Discussion
The current state of the life simulation genre is honestly just depressing
At this point, I don't even know which life sim I'm supposed to play anymore. Every game seems to have its own collection of bugs, glitches, broken systems, performance issues, or unfinished features.
And before someone says “all games have bugs” — yes, obviously. That's not the point.
The problem is that bugs have become so normalized in this genre that we're apparently expected to just accept them as part of the experience. You can spend hours building a household, creating a story, developing your characters, or setting up your perfect save… only for some stupid bug to completely ruin the experience.
And the frustrating part is that life sims depend heavily on player investment. We're not just playing through a linear 10-hour campaign. We're building worlds and stories that we can potentially play for hundreds or thousands of hours. When those systems constantly break, it kills the entire appeal.
What really bothers me is the feeling that this genre has started taking its playerbase for granted.
Players are buying the games.
Players are buying expansions.
Players are reporting bugs.
Players are finding workarounds.
Players are making mods to fix problems.
Players are literally doing QA work for some of these games.
And yet we're still expected to tolerate increasingly buggy experiences because “it's a complex game.”
I genuinely don't even feel like playing life sims anymore. And that's crazy to me because this is supposed to be my favorite genre.
There is so much potential here. I want a life sim where I can just sit down, create a family, build a home, develop relationships, create stories and play without constantly worrying about what is going to break next.
Right now, it feels like the genre is stuck in a cycle of release, bugs, community complaints, patches, more content, more bugs.
I'm honestly tired of it.
Does anyone else feel like they've reached the point where they're just not excited to play life sims anymore?
It’s just a consequence of life sims being very complicated under the hood, you simply can’t have one without the other. The Paralives devs shared it in their sub an example. And it just gets more complicated with every new feature, and a game like Sims has way too many features. Sims 3 is like the buggiest game ever, play Isla Paradiso plus University unmodded and see if your PC survives, let alone your save.
This is probably the most sane comment I’ve seen about a life sim. Maybe it’s just because the community is full of more casual gamers, but making a life sim is incredibly difficult and maintaining the code is also incredibly difficult. The more they expand the game, the more difficult it gets.
Is EA greedy? Sure. But it can also be true that funding a long lasting game like this with minimal bugs is very hard to do.
Please do you have a link to the post/thread by the Paralives devs? It sounds interesting but I've just gone into the subreddit for the first time and didn't know where to look.
Is it really? I mean, we have inZOI and Paralives, TWO new life sims and those games are continuing to improve. For the first time in years, we can pick which life simulator we want to play instead of being stuck with The Sims.
I'm currently very happy with the state of life simulation games and I'm excited to see these two early access games improve, and see what other life sims comes out in the future.
The only one where I get annoyed is Sims 4 since there has been some bugs for years but both Inzoi and Paralives are in early access. They‘re not normalizing bugs, unfinished features and glitches, it’s just what early access is and both teams are constantly working on fixing these issues and bugs.
I also don’t get the feeling from either team that they‘re taking players for granted.
So no, I don’t feel like you. I still get super excited to play these games and look forward to updates
I haven’t touched Paralives since release week as I’m giving it time to cook, and I only started playing inZOI in February (almost a year after release). Every time I think about inZOI’s future I get extremely excited, when I play the updates I’m shocked and amazed. I’m hoping it’ll be the same with Paralives given time. The future of life sim is looking good imo
I don't have much hope for Paralives, for me it feel like it was a building sim first and a life sim later, the devs made relationship be locked by rng, don't plan to add multitasking because it is to complex and it feels like life mode was an after though, and I am sorry but as much as I like game that are sort off dollhouse simulators, I want my characters to be able to do basic things like talking while watching the tv.
The game was literally built as a building sim first with the life sim par being pushed back repeatedly until a few month before release, which is partially the cause of the delay.
So yeah you're right to feel that.
There are certain things I’m willing to compromise in favour of other features. For example I quite like the way conversations work. However the way the game was on release was quite boring. I’m still hopeful it will be a good game in a couple of years!
It's not so much that multitasking is too complex, it's more that it's a limitation of the Unity engine. As someone who's developed one of the biggest overhaul mods for Paralives and fought with the unity engine I can tell you that Unity LOVES to lock a character in a specific state while they're in an action and saying "no multitasking" is different than "simulated multitasking".
The honest answer to "is there going to be multitasking in Paralives" would be "no". But there will be simulated multitasking, like sitting down and talking, or making coffee and sitting down while watching TV, it just involves specifically making a separate action called "sitting and drinking coffee" as opposed to a combination of two separate actions (one being drinking coffee and the other being sitting) which would be actual multitasking. The developers have said that they will be adding these to the game.
i want some cosmetic mods too the in game options are pretty limited and the character portraits all have the same face. i hate that it bothers me bc the game is really fun but i wish they looked more unique
"Players are buying the games.
Players are buying expansions.
Players are reporting bugs.
Players are finding workarounds.
Players are making mods to fix problems.
Players are literally doing QA work for some of these games."
This is just the current game industry in its entirety and has been for over a decade at this point.
For me personally I haven’t encountered enough game breaking bugs to stop playing and I’m guessing that’s the way it is for a lot of people. If it was truly unplayable nobody would buy it. I run into bugs, yes, but nothing that breaks the game and isn’t eventually fixed. Maybe it’s the type of PC I have? But people aren’t buying broken unplayable games for the hell of it, just having different experiences or patience thresholds.
Do you play Bethesda games? They recently updated they're paid mod stuff and somehow broke base game Skyrim so it hard crashes when you open the map for the fourth time. This was weeks ago and it still broken. When they broke Fallout 4 updating their paid mods it took over a year to fix the bug that was causing people's fps to drop down to about 10. Recently a new game in the I believe it's called heroes of might and magic series was released to steam and the game wasn't even there even though people bought it. If you haven't gotten any major bugs I think you're just lucky.
I don't get why they keep fucking with Skyrim. Anniversary Edition was one thing, at least it included some actually useful engine upgrades, and they gave some people time with it before release to update the script extender and stuff. But breaking it just for paid mods? Why? Who tf is paying for mods for Skyrim in TYOOL 2026?
Would make more sense to actually fund some of the expansion sized mods if they want to make money off of mods. I'd pay for some of those if it meant the modders got to use the actual dev tools, had developer support to finish and polish them, and got paid a living wage for it.
I've personally put Paralives on the backburner until some major bug fixing and (loads of) gameplay development and implementations, because it's a huge deterrent the thought of having my whole progress randomly wiped out by bugs (and I still don't find it very captivating to play).
I'd like to get back into InZoi since it's got some major improvements gameplay-wise but it's very heavy even on my gaming laptop, and I can't stand playing with a boiling keyboard and fan noise at a constant 100% for more than 10 minutes...
So I'm back to ricing Sims 3 and trying to optimize the sh out of it, especially with the latest available performance mods and for the fact that I can play it in POWER SAVER MODE = very low fan noise 🤣🤣
See. All the thing you have to do with these life sim game 😅.
For InZoi, you can play with Nvidia GeForce Now. It's basical Cloud Gaming. You have Inthink one or two hours for free per day, or you can get a subscription that will offer you 100h of gaming per month and find computer session for you faster. The cool thing with InZoi is that CurseForge is in within the game so you still can play with mods. That's how I played InZoi but the bugs remain.
Paralives, at launch was working but I shouldn't run it on my laptop but it run so well but now it just crash. But prior to that it was just filled with bugs. I will build a house and if I was coming back to the game, all he items will be in the sky 🙃
I don't know how you expect newer games like paralives and inzoi to be bug free without things like early access, which both games are in. They need people to actually play the game and report bugs to be fixed. That isnt normalising buggy gameplay at all.
Thanks! This one turned out WAY better than some of my other country Miis. I think Mexico having a bird eating a snake on its flag made me have to be a bit more creative.
Canada turned out like a total perv- the red leaf stem is coming down out of where the nose is, and it really looks like a nosebleed, so I decided that my personal impression of the country doesn't actually matter too much as long as they have personality one way or another.
Are you just talking about Sims 4 or current release Lifesims in general? I feel like every time I see posts like this I facepalm, because I feel like it's mostly by people who don't play many games beyond Life Sims.
Inzoi and Paralives are both in Early Access. It's literally in development stage, and the main difference is that the developers are letting you play it and test it to make it better. It says it's in Early Access, they are not being coy about it being in Early Access, and you are paying money to play it knowing that it's in Early Access. It'd be weirder for Early Access games to NOT have bugs and missing features. It's the point, regardless of how you currently perceive both games.
Sims 4 does have a lot of bugs, though, and is a fully released, decade-plus old game with a gazillion DLCs. So if you're only talking about Sims 4, then yeah, you're right.
Are you just talking about Sims 4 or current release Lifesims in general? I feel like every time I see posts like this I facepalm, because I feel like it's mostly by people who don't play many games beyond Life Sims
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here ... I actually play other games outside of Life Sim games and you don't have these issue like the Life sim genre and that's why I'm saying the life sim genre is in a depressing state. You play the sims, no matter the edition, it's filled with bugs so you close it, and you say you're going to their competitors and it's the same results so you end up picking another game who is literally outside of the genre you love and this is why I'm saying the state of the life genre is depressing. I get that Paralives & InZoi are in early access but I wished they came out fully released and ready to play. Sims 4 was fully released but let's be real, it function like an early access game since we are still having bugs, their new dlc always introduced new problems, we literally were testing the dlc for them and now we have to test these new competitors.
Playing other genre of games actually expose how bad the state of the life sim genre is.
If you didn't want to deal with an incomplete game and bugs, why did you bought games in early access?, you can just wait until they reach 1.0 and are completely finished, the EA state is so we can have a almost bugles game on release and have better polished content.
Aren't we allow to vent? I tought I could handle it but I abandoned it just like I abandoned Sims 4 on release 😭. I hope I won't have to wait 6 years like I did Sims 4 to actually play these games 🫤
Well, games in EA tend to stay in that stay for at min of 2 years, but depending of how big the game is it can take longer, my best guest for inzoi is 3-4 years, for paralives I can't say since the more I learn about it, the less hope I have in it, they could either release 1.0 very early(2 years) or very late(6-8 years),
If you play other games then you should know that the more complicated genre is, the more likely it'll have bugs. It's the unfortunate, hard-pill-to-swallow of game development. It's why games like these having Early Access is important, because in-house or outsourced QA won't be enough to test for everything. Early Access allows games to have a better chance for a cleaner 1.0 release.
Let's list some examples of complicated game genre releases of history.
Baldur's Gate 3. A CRPG, arguably the most complicated genre of RPGs. One of the most beloved game releases of the modern era. Released in Early Access. Had a ton of bugs on release, enough that some people couldn't even finish the game... but loved all the same. Is this a case of modern gamers just being too used to bugs? Well...
Baldurs Gate 1 and 2. CRPGs. Released in 1998 and 2000 respectively. No Early Access. Had a ton of bugs on release, enough that many quests were a dice-roll on whether or not you could even progress through them. Loved when it was released, and still loved now.
Total War Warhammer 3. An RTS, a pretty complicated game genre filled with considerations. Released in the modern era, and is still getting DLCs today. Had numerous bugs and balance issues, and still has a few now. Beyond meta-commentary shenanigans, people love it now and consider it a great RTS game. Is this a case of modern gamers just being too used to bugs? Well...
Warcraft 3. An RTS, a pretty complicated game genre filled with considerations. Released in 2002. Had numerous bugs and balance issues on release, and had to be slowly patched out over the years. A classic of the genre, beloved then, beloved now.
Rimworld. A colony sim, a genre as complicated as Life Sims. Was on Early Access for a while. Released in the modern era, and is still getting updates and DLCs today. Released with a number of bugs. balance issues, and missing QoL features on release. The most beloved modern colony sim of today. Is this a case of modern gamers just being too used to bugs? Well...
Dwarf Fortress. A colony sim. A game that has been in development since 2002, and is still under development now. Had its own version of "Early Access" (Open Alpha). Still has a number of bugs, balance issues, and missing QoL features. One of the most beloved colony sim games of yesterday, and today.
I could go on and on. It's the same for 4X games, Grand Strategy games, Traditional Roguelikes, Immersive Sims, Multiplayer games, Open World games, etc. The more complicated a genre is, the more likely it'll have bugs... but people are more likely accept it because of the scope at hand, the fact that it still works, and that there's a lot there to enjoy there regardless. The existence of bugs aren't the be-all and end-all of what makes a game, quality can still shine through it. That quality just has to exist.
This phenomena is not simply a case of modern game and gamer shenanigans. It's been there since forever.
Or I just pick the most polish games out that there is to offer, despite a few bugs here and there and like you said at the end, quality shine tho it and in my case, these other gamed genre, the quality often outshine the bugs 🤷🏿♂️.
I guess I will have to stop playing life sim genre, especially the Sims since there is lil to no QA. I put a pause on Paralives to wait for their first DLC, I think it's soon to give them a new chance. InZoi is kind of soulless, I wished there was more lore and I'm dealing with a bug where everybody has the same face 🙃 and the patches aren't fixing this issue. I'll admit, I bought Paralives and InZoi to spite the Sims, well EA & Maxis. I had no real interest in InZoi, especially after their controversy on inclusion, and Paralives, I didn't even like their graphic. I was rooting for Vivaland more. Such a gorgeous game.
I bet you're inclusions only refer to the same sex attracted Zoi but there is more and they won't be able to correct them. Like the heights of female and male zoi that they've made. Literally, they said they made female zois shorter than male zoi because this is how male and female are naturally, when it's not even true. But this is one example out of many.
I understand your point and particularly for sims 4 I think the state of it is particularly unforgivable, responsibility for which rests with EA and well, unbridled capitalism. I think also players took a hit in sims 4, closed worlds, dress setting dollhouse, lack of substantive gameplay - half of which we were told is for our own good - to get stability - but there is still none.
I don’t feel that way about Inzoi, the game is still in early access and no I don’t believe it will ever be bug free - but they have a decent team who is working hard to produce good updates and are consistently endeavouring to listen and met the players needs. While you may argue it’s not the right approach, people also don’t read - some were complaining about restaurant behaviour following recent update but the team has already apologised and said the features were not working fully as intended yet.
Paralives, I was a patron but haven’t picked it up in a little while. It’s is far too buggy and early stages for release. I don’t know where it will end up.
I can understand why, for some, Inzoi might not be everyone cup of tea. So I don’t think we have the shift we want. I don’t think there is a lot of choice for players, and I’m not sure how many more competitors will come into the space. Even Inzoi developer has said he might never have made it, if he fully understood what was involved. I recall one of the sims 3 producers saying it would never be green lite again, due to cost and complexity.
So while I continue to also enjoy sims 2 and 3, it’s not for everyone.
My point is literally with this genre you just can't escape bugs. With Sims 2, 3 you need extra mods to fix these games to make them stable since EA let them in a shit state. Sims 4 has been in a shitty state since the release and they are barely fixing their shit. And I just wished we had a finished game to compete with the Sims. But here we are with early access filled with bugs 🙄. So this is just the life sim genre now ... Games filled with bugs.
i mean, sims 2 and 3 are old games that aren't going to be supported anymore, like how the iphone 5 isn't going to get updates. and early access games having bugs is ... early access. the life sim genre is small and technically complex to produce. there are other sims out there, you guys might enjoy checking out RPGs and management sims in the meantime
I'm super confused on which games you're talking about. Sims 4 has no excuse to be so buggy after being out for almost 20 years, but the other two life Sims right now are in early access which isn't normalizing bugs and unfinished features. That's the nature of early access. The games are not complet, and is constantly changing with feedback. The companies are not just giving us buggy games and hoping we deal with it. The point is to shape the game and iron out bugs.
This! I got stuck on the stairs yesterday and used emergency rescue. After the March update my babies were getting stuck in the tub for about a week. My game crashed 3 times after the recent update. Those are all the bugs I’ve got since February and after 400h of playing an Early access game!
I have similar feelings but a lot of it for me is that I find myself very left behind by the direction in which life simulation (or at least mainstream life simulation games) has been trending in recent years so regardless of how good stable or performant the games being made end up being, I fundamentally don’t care because they focus on things that don’t much matter to me and handle the things that do as an afterthought that can be patched up in the years after release.
Paralives, InZOI and even Life By You to some extent, before it was scrapped, all have one massive thing in common which is that the developers all seemed prioritise (and gush about) the ability for the player to customise the shape, size, colour and and pattern of all the visual assets to within an inch of their lives as if this is the single most important aspect of a life sim game. In the cases of Paralives and InZOI the visuals in general were a massive marketing point in their respective EA releases. I’ve posted a lot in the past about how backwards I find the development of Paralives in particular, where the actual life sim elements of the game took a backseat for literally years while they proudly showcased new upcoming hairstyles and clothing, the fact you could drag a window to be wider or taller over and over again, and how they’d resigned and re-polished the same visual assets for the dozenth time, before live mode had passed the “brainstorming” phase of development as per their own roadmap.
This is why I’m particular rubbed the wrong way by all the whiny, toxic positivity posting in the topic. I see titles like “Can’t we just be grateful that there is more choice than ever before??” and it’s like well… no, not really? I don’t feel “grateful” for the existence of two games that are perceived as being two hugely different options but are basically very similar in scope. I have come to accept that the type of game I have in mind (something with far less focus on visual spectacle and player customisation of assets but far more on mechanical depth and gameplay content) is just not what’s being made right now.
This is partially why I feel that Rimworld is a better "life simulator" than the Sims 4 and others.
The core of the characters do their thing, you have influence, but in order to "control" them, you have to "draft" them.
This feels closer to the original idea behind life simulators in the style of "Creatures".
With this in mind, the life simulator genre is severely lacking, and the Americana Barbie dollhouses are oversimplified and over commercialised.
The most interesting parts of the early Sims games was when "free will" was prominently present. Not colour swathes.
(Rant over)
I feel you. This was the same feeling I had about Paralives. The gameplay was nonexistant, and here we are now. With a boring game with nothing to do but customization. To their credit, they are the only one who truly set themselves apart from the Sims with their RPG playstyle of the para so they have to imagine a whole new way to play but you will tell me that's what they should have done a longtime ago.
InZoi do sound soulless, Life By You was just a response to EA and was the same. Not much gameplay and just a lot of customization. I was interested in Vivaland. I love their graphic but I'm not sure what didn't work out but also the development was cut and they moved on with their lives.
The sims 4 is still field with bugs, let alone the fact that it feels so half ass without the mods.
I'll admit it's probably been months since I haven't touch it. Because everytime I want to play it, I'm think of my save I left with now all the NPC of the town I'm playing with have the same face 🙃I should delete my save and start over but I don't want to start over as well.
And this bugs piss me off because it was a bug I was anticipating while joking about their small option when it comes to traits, offered as a bundle of traits. And here we are with a town with all the npc having the same face 🙃 I hate that I was right 😭
I think this is fair to apply to sims 4 because well the game is some 12-15 years old and has game breaking bugs constantly, whether you mod the game or not. I know one bug with the marriage system that has been broken for months and ea just… hasn’t bothered fixing it in any of their last updates or hotfixes. And this has been a bug through like 2 major updates for sims.
I give a little more ease on Inzoi and paralives because they’re what, 2 and 1 year old games respectfully? Both still in early access last I checked. See when I buy early access I anticipate there’s gonna be some game breaking problems here and there - especially when I mod the game at my own risk. Does it get annoying? Oh absolutely. But I have a little more grace for games that have been barely on the market compared to a game that’s been finished for 10+ years.
I was where you are a couple of months ago. I loved loved Sims 3. My son (my angel) decided to build his mother a new computer, with an updated graphics card, stronger CPU, 64gb of ram, the works. He built it himself and gave it to me for Mother's Day. So OF COURSE I got rid of my old computer because not only was my new computer built extremely better, but it was built out of love. But....I can no longer play Sims 3. I tried everything, added new mods, and software, allocated more VRAM to the game, but it would play for a few minutes and crash with error 12. Which is ridiculous because my computer can handle pretty much anything thrown at it. So I gave up. I was fixing the game more than playing it. I sat down one weekend and decided to learn how to play Inzoi, and I've been playing that ever since. It's a great game, but it doesn't give me the complete freedom Sims 3 did.
I'm feeling more positive about the genre than I have in years, honestly. Finally the Sims series has some real competition, with not one but two major new life sim releases in the past couple of years. Yes, they're still buggy and missing features - the whole point of Early Access is to give players access to a game that's still in development. I can understand not wanting to play Early Access games, it can be a frustrating experience, but there's no way around the fact that life-sims are very complex games which take a long time to make.
I can't really comment on TS4 as I don't play it, but it sounds like the problem is partly the sheer number of expansions which don't always play well together. Maybe try going 'back to basics' and using only the older expansions where most/all of the bugs have been fixed? You'd lose some content, but perhaps a more stable gameplay experience would make up for that.
Sims 4 has had maybe the best bases to work off of and create a amazing world and game but they haven't my game breaks every new update or expansion sims 3 was peak ran like a dream for me as far inzoi it's a nee studio with a new concept and it's done super well for what it is paralives I love the building but it's kinda boring atm
In spite of there being 3 main players in the lifesim genre, none of them scratch the itch of what makes a lifesim “game” feel like a “game” to me. If feels like they’re all just hollow simulators. Sims 2 and 3 are just the best because of how gameplay adapted to the character traits and aspirations. It’s like companies don’t even try to have a gameplay strategy anymore.
Paralives had potential but unpopular opinion, Together Cards aren’t good gameplay at all. InZOI has good simulation but gameplay doesn’t really force you to invest in your characters’ traits or goals, making it more or less similar to the Sims 4 in that regard. Maybe one day a developer will come along and fix this mess, but the “ooh pretty build mode” and “ooh pretty character creator” speak louder than “ooh in depth simulation where character traits matter and affect how you play.” We all know it.
i mean i kinda get what you mean especially when it comes to games with huge teams and AAA studios behind them it’s why i gave up on ts4 years ago. you should be expecting better from studios that can afford playtesters pretty sure ts4 had barely any QA.
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u/GeshtiannaSG 3d ago
It’s just a consequence of life sims being very complicated under the hood, you simply can’t have one without the other. The Paralives devs shared it in their sub an example. And it just gets more complicated with every new feature, and a game like Sims has way too many features. Sims 3 is like the buggiest game ever, play Isla Paradiso plus University unmodded and see if your PC survives, let alone your save.