endures.

Now we take into account what TS3 brought to the table. Not much. In fact, for most long time Sims players (Those of us who have played the previous two versions, and even the console versions) it offers little if anything in the vein of innovation. As was stated by a number of people in this very thread, many of the new "game changing features" TS3 has could have easily been incorporated into TS2. By every account, and I say this being someone who actually works in the Video Gaming industry, TS3 is a failure. Once a publisher starts pitching ideas in any way for a sequel of a game, and the IP (Intellectual Property) is just barely in market for long, it either means it was a complete success, or an utter bust. TS3 was the later. And there's no denying it. EA will use their bottomless pockets and endless PR campaigns to deny that fact, but I'll use one prime example to prove my point. How many TS3 ads have you seen since Ambition's release?

Need I say more.

Rockstar Games is advertising the CRAP out of Red Dead Redemption, easily the best game they've ever released. It's even surpassing their franchise Grand Theft Auto. Hell, here in NYC, there's a billboard in Times Square advertising it. When a game is doing well, you market it until it hurts. I've flipped through channels like NatGeo and The Food Network and seen RDR commercials. Whereas for a game like TS3, I saw a few youtube adds the week the base game, World Adventures and Ambitions came out, and TV spots for the base game alone when it released. And nothing since. Why you ask? Because from a business stance, it makes no sense advertising something that ISN'T SELLING. But you'll never hear it on any of the so called "major" review sites like IGN, 1up.com or Gamespot, because they get revenue from advertising games as well as reviewing them, and there's a reason why EA is nicknamed "The Evil Empire".

It all came down to dollar signs. EA bought out Maxis. They bought the rights of The Sims franchise from Will Wright, and decided to hand it to a development house that to this day has only worked on RACING GAMES, and not even particularly good ones. End result? One of their most lucrative and storied franchises has fallen to the wayside, and most likely will never recover from it's pitfall. TS3 has the potential to still be a solid entry into the series, don't get me wrong. Problem is, by the time it is actually something a long time player of the series can stomach playing, no one will even care anymore. Add to that equation that the community continues to, and WILL continue to keep TS2 alive and well, and EA stands to take a huge shot to the chin, as if they haven't already. Biggest mistake I believe they made in all of this is entrusting The Sims IP to anyone aside from those who had a hand in it's creation. Was Maxis experts? Hell no. We all know what kind of complaints we had with how Maxis did things, or shall I say, how Maxis was made to do things because EA was in their ear. But at least Maxis had some insight on what the community at large wanted to see done. We used to pan Maxis back in the day, but in hindsight, they only did what EA told them to do. And in hindsight, they did pretty well by us in the long run. But once EA got their hands on The Sims IP all themselves, they opted to make it something other then what the community at large wanted, thinking we'd all flock to it and leave TS2 behind. And a lot of people did actually. But how many of them are now back to playing TS2 again? I'd have love to have been a fly on the wall at their annual marketing meetings. There was probably more chewing out then a Laffy Taffy convention. Hell, even at E3 this past week, the biggest gaming expo of the year, EA did more to promote EA MMA, their new Mixed Martial Arts game, Madden NFL 11, NCAA Football 11, Need For Speed: World and All Points Bulletin then they did TS3. The ship isn't just sinking, it's already capsized.
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Theraven
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« Reply #109 on: June 18, 2010, 02:10:42 am »

In addition, Sims 1 was a highly customizable game, compared to 2 and 3. I didn't play it much, and only discovered CC after sims 2 came out, which was after the sims 2 community had made great tools like SimPE and so on. But even Bodyshop was a plus, because you culd in fact customize things more or less exactly the way you wanted it. With meshing knowledge, you could get things the way you wanted it.

Now with Sims 3... granted - you do feel free at first, with all the patterns and recoloring actually inside the game. But having to re-learn everything, even re-learn new methods of recoloring... It's not very tempting, for me at least.
And strangely enough, I find myself missing Bodyshop when I play sims 3. There I could place all those tiny little details, and feel I was in total control over an outfit or a skin.

It's a bit like comparing Photoshop to Illustrator, as drawing programmes. I'm not the best with either of them, but I do feel PS gives me a lot more artistic freedom. Illustrator usually gives it all a stiff and illustrated look. Both can be nice, in their own way, but I'm more confortable with PS. Guess which of them is the ultimate pattern programme...

Honestly, I don't really miss patterns and color wheels and the like while playing my highly customized Sims 2 game. The clothes looks more real, and I get all those little details that sims 3 can't really provide. In fact, with only a default skin, default eyes and default eyebrows as the only bodyshop content, I'm perfectly happy with the way my sims look. My test sims look so cute that I can't bear to kill them off for real... Also, the clothes I've made don't disappear, like they do in Sims 3. They are in fact there (probably a bug in my game, but so far I've not figured out how to fix it). My sims can have hundreds of outfits to change between. And they actually keep them all. They don't just have three out of each outfit in their closets. They've got hundreds.

A skin made for sims 2 makes wonders out of the original skin. The result is a sim who isn't even recognizable as a sim sometimes. They look almost real. And that is easily done without even needing a custom tool (besides a drawing programme).
The problem with CC for sims3, is that no matter how good you make it, they still have the pudding faces. Nothing you can do about it... I've seen like ten sims 3 sims altogether which I thought could be classified as "pretty". So far I've seen maybe one or two toddlers who were "cute". Several of those wore a buttload of CC. Which didn't really help much... You can't make diamonds out of clay, no matter which tools you have...
When a lot of the sims 2 sims I've seen are promptly classified as "gorgeous", or even "perfect", and 90% of the toddlers gain an "awwwww", then that does say something... I've even "awwwww"-ed a few maxis only sims... Babies in sims 2 are so cute that I sometimes refuse to grow them up. You can even do more with them...

Dropping in CC in sim 2 is just a matter of a quick check if it is compatible with my EPs, while clothing or hair with custom meshes don't even need checking. It's just drop it in the Downloads folder, and try not to go too berserk...

I find myself smiling when I see sims go in and out of their cars, and if I do want to play with community lots, at least they are playable and interactive!

Animations... being an animation student, I've started to learn what is good and bad animation by now, and there are a lot of things bugging me about the animation in sims 3, compared to sims 2. When animations are a bit too out of the way in Sims 2, I just smile or even laugh. When animations go weird in S3, I just find it freaky. Maybe because most of the animation or morphing goes wrong with their faces, and it just looks strange. They look scary, and I think "I wouldn't like to meet you in an alleyway alone in the dark..."
Most of the animation is recycled from sims 2 anyway. The new animation they put in could have been made tons better.

They did manage to take away some annoyances, like the fact that my sims rarely stop up to wave their arms because they can't get past something, or the fact that you have more slots to play around with.  
Then again, they regained even more annoyances. Rabbit holes, anyone? Pudding faces? Toddlers looking like creepy midget adults with squashed faces? Babies looking like miniature squashed midget adults? Those are things that can't even be fixed. Not easily, anyway.

We thought we would gain more control with Sims 3 (ingame at least), but we really didn't. Maybe that's one of the main reasons why people end up going back to sims 2...

Money rules the world. Which isn't exactly a new thing... It's just clearer now when technology barely make it to production before it's supposed to be ready. Preferrably last month. People are screaming for new games, new toys all the time, and even if companies would want to test things properly, they wouldn't have the time to do so. The only games and new gadgets that gets some more testing than others, are the gadgets and games people haven't even heard of yet... When a "two" or "three" comes out, you can forget about testing.

Next to money, mobs rule the world.
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« Reply #110 on: June 23, 2010, 12:18:03 am »

I think that game was always doomed to flop.
It was launched when the securom scandal was at its peak and EA were badly on the nose.
That silly pre-release (pirate) and the overwhelming negative feedback it got plus the bad press their EULA and store got from the gaming community should have been enough to convince even the most mediocre executive that they had a potential lemon on their hands and to continue with it in its present form will only result in throwing good money after bad.
Allowing themselves to be convinced by Rod Humble that he was going to be the next Will Wright and lead EA to new heights of wealth and fame with that childish imitation of what once was a good game tells me that the senior executives of EA were either heavily involved in something else (probably that securom stroke of genius) or all on the booze for a few years.
So where now? EP after EP? Wash their hands of the thing and let it die a natural death? Or get a new design team in and start again?
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« Reply #111 on: June 23, 2010, 09:50:59 am »

So where now? EP after EP? Wash their hands of the thing and let it die a natural death? Or get a new design team in and start again?

unfortunately, this is looking more likely than hiring a new design team
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« Reply #112 on: July 12, 2010, 03:03:26 am »

Something to remember is that the sims 2 was created almost exclusively by EA, they had bought maxis lock stock and barrel before the sims2 was released.  The still kept the maxis logo though, google for EA buys maxis.  You will find a wiki with all the info. 

Back to the original topic, its been many months since that conversation I had and it looks like the guy I talked with was sort of on track, there is more CAS customization continually coming out.  Some of the things recently introduced have been CAW and tats and other stuff.  It is probably going to take at least another full year (Fall 2011) before we really start to see a "clean game".  What I mean by that is a game that works how its supposed to work, without a zillion bugs.  It was the same way with the sims1 and 2 .. with sims 2 it was not until around EP4 that we started to see the kinks ironing out.  I have not played in a while but might fire up a new game after the mods have been updated to work with the newest patch... just to see what sorts of game changes there have been.  Also I am quite surprised at how many replies this thread has received and that it is still a hot topic!

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MaryH
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« Reply #113 on: July 12, 2010, 04:03:40 am »

Well, it's going to take a lot longer than next year to fix all the bugs-for every patch they put out, a dozen new bugs pop up. There's a continual stream of complaints and comments on those from the official forum, plus the usual "I can't get my game to start, run or stay running" from players.
You'd think by now the bugs would be sort of dying down-instead, they're intensifying and players are really starting to get annoyed and angry at the amount of screwiness involved in even running the game.
Having to uninstall and reinstall the entire game with every EP and patch is pretty lame, if you ask me. Add the fact that the advice from EA on how to fix the patches is not even close to helpful-"list out your DxDiag, and we'll get back to you soonest." is not a good way to keep players coming back.
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« Reply #114 on: August 04, 2010, 12:16:07 am »

Something to remember is that the sims 2 was created almost exclusively by EA, they had bought maxis lock stock and barrel before the sims2 was released.  The still kept the maxis logo though, google for EA buys maxis.  You will find a wiki with all the info.  

That's weird. If it was EA all along why did they change the good things about Sims 2 like the ability to play more than one family at a time and the camera? I know they're most likely lazy but if they made 2, they already knew how to do the camera and to make it so you can easily play more than one family so it wouldn't really require any effort. maybe I'm wrong..I'm not a computer guru but these are my thoughts.
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MaryH
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« Reply #115 on: August 04, 2010, 06:46:30 am »

What happened was that EA went through some (and actually is still going through) some financial downsizing, and laid off the studio that worked on the Sims 2.
They then hired a whole new studio to develop Sims 3. Different studio, different way of looking at the Sims series. They also replaced a few corporate suits at the top to head the production-Rod Humble was put in charge of the development team-he used to work for another company that made RPG games.
Enough said. You know now what happened to the franchise.
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« Reply #116 on: August 04, 2010, 11:18:52 am »

Yeah, it got flushed right down the crapper with the rest of the steaming fecal matter, where it belongs.
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« Reply #117 on: August 29, 2010, 01:56:36 am »

Rod Humble was put in charge of the development team-he used to work for another company that made RPG games.

RPG games? That explains why the game is so restrictive. Cheesy

It would actually be really nice if they did work on those pudding faces and actually make the game less restricted, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
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« Reply #118 on: January 24, 2011, 12:28:19 pm »

Well they finally added breast sliders haha.  Thats a start!

I would say we are looking at early 2012 before we see a game that is "better" than the sims2. 
Suffice to say that the "T" for teen label is basically a death sentence for almost any PC game for the last few years.  The bulk of successful games are rated M.   Rock
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« Reply #119 on: January 29, 2011, 03:58:05 am »

Speaking total hearsay (ESL - "hearsay" first), did I imagine or is there a rumor going around about a Sims 4? Should I get my hopes up? Is this spam? Am I in the wrong thread? I haven't been around much lately. So I apologize in advance for any faux pas.
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