I did start playing again with the release of Unleashed. That was great, I had to go back and uninstall everything and re-install the original game, and every expansion pack, in order, all because the game's reg entry or InstallShield directory got screwed up. But for a while there it looked like a lot of my old bugs had finally been solved. Lately though, those bugs have started creeping back into my game. Argh!
But I'm not here today to talk about a bunch of old bugs in today's column. Oh no. Because along Unleashed has brought in a whole bunch of new ones to play with.
Issues With Unleashed
At this point, it's kind of a given that a new Sims expansion is going to have problems. The bug list for Unleashed isn't as bad as some past expansions have been, however there are still some real annoyances. Like having appliances break and spill water under other appliances where no one can clean them. (Hint: always play with the cheat "move_objects" on and just go into build mode and delete the flood with the hand-tool whenever anything breaks). Then there's the whole "My Sim will walk around a chair in a circle five hundred times before sitting down." What's up with that? Two years later, and the path-finding is getting worse, not better? I can feel my comfort level dropping, dropping, dropping!
But perhaps what is really the most disappointing thing about Unleashed -- for me, at least, and I'm sure the same holds true for a great number of more dedicated Simmers -- is the fact that many useful third-party programs no longer work properly with the game.
These include some of the best utilities out there, utilities that in my opinion beat the skins off the somewhat sloppy and rushed-looking products Maxis themselves occasionally posts or tries to sell. I'm talking about programs that let you change a particular Sim's outfit, pajamas, and swimsuit outside of the game itself, so you don't have to scroll through hundreds and hundreds of outfits for that perfect fit. Or let you go in and edit Townies and other NPCs -- their names, their faces, their clothes, to they fit better into your Sims town. Utilities that, quite frankly, should already be in the game by now.
If it was just me who felt this way, well big deal. We know what Maxis thinks of game reviewers, they put them at the bottom of the Journalism career track! But let's listen to the Sims community itself has to say. I went out and contacted two top-notch utility makers, Rick Halle of Simenhancer. com and James Sausville of Simwardrobe. com, as well as one of the community's best object makers, Chad Authier of 7deadlysims. com, for their input on bugs, expansion packs, and some of the frustrations the Sims community has with the development of the game.
IGN: From the perspective of the Sims' mod community, what is in most need of patching for The Sims Unleashed and Deluxe?
Halle says he would like to see the most glaring problems fixed. "The outfits selected during game play need to be saved so you do not need to keep buying them or changing them every time you close the game and open it again," says Halle. "[And] the game needs to generate thumbnails for objects and characters when they do not exist."
Sausville also has experienced a number of frustrations with the newest expansion pack. "Uneashed is far too unstable on most people's computers. The changes to the sound system in particular have caused many people grief.
"There are a few other things like Hot Date buyables not being saved and that silly water under the objects bug that should be fixed as well." He also is irate about characters who "spin" and notes there are some problems with the rezoning as well.
And for his part, Authier has simply given up on using the add-ons, so he can ensure his new creations remain compatible with everyone's game. "I stopped buying expansion packs after Hot Date and have yet to install it, because of what Maxis did with the object changes. They changed the foundation of how objects work and if you clone an object after installing Hot Date, people without that expansion pack wouldn't be able to get it to run."
"[It] seems Maxis puts out a new expansion pack faster then a patch for the previous one," Chad says. "Just seems to me a huge install demon if something goes wrong. Installing everything over again, and having to install in a very specific order seems cumbersome, and I know a lot of people hate having to do it over and over."
IGN: Why do you think every time there's an expansion, the data structures change? For example, many of my user-made objects no longer seem to work downtown and won't work at all in Old Town, faces appear upside down, and so on?
"This is tough to give a direct answer to," says Halle, "because it involves speculation. For the most part the data structure does not change much. In the latest expansion pack (Unleashed) a number of the changes make a lot of sense because of the additional characters: pets.
"[But] In some cases they do things that do not make much sense though except that they seem to be trying to force users to play it their way," he says. "An example is that the ability to assign formal outfits for children was there all along. Then all of a sudden with Sims Deluxe they changed it so that it just erases any attempt to do so. To me that just seems like they are forcing users to play the game their way. There may be a perfectly good reason but I have yet to see it.
He doesn't think upside down faces has to do with any data changes, though. "That is either a design change in the program or simply is a bug because it is not generating thumbnails. I suspect the later unless they eliminated it to try to improve game load times. Knowing that users add a lot of extra skins and remove them from time to time it seems like a mistake if they did this on purpose."
Sausville agrees that they may be changing things around in order to speed up the loading of the game. "One thing that Maxis has done in Unleashed is to cut corners wherever possible to reduce load times. The upside down face problem is a direct result of that. The game used to regenerate the bitmap for each Sim when they were loaded into the game. Since that no longer happens you can get Sims with the upside down face problem without having used third party programs. There is an obscure bug in The Sims that causes some children born in the game to have no bitmaps when they are created. These Sims are now stuck that way unless a third party program is used to make new bitmap images.
"Maxis has a tendency to 'fix' things in the program that aren't broken," Sausville concludes. "Rather than just extending the program they make changes to how the core of the program works. These changes are made with no thought to backward compatibility."
IGN: What do you think of Sims Unleashed?
"I was disappointed in the quality of this expansion pack," says Sausville. "It looks pretty good, but it seems quite obvious that it was not thoroughly tested. How do you miss something like water flowing under the objects? How do you miss something like Hot Date buyables not being saved? How can you say that you tested a game that does not work correctly with many SoundBlaster sound cards? I feed that Maxis simply added on pets and a larger neighborhood and spent very little time with the extensive testing that should have been required."
Halle disagreed somewhat, saying he did like Unleashed, despite its problems. "Overall this expansion has been the most impressive of any to me. Some of the high points are the ability to have more than ten homes in the neighborhood, the new spiral staircases, and most of all the addition of pets. This adds a great deal of realism to the game for those that have pets and gives those that do not it gives them a way to have virtual pets that they otherwise may not be able to have in real life." He was less impressed with Deluxe though.
IGN: If there's one thing you wish Maxis would do in future expansions, what would it be?
Authier wishes for a closer working relationship between Maxis and The Sims community. He says they should make sure their new expansions work not only with their content, but also with the community's.
"Seems they forgot about us sometimes, and sometimes it's pretty devastating to the community," he says. "I mean when Hot Date came out, no user created objects were able to be viewed downtown, until someone from the community not Maxis made a program to fix that problem. But then months later Maxis released a program to do the same thing, but it still isn't up to par with the user-communities version!"
Halle would like to see more testing before more expansions come out. "I do not know the right answer as to how to go about doing so," he says, "but at the very least it should include testing in real situations where there is user created content added.
Sausville was even more adamant about testing. "Actually, I don't want to think about future expansion packs until Maxis fixes this one. I certainly would not be very excited about buying another one in six months."
Instead, he calls for Maxis to release their in-house object editor. "One thing that Maxis should do eventually is release the Edith editor," he says. "The Sims mod community can already do everything that Edith can do. Creating and debugging new object without it is quite a chore. They have stated publicly that it would be made available to the Sims community. I want them to make good on that."
Perspective: What is really going on?
Thanks to the guys above for lending some insight into the situation.
Now let me just say, I realize it is not Maxis' responsibility in any way, shape, or form to support or even acknowledge third-party utilities. However computer gaming has a longstanding tradition of online interaction between the game developers and the fan communities who support them. Look for example at id Software. After the release of Doom and during the development of Quake, id Software would frequently lend assistance to the mod development community, whether by releasing source code, offering assistance, or otherwise actively facilitating the development of shareware level editors and other utilities that greatly extended the shelf life and interest in those series of games. Subsequent first-person shooter developers followed suit.
I don't see anywhere close to that level of interaction between the Sims community and the various Maxis teams. There's no Will Wright. plan file, you know? Now to be fair, I don't work at Maxis and I have no idea how many layoffs, turnover, cutbacks, and other external factors have caused them to cut corners and otherwise rush products out the door. Let's face it, in a perfect world Maxis would still be a small, independent developer like id Software, able to do what they want. But it isn't. It's a division of Electronic Arts, the biggest game publisher in the world, and a publicly-traded company with quarterly expectations to meet. And The Sims -- a game EA brass didn't even want to publish to begin with -- has become one of EA's biggest cash cows. They're milking it hard.
Now look at this article from The New York Times from earlier this week (free registration required). It sounds to me like Electronic Arts is betting big time on the success of The Sims Online. It sounds like they pushed back the release of SimCity 4(which is consistently misidentified in the article as "Sims 4") into January to boost sales of The Sims Online. Read between the lines. Could it be that a whole lot of people who could be working patches and expansion packs (not to mention the "Sim Week" updates that used to appear on the official website every week but have gotten a lot sparser and slower over the last six months) are busily working on The Sims Online instead?
It will be interesting to see how well The Sims Online does for them, considering how poorly managed EA's online efforts have been to date. I don't think they did very well with Majestic, which they pushed hard but seems to have vanished, and they failed to convert the success of Ultima Online -- once the leader in the MMORPG space -- into a next-gen 3D fantasy game, yielding that valuable space to EverQuest and arch-rival Sony. who you will note is also going to score with the Star Wars game (and who knows how many others? Marvel? Lord of the Rings?, thanks to licensing.
So where does that leave EA's online efforts today? They're leaning heavily on their acquired studios to turn out the online cash cows for them. Just as Origin produced UO, now Westwood is out there with Earth & Beyond and Maxis gets to step up with The Sims Online.
How all this will ultimately affect the development of The Sims remains to be seen. But as a Sims fan, I hope that either the failure or the success of The Sims Online does not in any way negatively affect the development of The Sims 2, the unannounced-but-certainly-coming 3D version of The Sims we all want to see. And I certainly wish they would make more of an effort to empower the user community, and open source The Sims if a more advanced sequel is released.
But I guess we'll all just have to wait and see.
Fansites of the Week
I know I've profiled a couple of these sites before but since they contributed to this article, here they are again, in case you missed the links before:
- SimWardrobe. com -- Home to SimsWardrobe and other utilities. SimEnhancer. com -- Home to the SimEnhancer shareware utility. 7deadlysims. com -- Great, free objects for your Sims.
Sims IGN Update
Yes, this project is still going on. In fact, one of our moderators here at IGN, Crofty, is helping me out with this. If you're any good at skinning, modeling, meshing, or otherwise making Sims objects and would like to help the dream of a Sims IGN into a hard-coded reality, than head on over to our Sims board and lend a hand.
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