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so apparently sims 5 is more or less cancelled and they're just going to keep updating sims 4 forever. lol, lmao even.
@beardalaxy It's such a shame to see how much the series has fallen. I haven't even played the fourth installment, but that game just felt like a downgrade just by looking at it. Why would anyone think that stripping the defining feature of the previous game (open neighborhood with no loading screens) would be a good idea? And I just didn't like how they outright refuse to add basic features like drivable vehicles, and that's all because the game literally reuses an engine that was intended for some unreleased MMO spinoff.
And it's not just a shame for The Sims series but Maxis Sim games as a whole. I used to be obsessed with those games, but they all died. Maxis stopped making Sim <insert subject here> games after The Sims became extremely popular. EA killed SimCity's one chance at a revival after their missteps with SimCity Societies by adding always-online DRM, and Spore wasn't big enough to justify continuing.
I would love to make simulation games as spiritual successors. One idea I have is to write a spiritual successor to the cancelled SimsVille, but the inner workings of those games (pathfinding, AI, etc.) are way too complex for me to wrap my head around.
@beardalaxy Yeah, I remember the game being extremely buggy, but I suspect that it had more to deal with the game running on the Mono framework (an open-source implementation of the .NET VM). I could be wrong though. But I do know that The Sims 4 starting out as some spin-off game is a major reason why people felt like it was such a downgrade. Maybe dividing towns into sections was a better idea, but I think it could've been done better instead of having the map be a 2D image. It destroys any potential for user created towns.
@xianc78 sims 3 is actually a horribly coded game. I'm willing to bet they did away with the open world just because it had way too much of a performance impact and made things break often. After a while playing on a save file, especially with lots of expansions, the game can take 5+ minutes to load even on newer hardware and you need mods just to clean things up. I'm not surprised they shifted away from open world.
Personally, I do like sims 4 more. I think it actually works better just fundamentally. But I do miss the personality and the customizability of sims 3.