1/16/2024 0 Comments Paralives studioThis tickled the fancy of many players who had dreamed of being free to create and perhaps even destroy the lives of their Sims in whatever ways they imagined. With an added colour wheel, life aspirations and many more exciting additions, The Sims 2 brought with it all the customisation that the first game lacked. Apart from the obvious improvement in graphics, the story and mechanics were also much better. When EA published the second game in 2004, people were instantly drawing comparisons. Though limited in graphics and story, for its time it was a phenomenon. It brought with it a surprising amount of success, and arguably gave rise to the simulation genre. Because right now Project Rene just looks like a less fun version of its direct competition.The Sims burst onto the gaming scene in early 2000. Adorbs! If you ask me, Maxis should have waited until they had more to get excited about. You can literally stop and smell the roses. Why, just the other week the Paralives team dropped a sneak peek at some summertime interactions that included daydreaming and smelling flowers. Plus, c) Paralives doesn’t (yet) have the spectre of free-to-play monetisation methods wafting around in the background. From facial hair to tattoos to beautiful loft flats, it has more to get excited about than Project Rene, which mostly has a sofa and a bad name. But Paralives Studio have the advantage of a) being quite open about their development and b) regularly showing off loads of it. Two good lifesim games are better than one, after all. The Sims could probably be improved by cribbing a bit from Paralives, because a bunch of their players are vocally excited by it. The existence of AEW, for example, has reinvigorated WWE, with wrestling once again approaching something of the energy of the Monday Night Wars. That isn’t a bad thing, in the sense that competition is good. I’m not the only person who noticed the similarity, either. The individual cushion placement and modular building that Maxis showed a snip of just… well, it looks a lot like Paralives. People are paying attention to it, and honestly? This early tease for whatever Sims 5 is going to be smacks a bit of Maxis waving a cocktail sausage in front of a distracted dog. That’s a lot of people putting their money up for an alternative to the Maxis juggernaut. Meanwhile, Paralives’ Patreon is drawing over $40k a month. And whether they're good or not, they bring a host of bugs every time. I was a fan of Cottage Living, for example, and Rebecca really liked the whole werewolves thing, but the Star Wars one was almost universally hated - the more for being almost a textbook example of how to do a soulless franchise tie-in badly. Meanwhile, the official game packs over the past few years have been… mixed. And modders are like unpaid angels, making everything up to and including functional bunk beds for the game before an official version ever came out. You might somehow render the stairs unusable for sims - which then necessitates you moving everything on the walls of the kitchen until you figure out it’s a light you moved off the grid that is somehow interrupting the pathing - but by God your interior decorating vision will be on point. Absent official ways to make balconies, split level rooms, or properly cluttered shelves, players share complex and specific ways to clip objects or use debug commands to make exactly what they want in build mode. And the character customisation? Just look at it!įor a while now, it’s felt like The Sims was a few steps behind its own community. Curved walls! Modular furniture! Control over colours and patterns on fabric! You can even have modular floors within one room. And when you look at Paralives, it’s basically trying to offer the kind of control and customisation that Simmers have wanted for ages. Paralives has been in quiet development for a while now (I interviewed the project lead a whole two years ago, in fact), and offers small tidbits and updates every few weeks. Go to about 26:50 in this video for the relevant Project Rene bit.
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