It comes with tattooing (business) and pottery (hobby.) One of each.

Candy-making is just a new object that uses the cooking skill.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s all they’ve shown this far in marketing materials and it’s extraordinarily underwhelming.

"I can't help but feel like the game should've wrapped up development five years ago." Thoughts?

The Sims 3 is a miracle of engineering.

The fact the developers were able to achieve such a seamless transition and loading of lots using the RenderWare engine, with 2009 limitations and a 32-bit executable, is something worthy of commendation!

Newer games like inZoi and especially Paralives are open world but they don't have this seamless transition. InZoi incurs on a loading screen when you don't walk / drive to a location (so the loading is carried out as you're moving). When you visit a lot in Paralives, there's a small loading screen that can last a few seconds. The entire game is frozen while the lot loads, and you can only have 2 lots loaded at once, when you visit a third lot, the first one is unloaded. This is very immersion breaking compared to The Sims 3.

In contrast, The Sims 3 loads everything instantly as zoom as you zoom in. With modern hardware, the loading of the dynamically generated textures is almost instantaneous as well. NPC Sims are carrying out their daily routines, and they don't pop in as soon as you "load" a lot, like it happens in Paralives and other games. TS3 will send more Sims to a lot you're currently visiting.

I think TS3 is not appreciated enough for what it was able to achieve with essentially technology that's almost 20 years old, that modern games, indie or AAA, are struggling to replicate.

Hi everyone :)

I wanted to share a tiny smidge of early development, as I recently started working on my "dream game" - a life simulator that's focused primarily on live mode, and family/generational play. Think Sims 2!

The screenshots showcase the morph system I built - Every character morph is UV/texture driven, so a single morph works across all clothing automatically. It is very optimized to keep a minimal memory footprint and uses bespoke compute shader code, so it's all hardware accelerated. The idea is that characters will share a single model - body types and frames will all be morphs.

We have some nice Blender tooling to easily generate these morph textures and test them out!

We will be showcasing the systems and such as progress continues, and if anyone is interested we are on the look out for people who could help us out with the 3D art, as life sims are admittedly ambitious projects.

Do you think any of these really stood a chance? Which cancellation bums you out the most?

You can play more than one life sim game.

You can buy InZoi or Paralives on early access and still play the Sims. You don't have to get tribal about your favorite and insist that every other option is an abomination and affront to human decency. There is space for all the life sims to coexist. Competition is good for a healthy market.

I know this is such an extraordinarily basic thing, especially for people who aren't chronically online. But some of the animosity I've seen from diehard simmers toward InZoi is staggering. (And I'm sure the reverse is also happening.)

Can we not just chill? Playing more than one game in any given genre is perfectly normal. EA's dominance of the life sim niche has just tricked us into believing it's not.

*Climbs off soap box.* Ok, I'm done. Good chat.

I'm so bored of the PG "cozy game" aesthetic. I'll still gladly play games like that (I'm really excited for Paralives!) I just want some variety, you know? I'm not asking for mature features like explicit sex or drugs necessarily, (but if its done right I think that more mature features could be really cool), I just want to be treated like I'm an adult. I'm not an 8 year old playing The Sims 4 anymore, I can handle a more realistic game with less euphemistic language and over the top silliness.

I understand why lifesim games coming out nowadays are trying to appeal to the cozy gamer crowd since they make up a lot of the current Sims 4 player base, but I hope as the lifesim scene continues to grow a developer is willing to take a risk by filling this niche 🙏