The Sims 3: Generations

Indeed. Sims 2: University was awesome.

edited 5th Mar '11 8:47:55 PM by HopelessSituationWarrior

"Weird doors open. People fall into things."

Only problem was the same problem in The Sims 2 altogether : no one else aged.

Now that people age in The Sims 3 away from your household, The Sims 3: University Life would be perfect.

Jonah Falcon

I actually came to this thread for the sole purpose of posting this, only to find I've been beaten to the punch.

That was pretty much the only expansion pack the series ever had that I felt added something really important and great to the mechanics. Sure, apartments and businesses are cool, but the College mechanic really added new levels to how you treat your Sims (and, plus, easy access to lots of NP Cs).

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

I wish that Maxis would finally add another expansion for Spore.

Anyone who assigns themselves loads of character tropes is someone to be worried about.

Don't get your hopes up. For any non-Sims game, the trend is to release only one expansion pack a game and forget about it, as SimCity 4 and SimCity Societies have demonstrated.

edited 6th Mar '11 8:13:10 AM by MalagasyParrot

Maxis don't even develop The Sims as of the third game.

Which raises the suspicion that Maxis may no longer be functioning as a proper developer, especially after Will Wright's departure. Thus EA takes full control of the Sims franchise (handing development of Sims 3 to another studio) and neglects every other Maxis franchise.

edited 6th Mar '11 8:29:19 AM by MalagasyParrot

Sim City 4 and Sim City Societies bombed badly. Plus, there was nothing really you could ADD to Sim City 4, really.

Jonah Falcon

I disagree - well, for Sim City 4, anyway, you had the Rush hour stuff, and theres a nifty transportation mod that adds a lot more options to figuring out solutions to traffic problems. I'm not sure I could play it without Rush Hour attached.

Societies? Yeah, hyped up and not particularly deep to play. Shoot, Farmville and its derivatives are almost as complex as Societies.

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

What I meant is that what could you possibly add to a Sim City 5 that Sim City 4 + Rush Hour didn't already give?

Jonah Falcon

You don't have to do anything new. You can just do what you've already done and do it better.

edited 6th Mar '11 10:03:26 AM by SuperDimensionman

How?

Jonah Falcon

Sim City 4 isn't the flawless, perfect expression of everything a Sim City game should be. By definition, there's room for improvement.

You guys realize Maxis is making Darkspore, right? Why would you think they aren't developing anything?

Needs a new signature.

<Looks up Darkspore>

Interesting.

I need something to fill the Spore void in my life, given that due to bullshit patching issues I am unable to play the game anymore.

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

I like SimCity 4, but the game is inherently complicated to the point it left out more casual players who enjoyed building multiple metropolises in short time in 2000 and 3000.

While Rush Hour alleviated several transportation-related problems, it still doesn't resolve the problem of scale. Building a metropolitan area over multiple regional parcels takes far more time than your average player would like to spend, as a result SimCity 4 ended up being something of a niche hobbyist game in which hardcore players would build up entire regions and show off their creations in forums, kinda like those model train sets that grown men would build for hours on end.

And Darkspore is coming out in less than 3 weeks!? How the hell did that news elude me!? I'll keep an eye on this.

We're really derailed the thread, didn't we? Time to get back to topic.

edited 6th Mar '11 8:04:29 PM by MalagasyParrot

Please don't bring up Societies. I have never cried more for wasted potential than that.

I think EA has essentially backburnered the franchise. Maxis as a company essentially doesn't exist anymore, and they laid a lot of people off last year.

Sim City Societies with a different game compared with the reduction of the "strict urban planner's role", and more on "social engineering" Sim City before the main focus of the title. Mill Entertainment has reduced inclined Sim City Societies after the game before the complexity of the series have been too complex by the Will Wright's description. Reduce the complexity by eliminating the need to lay pipelines and power grids. The ability of the Fund, individual buildings, building evolution, nor partition of the game features. Previous Sim City games Advisory System was replaced with a city status, instead of by the citizenship behavior, said the players should each have a building of civil behavior. In addition, the introduction of a reward system, allowing the player access to new buildings, when they reach a certain goal of other features.

Jonah Falcon

As unstable as it is  ^*

, Societies isn't really a bad game in itself; the concept is interesting, and you have full control of what you want to build and how you want the city to look by setting up the right combination of buildings. Long time fans were simply pissed that the game was stamped with the SimCity brand name, because Societies was so disjointed from its predecessors but was promoted as an equivalent to the Maxis SimCity games anyway.

edited 6th Mar '11 8:22:25 PM by MalagasyParrot

It's official.

Jonah Falcon

Just checked the list of features on the Sims wiki. Extremely disappointing to me to see just how superfluous this whole expansion is. I don't even want to call this an expansion pack because this doesn't seem to expand the game in any significant way. Every previous expansion in the series added something that made it worth coming back to their respective game, with stuff like pets, college, new jobs, pets, vacations, new life states, and large changes to the social interactions. These 'features' seem to be various things left out of stuff packs and put on a disk to make a quick buck.

When they came out with stuff packs last game, I decided okay, this is new content for the game, and although it's way overpriced, I'm okay with it. When they made the Sims 2 Store and sold this stuff for ridiculous prices, I was sort of angry. When they left content out of the Sims 3 to sell it on the Sims 3 Store AT THE GAME'S LAUNCH, I was pissed. This is the last nail in the coffin.

Needs a new signature.

A whole "expansion pack" for this piece of dub? Hope the new monster is good, like a Gorgon or a Harpy or Dragons or Breach. Or they involve Homosexual Reproduction or Polygamy. or somthing.

Edit: They should add transgenders

edited 7th Apr '11 7:13:07 AM by RandomChaos

With the power of a dragon I can make up for my inability to spill.