Exactly. And simmers (on the EA forums, don’t see much elsewhere) are actually defending that. Claiming they’re more than happy with just stuff to look at. In an “everybody plays this game differently” kind of way. Oh yeah? So, how do you play this game, just sit back and look at it? How is that a game.

That’s an excellent point about the sims 3. And yes I like that the two age groups are distinct. But that’s a sims 4 problem overall- this is a game where you have children wanting to buy dishwashers and do laundry.

And I’m thirty three and I’m officially feeling old after that tweet. Pass me my pipe and slippers!

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Pretending your sims care and ignoring the emotions

“Look I know it says she is happy but she is really devastated okay!”

No one over the age of 25 has a bit of a Logan's Run feeling to it. Should we just sentence our sims to death once they age up to Adult?

Speaking of that - I can see why emotions are a thing. If you're into making videos in TS3, and you want your Sims to be expressive in a certain way, there's not a lot you can do. In TS4 it's convenient to be able to change how Sims look and act, even if it's shallow and meaningless.

I understand that the sims can be very different things for different people but I really wish the team would focus on the "simulating" and less on trying to create my digital persona and "whacky stories". Because it seems this whole time the marketing and focus for TS4 is about creating "me" expressing "myself", dammit I just want to build houses that are not out of fucking proportion, don't have sims walking through furniture and each other, and animated cars.

But it’s supposed to be a game. Not some tool to make videos.

And I love to play young attractive womanizers, stealing vagabonds, artistic genies or life saving adventurers. All very much not at all me. I don’t need to play me. I play me all day already.

It shouldn't be a tool to make videos. It's not impressive if you can make a coherent, interesting short movie in a program designed for making short movies. If it were that, all I could claim to be is good at VFX. I haven't been spending several dozen hours over the last week or so to show that I can do pretty visual effects. I've been doing that because it helps me tell a story in a game that's about telling stories, that also happens to accomodate certain ways of sharing those stories.

Ironically, that does include both lots that are well out of proportion and static, lifeless vehicles. But in a good way, not in a TS4 sort of way.

Likewise, I don't really have a self-Sim. Or I do, but that Sim doesn't represent me and things I find interesting about me. I have other Sims for that who represent certain aspects of me. They're almost always older and wealthier than me, dare I say more attractive as well, but I imagine I can relate to them in a variety of ways.
It's a happy coincidence that my 3 protagonists for the series are all different archetypes because I do relate somewhat to each of them. The assertive yuppie, the socially awkward dork and the mild-mannered idiot. I think I can be a little bit of each.

And the fun thing about The Sims is - you don't design them that way. They become characters over time. You put them into your world with no real idea of who they are, but as you play with them you kind of invent a personality for them, and most of the time those personalities are fun and interesting. I'm doing this thing now called "Jer Facts" where I write down random, idiotic observations that my mild-mannered idiot, Jeremy, supposedly makes on a day-to-day basis.

I think it's unfair to believe that many Sims players didn't play it as a "safe space" from the world. A couple weeks ago, I made a thread on this forum asking if people would like to see mental disorders in TS5. There were many replies from people who used The Sims as an escape from their own lives and didn't want it to be very realistic. Now, of course, that doesn't mean they want their Sims to be happy all the time, which is what TS4 has leaned towards since its creation. But, for many, it is an escape that helps them enjoy their lives a little bit more.

I also think it's unfair to call game development a fake job. Being a game developer is one of the most demanding, underappreciated, and under-rewarded jobs on the market. Devs pushing 100+ hour work weeks are not uncommon, and anyone who has ever tried to code something for themselves will tell you how much hair they constantly pull out from the regular frustration of the job itself.

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There is something else I would like to address to everyone that also applies to this comment. The marketing team who created this ad is not Maxis. Marketing teams are typically completely separate entities, and it's also likely that this team does adverts for other games from EA (such as Battlefield). It's very, very likely that Maxis themselves had little to no input into this ad--the budget comes from their parent company itself, EA.

Blaming Maxis for this ad makes no sense. You can certainly blame Maxis for, say, this new update, because they absolutely had a hand in it (they made it!). But marketing works very differently from what many people think. It's a totally separate company or wing, with totally different employees, with totally different bosses, with a totally different budget, with a totally different set of rules and guidelines from upper management, in, likely, a totally different building, maybe even in a totally different city (as can happen a lot). So Maxis employees didn't decide to pander to these politics while adding $600 worth of ugly clothes--they're just the ones who added the clothes. I'll bet some good money that most Maxis employees saw this ad for the first time along with us, if they've even seen it yet.

Sims 4 developers have made a few things very clear. Firstly they consider themselves as employees of EA, (maxis is just promotional guff, they don't really seem to identify with this name anymore, it's just a label on the box they use for marketing reasons). "We are all EA now" said Graham. And guaranteed this is probably true as they're eligible for EA stock shares as part of their their pay resolution. Secondly, staff at Maxis no longer crunch, they are proud of that one, which occurred after the infamous "EA spouse letter" In sims 2 development time, female developers picked up their children out of day care, and kept them under the table sleeping, whilst they worked all night. The industry was new, they didn't know better. It's not like that anymore. EA got sued.

Maxis is in with marketing, otherwise toddlers wouldn't have been promised when TS4 first came out. Anybody that was around before and right after TS4 came out knows all to well how that went down.

As for the video, I watched all of 15 seconds of it then promptly gave it a thumbs down. From where I'm sitting and my personal experience from hanging around people that play sims for many years, most simmers don't 'speak' like they are reading from a script. The only ones that do are the ones that are trying to sell something and if they make YouTube videos, simply watching body language tells a much different story from what is coming from their mouths. Fakes are easy to spot if a person knows what to look for. I have no idea if the people in that video play sims or not.

Maxis is not a victim in this situation or for all the other problems they've gotten themselves into. Things have been quieter since Michael Duke took over as lead producer, but now he even has a smear on his name due to IL being sold as a expansion when it was a game pack. Whether he had anything to do with that or not, we'll never know, but since he was the one that had the reins under Lyndsay, it doesn't matter. It was yet another bad business decision of which there are plenty. Give them a inch, they'll take 10 feet.

The Sims 3 alone launched June of 2010. So, the youngest of their target players should be at least 23 - two whole years before being too old.

Even Deligracy is 28...

Does TS3 still count?
I’m sure TS2 is dead to them, despite it pushing more units than TS4. They even removed it from Origin.

It was actually 2009 for TS3. So I guess they've only got a year left, if they even cared about TS4 in the first place.

Honestly, I want to know whose idea it was specifically to market the game towards people younger than 25. Since when is that considered old? Yes, I know which age group this game is being -attempted- to be sold to, but my point still stands.

If you're going to tell me I'm too old to be playing games, then I guess it's time to be placing the Sims team in a nursing home. While we're at it, stick all of the clueless EA execs in there.

EA thinks it can expand the market by excluding older players.
Well, how about do with Infocom did with "Leather Goddess of Phobos". They recognized there was large range of folks preferences who they could sell the game to, so they put in a switch: tame, medium and wild IIRC.

actually YA are kinda 19-30 rather; in most modern developed countries, that subclass does not really have sense in regard to the societies from e.g. XIX age or the "primitive" ones, it reflects institutional education, long period of adolescence and long period of acquiring social autonomy, IIRC that term landed in social sciences around 60' of the last century. It's maybe technicality - YA means "adult by age development but not involved in (expected) adult social rules, yet" - though that sociological classification may not be accurate anymore, seeing these 40 y old still living with mama.

Its existence in the game since S3, and in S2 in the University - with rather clear lifeline around 18-25 ys - always was rather warmly welcomed.

Where my surprise mechanics at tho?

I think I must be logged in at the wrong site, this is MTS isn't it and not the official forums?
I wasn't under the impression anyone was required to agree with my opinion.

Good god, you really are old.

I was aware that they didn't really go by Maxis anymore, I was using the term to easily distinguish Sims employees versus regular EA employees/higher ups. Even if it is a bit outdated.

I hadn't heard about the crunch time thing, so that's good to hear. EA is probably the only AAA game company that no longer crunches... Even if it's due to legal reasons. Regardless, I hope other companies follow suit.

You're asking for sincerity from... an ad. Did you expect it to be genuine and everything in it 100% true? Ads have scripts that are read from. Ads have actors who likely don't care about the product whatsoever. I just don't understand why you would expect this ad to be any more genuine than a regular ad on TV, because they're both ads made by marketing companies that have the same goal: get the viewer to buy the product. So, yes, of course the people in the ad speak like they're trying to sell something, and that's because they are.

How is Maxis at fault here? Can you give me any examples or sources?

I don't want you guys to think that I believe you have to like this ad, because I don't either. I think it's full on cringe like the rest of you. But getting so upset from an advertisement that's meant to sell a product seems like putting a lot of energy into absolutely nothing. Ads have existed since there was something to sell. It's a normal part of running a company. If this ad was a regular Sims ad that didn't involve anything political, nobody would care, even though the end goal for it would be exactly the same as the end goal for this video: Sell the product.

The ironic thing here is that the ad worked. The marketing company doesn't necessarily want us to agree with what they're saying--they want us to talk about it and expose it to more people. And it's worked beautifully, since we're talking about it right now. Talk about free press.

EA's products were better when they did extensive crunch mode. TS2 is a perfect example of how crunch can be beneficial to the product. Being proud of not working in crunch mode and then producing a subpar product is not exactly something to be proud of. All it shows is how lazy and passionless you are as a developer.

Right, it's a ad. Why are you upset over people crawling up Maxis' butt about it? It was blatantly fake, insincere and I'm tied of listening to Maxis, EA, Yibs and others yap about how EA really gives a damn when in fact, they don't. I've already posted that this whole inclusive thing is nothing more than a cash grab. That came from none other than a 13-year veteran working for EA. I'm not keeping anybody from buying anything, but I'm done with the Lies and Propaganda.

I don't understand what the problem is here. You post stuff like this, but in your previous post you tried to convince people that Maxis isn't to blame for anything. Which is it? It can't be both.

You explained it fine. I've just never been fond of the young adulthood years. Personally I care more for the teen hood. Though I had more freedom in the teenager years then I did in the twenties.

Oof...

No, not having crunch time means you care about your employees' well-being. When you crunch 100+ hours, you don't sleep enough, eat enough, see your family, your metabolism slows, your immune system stutters, your mental health and physical health decline, and you produce shit products because you're so out of sleep and stressed that you become unproductive. Some employees, get this... Don't even get overtime pay.

Do you want to work 100+ hour work weeks? 40 hours are the norm for most full time jobs, so that's more than double. You would be working over 14+ hours a day, the average full time being about 8. All of this includes the weekends, so you won't get a day off. If you want the weekends free, well, that's pushing your daily hours to about 20. That's 4 hours to drive home, sleep, eat, get dressed, kiss your children goodbye, and drive back to work.

Not working 100+ work weeks doesn't mean you're lazy or passionless. It means you're a fucking human being who needs to eat and sleep. EA products have decreased in quality over time, but not because of the lack of crunch. Both lawsuits from EA were settled by 2006, and TS3 was released in 2009. TS3, in my opinion, is the best Sims game made. Even if you disagree, it's hard to disagree that TS3 declined in quality or even ambition at all. You can blame the lack of quality in the games on many factors, including suffocating management overseeing.

Being blunt here: Super bad take, my dude... You really should delete your comment...

I already work 100+ hours a week between three jobs that I'm employed and do freelance work in. There are days where I don't sleep for 60 hours. I'm always in crunch mode because I technically don't have any days off. But I enjoy the work that I do so I don't complain.

I will not delete my comment as I stand by what I had said.