Playstyles

Playstyles

What's your playstyle?

E.g., mine:
When I create (either using CAS or gathering Sims from already-existing families) families I tend to give them a goal, or a role in the neighbourhood, which is inevitably contorted and subverted by game events over time. This constitues the family's 'story'.
These roles/goals vary from family to family, but it's possible to generalise that mainly I play collections of Sims as (albeit fairly fluid and fragmented) families rather than roommates and tend to create dynasties as my long-term goals.

The game lends itself towards families and dynasties, in my experience, and this is how if find it's most fun to play it. I find it almost impossible to resist the temptation to turn a group of platonic roomies into a family of sorts by making babies, or to integrate them into other families to make babies.

But my long-termism in terms of dynasty making isn't accompanied by long-termism in terms of finances - I don't find jobs a very interesting part of the game, generally, and my Sims tend to subsist on the small pile of motherlodes accumulated during the initial building of the house. Modifications to the house are ususally the result of the expansion of the family's population, rather than the expansion of their finances, which tend to be statically comfortable.

 

I think I play pretty much the same way as you, Zooty. I probably use the money cheats less and use the jobs side of things more. I tend to have one principal dynasty in my 'hood and play the various satellite families as and when needed to bring characters up to age where needed. I also plan to add one or two new families for each generation of the main dynasty.

On a side note I have recently taken to naming my sims in simlish. I now have a Flabolteeg and an Annabou ...

 

lmao - that's fantastic.

I think I would agree with the both of you - I create my Sims to have a particular purpose within the neighbourhood (e.g. the multi fertilizing bachelor) rather than just for the sake of it.

 

I only have one neighbourhood. My overarching goal is to make the families is integrated as possible, with noone straight from CAS, and with everyone having at least four or five genrations in their family trees, and knowing most other people in the neighbourhood. I find the idea of my Sims looking at pictures painted by their great-great-great grand aunt and their toddlers sleeping in the same crib as their parents did incredibly appealing. Absolutely yay for dynasties! That's why I concentrate on one neighbourhood.

I suppose my play style has a lot to do with the fact I don't get to play it very often, so don't really have time to start huge series of projects or they'd get dislocated and go nowhere. Instead, I'm content on focusing on one big project.

Mine's more decentralised. Or rather, the centrality shifts. I concentrate on one dynasty for a while, and then get distracted by another. I try to keep my favouring of families in terms of scarce resources (e.g. marriageable bachelors) as balanced as possible.

 

I play it to a level I consider geeky, even small mindsets are considered (would my serious/shy sim approch a woman the first time he saw her? nope - he runs upstairs and plays chess alone ).
I like to play sims with a certain level of attitude, on both ends of the scale - I make jerks/doormatts stoics/impulse buyers and play them as I see people IRL - creates a sort of RP story for me to enjoy.

The point being is I spend more time micromanaging and considering every decision than power breeding/trying new things - I believe this leaves alot of playtime, as I havent even been to the other towns, have only played 3 families (properly, not jsut to assist a main fam).

Hammering skill points feels like a bad mmorpg to me - i'd rather be struggling to pay bills and keep a pregnant mom socially happy than getting 160k and to the top of the career...

 

I'm with you on that side things. The families that I have "hot-housed" thru endless skillings and socialising and aspiration fillings to get platinum in turn to get promoted ... well, they just don't seem as happy as the ones who slob about watching TV and just being content with what they've got and scrambling around when the repo man threatens to pay the bills or hope for the best and dial for a pizza instead ...

 

My playstyle.

My playstyle is this:

1. Come up with a neighborhood concept and design it on paper. Like my EQ hood. Or my FF7 Midgar town (lots of metal buildings in a desert locale). Or my town of undead where I populated it then killed everyone then made zombie characters for it (name: Raccoon City).
2. Make characters for town, planning neighborhood zones, such as the rich area, the poor side of town, the middle class burbs. Plan house designs accordingly.
3. Build houses.
4. Create a pawper lot. This small lot has no building but serves as a place to start Sims, give them cash as appropriate to where they live.
5. Make families and begin moving them into houses.
6. Play and have fun with each family, some rich, some poor. Micromanage like mad.

 

I tend to make a "theme" for each family as I create them. They have a roll in my town depending on their socio-economic class. I create some "haves" and some "have nots." With the "haves" I use money cheats and create comfortable homes. The "have nots" live in the trailer court and I do not use money cheats for them. After I create each family I usually let their wants and needs play out. A romance sim who meets someone may want to get to know them better. Knowledge Sims want to max out their skills. Family sims want to keep having babies. And so on and so forth. I love raising babies and many of my sims are family sims or romance sims who keep getting pregnant. LOL

 

See this is why I believe we get more out of the game than the casual player. Sure, the more you play the less real life activity your likely to do (which by the way is a bad thing ). But look at the extent we go to to make the game feel *right*

- If Rowan staff did what he described 5 times, making a themed town full of manually created sims and then got them to get to the third generation... I think thats a good 3 months worth - I mean creating say 15 families, playing them until each of them has a child, who then has a child - creating decent houses for each of them - never mind RPing their mindsets or romatic cross-overs...

So anyone who questions the game's lasting effect - im afraid you just don't have the geek gene that I have

 

I play so many families it's not funny...seriously! One day I'll be so into this one family, then the next I'll be on another one. I play them all, just not all at once...am I making sense? lol. Sometimes how my mood is depends on how I play. If I'm in a bad mood, I'll make my people fight...on the other hand, if I'm in a good mood, things get accomplished.

 

Hm, play style...

1. Plan neighborhood/house. If neighborhood is already planned, skip that part.
2. Spend several hours/days/a week building the house.
3. Spend several hours cursing because house doesn't want to do what I want it to do.
4. Spend several hours looking for a tutorial, then give up in frustration and tear the house down.
5. Build new house.
6. Repeat steps 2-4.
7. Create family. Move family into house after giving them enough cash so they can just afford to move in.
8. Become bored with family after a day of game play.
9. Repeat steps 1-8.

I found I'm really more interested in building the houses than playing the actual families.

 

I'm like that with fancy houses built from scratch. It seems like too much trouble to find a way to control a family in a house that looks pretty but is, in fact, all over the place. Most of the families that I play a lot have homes that have been built piecmeal as and when funds allowed.

For example the pics show Ryan inside his foundationless hovel. Then from outside we see a foundation with a bedroom and bathroom (it connects to the hovel by a flight of steps) Lastly the first stage is completed and the hovel removed ...

 

Housebuilding is one of the best aspects of the game for me, as well. My Sims experience is divided pretty much equally between building houses, HomeCrafter and BodyShop, and actually playing Sims' lives, with a slight bias away from HC and BS.

Becuase so many Sims players enjoy housebuilding as much as, if not more than, playing with the actual Sims, I think Maxis would do well to provide in their expansion packs as much additional building content (in terms of greater flexibility to allow greater creativity (curved walls, domed roofs etc)) as they do additional content for how Sims can live their lives (enabling them to go to University, have pets etc).

For me, because housebuilding and actually playing with Sims are on pretty much equal footing priority-wise, I see controlling Sims in an enormous, rambling house built with aesthetics in mind and convenience for Sims firmly out of mind as one of the challenges of gameplay, along with raising babies and fulfilling Wants.

You know how conflict is an integral part of a story? Well, I think that can be applied to the Sims as well, which makes sense especially in light of the fact that the game was developed with 'storymaking' in mind. Maybe this partly explains why families who have an element of conflict or struggle in them are so much more satisfying, engaging and entertaining than those who have the kind of idyllic lives of the 'hot-house' families you describe. What do you think?

 

My Playstyle: I try not to actually decide anything, and if I do, every family has it the same.

1. Create families.
- randomly roll out facial features for gross facial anatomy
- tweek gross facial anatomy with slide bars
- randomly roll up hair, eye, and skin colors
- randomly assign personality points
- randomly roll up asiration

I do the things above so that I have a truly mixed neighborhood. My neighborhood has everything from truly attractive people to truly ugly, and the offspring should reflect the same range. I also like having a good mix of hair, eye, and skin colors since it makes for interesting genetics in children. I feel like if I allow myself too much leeway in actual choice, my own personal biases will creep in. I don't want that. I choose make-up, clothes, and hairstyle freely although I do roll randomly chance of wearing eyeglasses (which incidentally I will also roll for kids based on their parents).

2. Pick a lot size and lay out as many lots as I have families.

3. Build a house on each lot that conforms to the same exact floorplan with the same exact furnishings inside. Then I move in each family

The point of this is to give every family a chance to start on ground level and see how they develop over the generations. I am seeing the tendency for this to create the haves and have-nots as time progresses in my game. I also let individual houses grow and expand according to my whim as the family develps the cash to build or move to a pre-designed house from the bin (even those will alter over time as their inhabitants earn cash towards expansion). So far, eight identical houses have come to look very different. I never have used cheats although I have been sorely tempted.

4. Begin playing each family in turn, and play every family before returning to a family I have already played.

I do this so that the families stay on approximately the same age chronologically. Adults grow old together and sim children develop and grow up together. I think it gives my game a more "realistic" feel to have Flannen Wyndham and Emmanuelle de Vaux growing at the same pace than to have Flannen suddenly spurt up into adulthood while Emmanuelle remains a perpetual child simply because I was having more fun playing the Wyndhams than the de Vaux's. I play each family for three sim days, so my reward for playing less interesting sim families in their turn is that I know I will eventually get a shift with the ones I'm currently interested in. Already I am noticing that fortunes shift in my neighborhood the early haves are now not the front-runners in the money game anymore. Families that weren't nearly as interesting to me have changed to become enormously appealing.

As the second generation begins its crawl toward old age, I already have 3 baby boys and 1 baby girl with two other babies currently on the way, I realize my game progresses at a crawl due to my personal time constraints and waxing and waning interest in simming, but I also find the social networks and facial features developments to be fascinating which is why I am in the sim game.

5. Playing my sims really depends on them. I try to keep them green first, and then I concentrate on making their aspirations happen. I do this because I know I'm not wanting to work toward my grand goals in life if I'm not happy physically. I have said before that I don't necessarily play with the most efficient way to do things in mind since reality is that our lives are not arranged to be at their most efficient.

 

While we're on the topic of houses... you know what I don't get? There is one hell of a franchise waiting to be explored out there, which Maxis doesn't seem to be able to grasp ( either financially or legally ). What am I talking about?

Harry Potter, for example. Instead of making random expansion packs, why can't they take a theme and go with it? I would love to build something like Hogwarts, Hagrid's Hut, Knockturn Alley, etc.

Fantasy/Sci-Fi themed stuff. I remember spending hours in Sims1 trying to find items/wallpaper/houses I could use for a LotR setting.

Medieval themes. Pirate themes. Star Wars. Whatever.

I'm most likely not going to buy the University expansion pack. But a themed pack? I'd buy it in a second, for the building options alone. I think Maxis is still largely underestimating the buyers/players more interested in the 'technical' side of the game.

 

I don't know about a themed EP, sounds a tad niche, but I absolutely agree with you about Maxis' underestimation of the legions of under-recognised players who play the Sims to make things, as much as if not more than the central focus of playing Sims' lives.

 

The biggest problem with such things would be the potential for copyright infringement suits. Take for example the sad case of Marvel trying to sue the company running City of Heroes. Marvel is trying to claim copyright infringement because the hero creation engine allows people to make a character with pop out claws in a blue and yellow striped spandex suit and name him Wolverine. Marvel is doing this despite the fact that the company in no way, shape, or form encourages this sort of behavior from their customers. Yah, it's touchy and a bit akin to trying to sue the manufacturers of pencil and paper for allowing people to sketch comic book characters, but there it is. Maxis has been too successful to take the risk of coming too close to another's intellectual property. I think the best you could hope for would be some very generic sets like the medieval set that came in Livin' Large.

 

My two neighborhoods

My favorite two towns are Miseria and Baltimore. I set up Miseria to experiment with extreme features, very big ears, big eyes, jaws, or very slanted eyes, and so on. I added the costume makeup to whole families--one family named Cristabol all wore tiger makeup. I also created the families with extreme personality points. I very soon found out that all these families were my favorites and I played all of them, having children, building houses. These families were so much more interesting than the families that came with the game.

I created the town of Baltimore just to create homes for the homeless Sims--Sandy Bruty, Amin Sims, the mailman, etc. I set aside one corner for the Sparrows Point factory, built a dance hall, a strip mall and a park. I moved in one family, the Donatelli's, two brothers and a sister. They all married townies. They invited other townies to move in who then moved out to their own homes.

Then I came across the Legacy Challenge and created one more Sim -- Duke Sparrow -- for Baltimore. He and his family have taken a lot of my time lately, but I still go back and visit the Cristabols, the Mukkis and the Akils in Miseria.

I don't know if all of this could really be described as play style. I am less interested in career advancement then in family growth, children, relationships. I wish I were less inclined to micromanage. But I'm trying to give them more leeway. They do let me know that I'm meddling too much.

 

But that's just the point. I'm amazed Warner Brothers didn't approach Maxis yet to discuss the making of such an expansion pack. Imagine, if you will, Maxis getting a money shot for working on something like Harry Potter ( or anything which has an equally large fanbase, and don't tell me people who play Sims and like Harry Potter wouldn't buy a Harry Potter-themed expansion pack ). That they couldn't do it without approaching Warner Brothers is normal and I'd understand if issues of copyright infringement were raised. What I don't get is that there is no joint venture. When Lord of the Rings came out, people in the Sims community were screaming high and low for some LotR-styled houses/clothes/etc. I know a lot of people who don't have the slightest interest in 'University' but would buy something like LotR or Harry Potter as soon as it was on the shelves.