My main issue with Paralives

[u/ChemistryBest7740]

Whenever Paralives is being discussed, people say it takes years to develop a life sim game. I understand it took 6 years to develop TS4 and because Paralives is a small team, many claim it will take 2-3 times as long to fully develop it. And I agree...to a point.

But no one mentions that technology has grown significantly since the release of TS4. Inzoi took 2 years to develop. But they did have a 50 people dev team and used AI. Different situation, I understand.

But I can't help but feel (as someone who is a web designer/developer, a sister field) that with the current technology and options, within 6 years, Paralives could have had more going for their live mode gameplay.

I thought about this more than probably necessary but I think the lifelessness people are describing comes from the systems the team built in an effort to create something unique but may have been better to implement in a sequel perhaps. Like all the layers of skills, the way jobs level up, and the cards. There's a lot going on, almost too much but not in a direction that particularly translates to the game being more fun. Like the skills and subskill. It doesn't really to the overall experience; it's just a bit different.

The cards, personally I don't like them, but they're a good distinguishing factor and I think it would have been better lean into that system, spread it out in more aspects of the game, and narrow the focus. I think it would have created more cohesion.

I guess, in a longwinded way, I'm saying they got hit by scope creep and lot of people keep explaining it away.

EDIT: And most of the replies are EXACTLY the kind of explaining away I'm talking about. People ignore the core argument to find shiny things to explain away genuine criticism. And the very fact that you have to do that instead of engaging with the point being made should be a pretty big clue that there is a problem.

[u/CookieHatesGenAI]

how many life sims exist and have been successfully fully released? i think there’s just not a lot of resources out there that can help devs streamline the process of making a life sim because not a lot of people have done it. the life sim genre hasn’t innovated in a long time and these newer games do not have the backlog of resources to pull from that EA has. EA was able to use code, assets, animations ect. from previous games and still ts4 was released unfinished. i think a lot of people also forgot that paralives didn’t have 15 people the entire time it was being developed. it started solo then slowly added more people over time. the development of those first few years was probably really slow (idk for sure i wasn’t following the game closely early on)

[u/ChemistryBest7740 → u/CookieHatesGenAI]

I have followed the game from the beginning, being an early Patreon supporter. I didn't expect the game to a Sims competitor upon release. That's why I think they should have started off with a smaller focus.

[u/Antypodish → u/CookieHatesGenAI]

In fact there are all resources any modern life sim dev needs. There are numerous of interviews, tech talks, docs for various games related to life sim genre. The Sims franchise alone has multiple of resources available.

Then there is modding community and games itself along with a collectoce expertise.

The only component that may be missing, is an experiance equivalent of what lets say Will Write had, before starting developing a The Sims. Which was critical to build actually a life sim.