That is what I am hoping. I will wait to see final version before making any decision.

I'm gonna buy it anyway, cos I am like that. However, that doesn't mean I will play it more than twice if I don't get what I want from it.

Sims 5 will be subscription based and Paralives will take the place of Sims 4 - so I'm hopeful it will be much, much better cause I have no intention of going to the Sims again, especially if it's by subscription. I surmise a lot of people are putting a lot of faith in Paralives. I'm sure that's a lot of pressure on the team. (I figure the sims team doesn't even know what pressure is anymore. Shame.)

If Sims 5 is subscription based(that's assuming we ever get it), it's the end of the franchise. You heard it here first.

I'm not a big fan of the art style either. I don't care if the game is highly stylized, but I do care about the art style being consistent. The Paras are highly stylized, while the environments are, I wouldn't say realistc, but definitely more lifelike.

A game doesn't have to be ultra realistic to look great. Think of the new Life Is Strange. It's a very stylized game, but the character models are gorgeous and they fit really well with the environments:


Paralives is frankly an ugly game. And it has nothing to do with the fact its stylized, because like I said, stylized games can look gorgeous. Ultimately, I don't care about graphics that much. If the game is fun to play, I'll play it even if looks awful, but I hope the graphics improve because a lot of people won't play an ugly game, no matter how great its gameplay is.

I want to believe that the appearance of the Paras will be improved in the future. I don't like cartoon reliefs at all

I like the paras just as they are. Hope they don't change to much. It's not a Sims game, it's a completly other game.

As they said, if the game is good I can adapt.

Although I like the genetic variety in the facial features and that look does not seem very suitable for that.

I do want it to be like the sims, at least like the sims 2 but with many more options xD

I mean, I'm already happy with the way the Parafolk look like right now, but I'm fairly certain they will change somewhat before release (still enoooooooooough time). If you look at the various Parafolk we've seen so far, you already can see a change and development in their looks (I for one really hope that they'll fix the height slider, so that it's really a height slider instead of scaling the proportions with the height)

But there's actually some exciting news:

According to SimmerErin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okjz7JX4ZGQ and the Paralives Patreon, the next step in development are the "basics" of Simulation Mode: interactions, animations, pathfinding.
This is freaking EXCITING! Now...don't get it wrong...this is still a loooooong way off from actual gameplay, but at least it's the first couple of fundamental aspects of life mode. I honestly thought we'd still be a year or so away from that!

The fact we've been discussing Paralives for over 2 years and they STILL haven't worked on the basics of the simulation will never NOT be very concerning. I guess I'm used to indie developers actually starting with the basic systems and functionality of their game before anything else. This is a weird project since it started backwards.

I'm just waiting for it to release, so it can be relentlessly compared to The Sims (specifically TS2), hearing how everyone hates it because it's not the most perfect dollhouse simulator ever conceived, and is forgotten about in a month.

I have nothing against Paralives in particular, that's just what I'm fully expecting to happen.

That is a valid concern. But given the kind of game they're making and everything that they want to do with it, combined with the small size of their team....well....I'm fine with them taking their time. There's no rush so just do what Maxis DIDN'T do with TS3 and TS4. Make sure the game is as polished as humanly possible in all aspects before releasing it. If that means spending a good chunk of time on the customization stuff first, I'm cool with it.

I get what Naus is saying though. It's not a matter of taking time, that's just part of any good game's development cycle. But if you're working on a life simulator, what do you think should take priority before anything else?

Paralives at the end of the day is shaping itself up as a Sims competitor, or at least giving the genre another take on simulating pixel people. Regardless of it being an indie team, of if they're "listening", or doing this or that. If they don't get the basics down first then they run a good chance of things breaking or not working correctly later. Good foundation first, then make the game look pretty and customizable. Game development 101.

Oh I totally get what they're saying too. I definitely think it's weird that they're only just now getting to the gameplay elements. But I also know how demanding a game like The Sims is even for developers like Maxis, who are backed by EA. I don't know much about game design but I feel like you wouldn't go about creating a life simulator as in depth as The Sims can be, at its best, as you would with other games. Especially if you're a low(ish) budget indie team.

IDK. Am I so starved for a Sims game that feels like it's trying that I'm willing to give leeway to people who are doing all this for the first time and don't have nearly enough prior history in this genre to earn all the unwavering trust that they have from the community? Yeah, maybe. Definitely, in fact. But even when I think with my brain for a second instead of my easily swayed heart, I still feel like it's not unreasonable to assume that a big open world, highly customizable life sim made by a community funded indie team might take A LOT of time in terms of getting everything right. Just thinking from the perspective of someone who would need a lot of community support to make this happen, I think smothering people with fanservice first was a smart move. Hopefully now it's all out of their system and we can start seeing the more technical stuff soon.

I don't think that the game will be fully completed before the relase (the same situation as the Sims 4). The Paralives team did state (I don't remember where I read that) that there would be big free updates in the form of patches. However, I really hope that that won't happen and that the game will be fully completed.

The build and buy mode are as much gameplay in a Sims game as the Live Mode is. They just started with one aspect and now begin to implement the other.
Plus the very first teaser of Paralives was from a time when Alex was still the only person working on it, the team has since expanded. He probably started with what he could do by himself.

To me the only "concern" about this is that it will still take a long while before this is finished.

EA started SimCity (2013) by building a proprietry game engine, and look what happened there...

Didn't the first Sims game start out as a build/decorate type of game?

To some degree yes and it was even considered to call it Dollhouse. As I recall, Will's house burned and he made Sims in part to try to plan what they wanted to do in the build of their new house. They lost a home in a fire and Sims was created in part as a home design tool.

https://www.berkeleyside.org/2011/1...r-iosing-a-home

BTW it's not me doing all the disagrees (this time)

This is what the original "The Sims" was all about. The BBC still have Will Wright's views on their news archive, given at the launch of Sims 2. There's also a page about the guinea pig disease and the ructions that caused Simmers at the time.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3645552.stm

And I mean say what you will about the developers of Paralives, but they are nothing but transparent about what they are doing, you can follow the development month for month here:

https://www.paralives.com/development

They even state that they are in pre-Alpha and that the game has been announced a lot sooner than a bigger studio/publisher normally does so.

I like that frank openess - no matter the reasons if other than idealism, it just is refreshing from the way Electronic Art speak to the players. I understand that some decision about reciever of TS4 talk has been made somewhere at EA and the complexity of getting a lot of people on the same train of thought and the variations and routine that fosters; but no matter the age of the percieved audience I think I would have been put off by the condescension and lack of serious information from EA about TS4 even when being a teenager.

If they can make the game have AI autonomy and action queue (playing TS2 PETS PSP is what made me reason why I enjoy the sims overall, unlike the shitty The Sims Freeplay crap), then I be hooked for gameplay and my curiousity is grabbed.

I too think they're quite stalking with live mode. We can already paint a clear image of how "CAS" and BuildBuy equivalents work and the dynamic of almost endless possibilities of shaling object. We got enough of it. I do really think it's the right time to shift the focus and reveal of what actually so far they achieved with the actual simulation. At the very least show more of the animation aspect like we seen with Sebestian and a tiny glimae of the two residents buying the house. Time for Para Lives now, as we seen plently of Para Make.

Regardless of how The Sims as a series started (they are conflicting reports about this), both The Sims 2 and The Sims 3, sequels to The Sims 1, started with the simulation.

We had this same discussion last year and a year and a half later NOTHING has changed. We're still waiting to see the Paras perform a SINGLE interaction in live mode, route to an object, interact with each other. These are BASICS of a life sim game.

There was this life sim game a programmer called Mike Hibbert was making. It was still in early development before he abadoned it, but the characters could already route to objects and interact with them. There was an actual simulation to speak of, including the passage of time and the ability to change the speed of the simulation. He had started development early that same year and by the end of the year the VERY BASICS were there.


It's not that hard to understand. You can bend over backwards to try and justify the fact there's no actual game to speak of yet, but you'll end up being just like Sims 4 EA shills. I used to be really excited about this game, but after he's been getting 40K monthly and has a team of 9+ people, the fact there is still no live mode gameplay is just baffling to me.