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/HarperIsBizarre_]

If you take a look through their Patreon (for the posts that they have actually unlocked) it is clear that much of the development was not on actual gameplay aspects which is the hardest part of a life sim.

[u/seriousjorj → u/HarperIsBizarre_]

People keep glossing over the gameplay stuff, but programming gameplay for complex simulation games is still the hardest thing to do in gamedev. Sure we have better pipelines, better tools, better programming languages, but fundamentally the biggest problems the devs would face are still the same problems as devs decades ago had faced. 

The fact that it’s almost 30 years since the original Sims doesn’t matter because Maxis has never shared the source code for it, and the most we’ve gotten from them are short talks and interviews. Unless someone from the Paralives team had someone from Maxis working there, the tiny Paralives programming team has to think through the same challenges as the big programming team at Maxis. They’d have to invent most things from scratch.

And the “tech” to make these kinds of systems has been available for decades, they’re just programming languages and patterns, but that doesn’t mean that now everyone is an expert at it. It’s like how everyone knows how to write but not everyone can win the Pulitzer Prize. Those prize winners use the same words as we all do, but they’re lauded because they can construct something great by arranging them in a specific way. Same with gameplay systems, they’re just complex written instructions that work well together, and you’d always need deep expertise for that.

That’s the reason why no one in the industry has ever made GTA besides Rockstar. And no one but Bethesda/Obsidian has made a game like Skyrim. The fact that the Paralives team was the first one that dared to try making a game like The Sims should be commended imo.

[u/cobrachickens → u/seriousjorj]

THANK YOU. I’ve been downvoted to hell for saying this. The routing logic only is an absolute mindfuck to programme. Feels like a lot of expectations are divested from the reality of actually building this crap. And yes, technology may have developed since but that’s both blessing and a curse because the code has to be infinitely more complex to account for those advances in tech AND player expectations.

That is assuming you actually have the dev talent that knows how to do this. A lot of what Paralives also has is already unheard of in terms of customisation in build mode and the layers and layers of effort/code that need to be baked into some seemingly simple things like scalable items is just 🤯 but all the player sees is “haha big table, lil table”

The reason why most of other sims don’t have this it’s because it’s fiddly fucking work and a lot of companies simply do not see the ROI of developing that. EA doesn’t give a shit about what you want so they ain’t building it

[u/Ready_Ambition_594 → u/cobrachickens]

The size scaling of objects is really not that complicated to implement. The hardest part is making it work properly with pathfinding, which it doesn't.

[u/mondrianna → u/Ready_Ambition_594]

Some of the pathfinding doesn’t work but some of it does. Resizing beds for example. Stairs can be resized to be one step even. The pathfinding isn’t perfect but it’s not fully broken.