Comments on: T. Liam McDonald blasts EA: “Pull the Plug on TSO Now!”

By: Maria LaVeaux

Maria LaVeaux — Fri, 30 Apr 2004 17:18:29 +0000

Give me the opinions of someone who shares the game over those of a Critic any day. It is always a trueism that Critics views of ANY given subject are Shallow, and purely superficial, and also usually the result of some Frustrated Creative asperation of their own.
TSO is NOT the perfect Environment, True, but it’s potential (If EA would just work up to it) Far outweighs it’s shortcomings.

Thank you Banshee for a Well thought out response to what reads like a Knee-jerk reaction from someone who doesn’t understand the game concept.

Maria.

By: RB

RB — Wed, 14 Apr 2004 22:45:49 +0000

That’s it? i clicked the web link and that’s it? lol. Even i write longer *articles* than that. On everything. It was a short half hearted stating the bloody obvious rant, in my book.

- RB

p.s you’ve not seen me here cause i was away for 10 days for family stuff =D I see that i have alot of juciy stuff to catch up on. lol.

By: winginit

winginit — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 12:32:19 +0000

Likewise… Banshee, IMO, pretty much hit the nail on the head. The sims was an offline game ported to online. Other MMORPG’s were built as online games and were designed to incorporate new content. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that TSO devolopers spend much more time and testing introducing relatively minor additions to TSO than EQ devolopers do introducing a new zone or tradeskill, for example.

By: Urizenus

Urizenus — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 09:40:46 +0000

That’s certainly true.

By: CherryBomb

CherryBomb — Wed, 07 Apr 2004 22:44:08 +0000

I’m not sure I would call that article “passionately argued.” It seems more like a thoughtless slap, Banshee’s comment was better reading than the article itself.

By: Rachel Tinnion

Rachel Tinnion — Wed, 07 Apr 2004 18:19:04 +0000

well i think it would be well cool it would be like other sites such as habbo hotel except u aen’t the person. I don’t see u complaining about them or dubit hotel now do i!! they are doing basically the same thing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

By: Banshee

Banshee — Wed, 07 Apr 2004 09:50:42 +0000

I think that EA really doesn’t care as long as they have no liability, which it’s pretty clear they do not have. EA cares about making money for its shareholders. TSO does not make the requisite return (if any, it may be a loss from the economic point of view taking into account the development costs) and that is why it will be pulled, like EnB was. But, as I have said before, I don’t think this will happen before TS2 because EA wants TS2 to be a huge winner for EA, and will be reluctant to have anything really negative about “The Sims” come out before or during the launch of TS2. So my guess is that this is the waiting period now. The only way I see TSO surviving much beyond TS2 is if the game attracts a sufficient number of Asian players between now and then so as to make it more economically viable.

I do agree with the comments about the game design. There is little to do in the game, little to keep you occupied for an extended period of time in the game other than social interaction and friendships. In most MMOs, there is a skill system that keeps the player engaged, building skills, levels, abilities (and not having to rebuild them due to deterioration), there is the ability to craft and make things, there is the availability of new and interesting things to do, items to use, places to explore, etc., once having advanced to a certain level, and there is also interaction with other people, and working together as a team in some cases.

By comparison, really, TSO has this crazy game design that keeps you focused on reworking the same skills over and over again because they deteriorate … and for what? For that one piledrive interaction? There just doesn’t seem to be that much meat on the bone, from the game perspective. I mean the offline game had a career progression system built in right off the bat, with numerous different paths, and different prerequisites for getting advanced and so forth. It is absolutely crazy that TSO did not have this for such a long time, and that now there are really only two job options, and a third one that intermittently appears in Test Center. What nonsense.

I think that is very possible that The Sims concept really doesn’t port very well into an online game environment. Why? Well, because the name of the game in an online environment is keeping the players engaged for the long haul, giving them things to do that will keep them engaged day after day for a few hours at least, making progress towards some goal. The online game is focused on the long-haul goals, not short-term time management. This is important because the offline Sims game is essentially a time management exercise … the name of the game there is to manage your Sim’s time as effectively as possible so as to fit in skill acquisition, relationship maintenance and green motives so as to maximize the possibilities for career advancement. This just doesn’t port well into an online environment, because once you have all the skills (if they don’t deteriorate), and there aren’t very many of them, then you have the game won. So what they did was introduce skill deterioration, so that you couldn’t do that and had to keep skilling all the time just to maintain unlocked skills so that you could maintain interactions. But this created a very frustrating *game* environment, on the one hand, because people hate to work on skills only to watch them deteriorate, while on the other hand creating really very little incentive to work on those skills to begin with. So what did we end up with? A game that really doesn’t work well as a game, but works decently as a social interaction tool, and so that is how people have used it.

I think that The Sims offline game was a terrific concept and a well-executed one. We shall see what the real concept of TS2 is in time, and whether that compares favorably to the original concept and design. But the porting of this kind of game into the online MMO environment — while on one level seemingly intuitive because the game is after all a people simulator — really doesn’t work all that well because the kinds of things that you need to incorporate into a MMO to make it interesting really make the game into something radically different from what it was as an offline game. And it doesn’t seem like EA wanted to invest the time and resources to do this … they don’t seem to have wanted to create a new game for online play, but simply to tweak the existing offline game to “port” it to the online environment, and that really worked poorly because the entire way that the offline game is structured just doesn’t fit the MMO model.

By: Paul Tully

Paul Tully — Tue, 06 Apr 2004 22:26:14 +0000

That pisses me off, just because he doesn’t personally like our game, he’s moving to try and take it…I think thats completely unjust. And I bet you maxis would rather listen to him than to the loyal players of TSO. But, what are you gonna do? We’re basically at EA’s mercy with this game, as much as it pisses me off…le sigh, what to do, lol.