The choices one has for designing your Sim are legion, and there are nearly as many options for building your Sim the perfect starter abode. Right off the bat, Sims 4 impresses with its create-a-Sim feature. You can make choices to live in a way that is incompatible with the real world or one that mimics your actual life. You create a home for them, they can have a family, you build a career for them, etc. Like every other game, it isn’t perfect, and some of the frustrations one encounters with it are truly ridiculous, but it does a solid job in updating the very successful Sims 3.įor the uninitiated, the Sims franchise is all about creating a virtual person and living out that virtual person’s life. The Sims 4, which has just released for Mac this month, meets the challenge admirably. The real challenge is figuring out how to make that happen – how to create a game which has more things than you could possibly want going on, but make it easy to access each and every one of them. Put another way, every iteration of a simulation game needs to offer more than its predecessor, but needs to do so without cluttering the menu system or making things too difficult to understand. Then, I think, comes the real hard part making it so that all elements of the game are easy to understand and easy to use – yes, you want to reward people for playing longer, but you can’t have people walk away after 10 minutes because things just don’t make sense. In no game is everything perfect, so the challenge in creating something like EA’s The Sims 4 is in eliminating that which didn’t work in The Sims 3, improving that which did, gussying the graphics for the newest generation of computers, and adding other new bells and whistles so as to convince folks to upgrade. You might argue that building on the shell of what has come before ought to be easy, but I think in this case nothing is further from the truth. The task that they have in creating every new iteration is stupendously difficult. I don’t envy the creators of simulation games along the lines of RollerCoaster Tycoon, SimCity, or The Sims.
0 kommentar(er)
