What are your expectations in The Sims 4? What could The Sims 4 have that the Sims 2 or Sims 3 didn't have?
Need new computer. Will be online (for DRM purposes). Will have pudding faces and the Sims will have built in bad behaviors that will drive us nuts. A friend of mine whose husband works in testing at a major game company said that the reason so many gaming companies are putting their games "online" is because something like 80% of the people who are playing PC games are doing so on pirated copies. So PC gaming is trying to find ways of preventing that because they aren't making money the way that it is now.
Not to say I advocate piracy (I don't) but the costs are getting to the point of absurd. 60.00-70.00 for the base game PLUS 20-30.00 for expansion packs... per pack? It's getting costly to play any game.
It may be expensive, but so are wages and benefits for software developers, even in the games industry. (And the games industry pays much lower than other software development companies.)
I'm all for paying for good games. Honestly. Like when I buy my Blizzard titles like StarCraft 2, I don't blink for a second. I don't even hesitate. I know I am going to get a rock solid, amazing, gaming experience. However in contrast when I buy EA titles, I always second guess. I always hesitate. I always have second thoughts and doubts. Why? Because the quality of the games have gone downhill so bad the experience is a killjoy. There are so many flaws and bugs that to some extent it kills the game. Take example the new SimCity. I was really excited. I really was. I got to play two weekend betas, and I loved some aspects of it. Other aspects it got repetitive. Then there were other smaller issues that were just...well... these seems like a really really bad idea. But those second thoughts and doubts took over to a point where I said I'm going to wait. I'm going to wait at least one day before purchasing. And guess what... those bugs/glitches that marred SimCity reared its ugly head. Turns out, the hesitation were justified. We saw what happened. One stumble and fumble over and over and over.
I forgot about the DRM! The thing that only ever affects people who actually pay for the game/any media. I'm sure EA will have all the servers ready to go and will not make such a mistake as they did with SimCity... which is still not fixed. That's cheap! A new release game here is around $100 and the EPs are $50 each.
What about Diablo? I really cannot see myself ever buying an EA game again. I bought The Sims 3 not too long ago after not playing the Sims for years. The first thing I noticed when I started the game, was all these items that I could buy. I thought I had just bought the game. I don't want to be bugged into spending more money while trying to actually play it. The game itself seems to have performance issue and I would seem to suddenly get random FPS drops. I stopped playing after a day and haven't played since. SimCity really just was the end. I enjoyed the beta, even with the occasional problem, I mean, beta is beta, right? The game was released a few days earlier in the US and the servers died instantly. I thought this would be OK seeing as the game wouldn't be released in Aus for a few more days and I probably wouldn't play it till the weekend, surely it would be fixed by then... Anyway once the game was actually stable enough to run, with many of the advertised features now disabled, I could at least play it for a while. But the game was boring, I seemed to be able to make money extremely quickly through the specializations. The only challenge were the traffic issues, which are still not fixed. Almost two months later, the game still doesn't work, in fact it is now worse than ever, it crashes on me constantly whereas it was not before. I don't think I'll be buying another EA game unless it's been out for a few years and now selling for $10.
It's OK. It's not just games where we get ripped off. It became new when someone calculated that it was cheaper to fly to the US, buy the Adobe CS and fly back, for less than it cost to buy here.
Can you blame any of us Kat? The Sims was a brilliant franchise until we all got stuck in this never ending cycle. I think we've been burned so many times that we're just completely afraid to be burned again.
Absolutely! The Sims and Sim City were really great until EA boogered them all up with stupid nickle and dimeing us transactions and all their other stupid shenanigans!
I don't blame any of us for how we feel about how things have gone downhill. I just think it's sad that it had to happen.
I don't think age has anything to do with it. It's sad because we all used to love The Sims and SimCity so much. This website started as a place for people to come and discuss (and enjoy) the Sims. And now we're not enjoying it anymore. We're disillusioned (which I guess is a form of being jaded) and not looking forward to it. I still remember the days just before TS2 came out. We were so excited for it.
Kinda makes you wonder why we still play the game. I boot the copy up about once every six months or so, and then leave cause I felt like "i've done it all.."
