Discussing the failure of Life By You and speculating why it was cancelled. Socials - linktr.ee/SatchOnStuff BUSINESS CONTACT ONLY: satchonsims@gmail.com Support me! www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/...
It sadly looked worse than mobile game ads. I really wanted to get behind this game and would have given it a chance but I had so much trouble getting over the ugly characters and environment lighting.
Have you seen the NPC's from Cities Skylines 2 ? I suspect that both games used the same character models as well as the wonky animations making them look like they walk with a pole permanently inserted in their rear. CS:2 might have the worst character models I have ever seen in a video game and they claim that they were made by a third party which would be embarrassing if they got them free from the same source.
@@thephantomchannel5368 CS 1 and 2 are made by Colossal Order, Paradox is only the publisher. And the CS NPCs are extremely low polly, nowhere near close to what was shown in the LBY videos.
Paradox has a history of pulling out near the end so this should not really be a surprise. I had hoped that Humble's involvement meant this project had full publisher commitment but hope is a losing bet these days.
Yeah, I still can't believe they haven't officially cancelled Bloodlines 2 since it's been in development hell for years. A life sim sounds right up Paradox' alley since they love them some DLC.
As an older adult player of The Sims, I was really looking forward to Life By You. It and Inzoi were the only life-sim games that were being marketed to a more mature audience. Even though the game was ugly, I was hoping with all the feedback they would've massively improved the graphics and overall look before the final launch. As I suspect The Sims 5 will continue to be as cartoony and childlike as TS4. I can only hope that Someday we will get a life-sim game for adults with a bit of edge to it. Fingers Crossed!
I pre-ordered Life By You, twice. Then they refunded my money the second time and didn't put it up for pre-order again. I was very excited to play it, even though the people were kind of ugly.
I was excited too! But at this point, I think it's unwise to pre-order any game in general, especially from bigger studios. These companies have proven to be soulless husks of what they once were with no respect for their creations or consumers.
@@vomm It's actually really common for mass layoffs to happen via email, especially in the US where a lot of states have what's called "at-will employment", which basically means your employer doesn't have to actually provide a reason for firing you. Employment in the US sucks majorly and there aren't a lot of protections for employees either.
In my opinion, they obviously used Unity for the character models and honestly that was probably their Achilles Heel. It felt like baby’s first Unity game, not a Sims 4 competitor from a big company. It was giving $10 Steam game vibes.
The video game industry is headed toward another crash like there was in 1983. There's so much full-priced shovelware out there (Gollum, new Avatar game, Redfall, Walking Dead Destinies, I could go on) that very few games are coming out fully polished. Why bother when you can release something half-baked and then patch it later, like Cyberpunk? As such, publishers are setting unrealistic deadlines for their developers and overwork/underpay them like crazy. Then if the game development runs into too many issues, or the game flops on release, the studio shutters and everyone is out of a job as you mentioned. Life by You was planned to have free early access, so releasing it half-baked wasn't going to get them any cash flow. They bit off way more than they could chew and had no way to monetize it. As it stands, 99% of games released today have one of two options: 1) great gameplay, but graphics look like they're from 2003 or 2) good graphics, but glitchy or non-existent gameplay. Trying to do both is extremely unrealistic. I'd rather have option 1, but as you said, so much of life sims' appeal depends on aesthetics.
I really hope that Paralives does well. There are so many absurd things that we normalize in The Sims 4, like the game crashing, excessive lag, and overpriced items. How can someone still say they like EA when they do stuff like this?
I'm going to plug an indie game I'm into! Cozy Caravan! Still has a few glitches, but its in beta still and the game devs are VERY responsive. Its a bummer about Life by You, but Indie games are the way to go today. At least with indie games you get people that really care.
those "unrealistic deadlines" are because nobody is going to sit around waiting for 20 years for you to release a game. games have deadlines, just like everything else in the real world. grow up.
The existence of Kong contradicts your statement. 😂 I'm kidding ofcourse but wow the game was bad Bad graphics... so incomplete.. terrible gameplay.. just bad.
I was just saying this on another channel but I remember when Paralives decided to focus on it's appearance early on there were people complaining that it should be the last thing they focus on and asking where the gameplay was. So for LbY to get opposite has been funny. I don't think some people were ever going to be satisfied simply because it was seen as Sims competition and The Sims is be all, end all for some to the point where even its flaws are overlooked. I was interested in LbY and Paralives equally. I do want a life sim I can customize to fit my needs for different saves and LbY was hitting that mark. That was its identity and I was and still am all for it. The closest I've come so far is Sims 3 with NRaas mods.
I'm so jealous that you got the chance to try LBY out. I agree the graphics were hinky, but I was fascinated by the gameplay potential. I'm a die-hard Sims 3 player, but I worry that someday it will become inaccessible due to it's age. I have most of it on disc, so it can't be taken away from me completely, but I also have a lot of store items and some things bought in electronic form because the weren't available any other way that I could find. Of all the potential upcoming life-sim games, LBY seemed the most like Sims 3, so I am really disappointed that it has been dropped. I agree it seemed to lack personality, but I was reserving my judgement in that area until I got to try the game myself, which I guess will never happen now. The mention of another mysterious life-sim game with a Sims veteran on the team intrigues me.
I definitely agree, the game needed some type of polish to give it a distinguishable appeal or at least a art style that brought life to the world it inhabited
I think all that could've been created with some kind of mod or graphics filters, so I wasn't really concerned about the graphics, after all even Sims 4 has shader mods, I just like that it had Sims 3 features but still let you switch between people of different households. Which is why I couldn't get into Sims 3.
One of their developers, the linkedin guy, even admitted to being a ugc game, the lack of focus in the gameplay and all the menus and mods were the point of it. They were so focused on bringing in modders, even saying that any monetization was fair game, that they forgot about the actual life-sim part of the game. Add the bad graphics, be it Unity assets or not doesn't matter if it looks like unity assets anyway... It's a shame but this project wasn't well managed. Seemed that they were cutting corners from the beginning to maximize their profit with the mobile experience team, no art direction, only very basic gameplay like crafting and gardening and ai language models...
The sims franchise has always had a lot of UGC, but most of that wasn’t directly encouraged. Most of it was from people wanting to flesh out the world by adding stuff missing from the game or improving stuff already in the game. Sims 4 has a huge UGC community in part due to how broken it was upon release and how many features it was missing. UGC, which had already been big in the early games in the franchise, really exploded for Sims 4 due to simmers trying to fix the horrible gameplay.
I've said from the beginning that all this talk about mods from the developer side bothers me. Back then I was attacked by all the mod fans. Because mods are supposedly essential for every game. For me, a good game has never needed mods. For me, mods, just like DLCs, are meant to make a good game even better and not to make a game playable at all...
I've been following LBY from the get-go and I always had the constant impression that they simply didn't have a professional designer. Everything was so weird, from animations, to models, to the graphics itself, and not just in the game, but also in marketing. I so often had the impression that all of them are colorblind and live in a weird bubble, incapable of seeing what everyone else can. It's also kind of a Paradox phenomenon, even in Cities Skylines 2 there are so many mistakes that are so blatantly obvious, everyone sees what's going wrong immediately after a second, except the developer. Kind of creepy. As if they're aliens making games for humans.
Too early? The game had already been in development for 6 years when the first trailer was released. A year later and it looks and functions basically the same. How long was Paradox supposed to support them while they tried to make something worth showing off?
I might be the odd one out here in saying this, but LBY reminded me of the Sims (1), the original game when it first came out. All the pop ups on the map, the chunky unrefined original sims characters. I think people need to remember playing the original Sims, and then compare it to current LBY, if the game came out at relatively the same time as the Sims 1 did, I'm sure it would have been leaps and bounds beyond the following the Sim's franchises, it's just sad to see it canceled, and everyone working on it losing their jobs in the process.
HOW DID I NOT NOTICE THEY WERE ON THE UNITY STORE?? I looked it up and I've used those character models for a Uni project? What I didn't think big names used unity assets, seems like a big cheat! I wonder if they ran into problems trying to use those assets (ownership problems).
My guess is that they started out by using those models as basically a way to build up the game and gameplay features, there probably wasn't any ownership problems if they bought the assets, but if they were free, then it depends on the license that comes with using the models, and I did see later that the models did look better in later development, so by then they may have started using their own, but still with switching models you would need to have certain things that still match the base models due to animations and other factors related to sliders of the models, so they were probably still very similar.
There's literally no reason to spend hours and hours of time on making models from scratch when you can use a base mesh and tweak it to fit your needs. That's game development 101, you save time wherever you can. And no, they would not get into trouble, those assets being available for use is one of the bigger draws of Unity! Calling that cheating is like calling it cheating when someone sews a skirt just because they didn't weave the fabric.
@@Narangaraththe game was lambasted since it's inception for its horrendous graphics. Games that focus on at the very least an art style can proceed from there but the game throughout lacked direction. It's false to say there's no reason to make their own characters when part of the negative public reaction was from the less than appealing characters. Generic looking characters are fine for things that are meant to be in the background not main characters you're expected to look at for hours on end
I love the goofy look of the Sims 4, I rarely like realistic looking characters because they always seem off and they take more time and resources away from the actual game play.
Facts! I just don’t like realistic graphics for some reason and I never have. Unless it’s a game like Hogwarts Legacy or any other of those big games, I don’t care. I get that it’s a life simulator…but we have occult sims…it was never realistic from the start
Unfortunately, LBY had a lot of rough edges and I don't think most of the team was as experience in creating such a game. The graphics was pretty outdated looking for a 2024 game which either a stylized approach would have been better or literally getting someone in there that was more experienced that could help them bring that more realistic approach. I noticed not just the bad characters or bad animations but the lighting in the game kept getting worse and worse in each of their videos. Massive overexposure in the outside world that would cause any light colors to just glow and other times the game looked too dark. Why did all of this get past the game's art director? That is the one thing I never understood. Either way, There is another game which is Vivaland made by the team who brought the sims 4 multiplayer mod together. They've been doing a pretty good job and even released a build demo and plan to release another demo sometime this year I believe which will include more live features with characters.
That was disappointing, LBY was such a good game, and Rod Humble and his team did a great job with it despite the game faced multiple delays and attrocious graphics, wish the game and the Paradox Tectonic studio wasn't cancelled but i understand how they did it, wish for Paralives to be the best since the developers in that game did put their blood, sweat and tears for that one like LBY did.
The graphics weren't any more atrocious than Sims 3, but it had almost unlimited modding and the ability to play any household, so graphics mods actually could've made it look nice, and it would've given me the play experience I like by letting me switch households but with the features of Sims 3, in a way it was like an upgraded Sims 3
I've heard that one of the biggest shareholders of paradox wants to buy Krafton (Game Studio that is making Inzoi) so I could imagine him actually being like "cancel life by you or I'll pull my money" #ConspiracyTheory 🤣
@@thalesteixeira8382 And they own tons of games that compete with each other. They own Riot Games 100% and their mobile game Wild Rift, they also own that game's biggest competitor, Arena of Valor. They also have a stake in Epic Games, publisher of Fortnite, and as you said, Krafton, developer of PUBG. They never interfered with games that earns billions, why would they give a fuck about random life sim games that wouldn't earn nearly as much?
Unless they had stuff that was never released to the public, I feel the dev is overstating about how great LBY was doing, development wise. They were critiqued first overall by their character design and vibes, and it didn't help that they didn't really seem to improve on them. "Yea, we hear you!", then doing whatever else, is not really listening to the audience, it is fake listening. EA probably straight up ignores audience, but that seems more realistic! Also, I think you're the only one who has mentioned, this felt like a modding tool, not a live game on itself. I know they wanted to appeal to a segment of the community, but I felt that they were catering to a (vocal) niche instead of the majority. I was disappointed primarily in that they focused a lot on active careers (eh, they are boring), modding, building, and much less on just hobbies and things the character could do, as well as less focus on life stages. All was young adult, nothing family related.
Anyone else really wary of buying Paradox now? Like, even games already out - I saw something older on steam sale but I clicked away when I saw the developer. Trust is such a fragile thing
I refuse to buy their games based on the predatory practice of selling overpriced DLC to fill in the holes of their intentionally gimped base games. Cities Skylines being an example as it is the only title that I own published by Paradox which cost $400 dollars for the complete package which is why I stopped buying them and will never consider supporting them for version 2 which was released as a dismal failure and possibly the reason why Life by You is now Death by Paradox, to divert funds over to Colossal Order the dev team behind the Cities franchise because there is a possibility that if CO fails they will take Paradox down with them.
@@thephantomchannel5368 if you think they're bad you should look into a company called EA. They're the grand master of nickel and diming customers with broken content.
I remember seeing one video where the character was skateboarding I think, and a palm tree appeared out or nowhere, really close to the character like in PS1/PS2 era games.
They had some good ideas for LBY and competition is generally a positive thing for the consumer. I would like to have seen the game eventually released but there was a lot of work to be done in graphical presentation. Despite all the promise of gameplay freedom and customization the characters just DID NOT look good, and that's important in a life simulation game
Graphics alone do not make a game great.After all,look what happened with Anthem when the devs sacrificed gameplay for INZoi-like graphics. Gameplay is more important to a life-sim game than graphics are. With very little gameplay,a life-sim will fizzle out,no matter how good graphics look. This is the problem with Sims 4-the graphics are great,but there's really not very much gameplay. InZoi's graphics are realistic,but could turn out to be another Anthem if there's little gameplay.
@@Ballora1965 I think you have misunderstood my comment. Like I said LBY had some great ideas and I was looking forward to it being released. The gameplay potential for this game was through the roof and that's awesome, but graphical fidelity IS important to myself and many who play life simulation games. I had assumed they would release the game and improve the looks of the characters over time. I take no joy in seeing the game canceled...was looking forward to playing it
they should put it up on on abandon wear and let people make a game out of what was left. Or the gaming community should make open source base games and let people mod and share it like minetest. Perhaps thats the direction for many of the comunities that have been burned.
UMAs (Unity Multipurpose Avatars) area an open sources system that does come with characters like that as a defaults, though its mostly a code system and you can make avatars of your own. I have no idea if there is any connection to Life By You, or just looked coincidentally similar. The whole point of UMAs is to make very customizable characters, such as you might use an a character creation system. I considered using them for my own Life Simulator game, and only abandoned it because I also abandoned my game for various reasons.
Referring to the recent comments from one of the LBY developers on the situation and what happened with the cancellation of the game, although I agree there are some shady business practices going on on Paradox's side, and i'm not here to defend the way Paradox dealt with the situation because laying off all their development team over a public announcement has got to be the most disgusting corpo way to do it, I have no respect for paradox interactive and I have all the respect in the world for the developers for speaking out about the situation and what really happened, it is inexcusable. But, on the other hand, to say that the game was outperforming internal parameters doesn't actually mean much, their internal goals can be pretty much anything they want it to be, they don't need to be high bars, for all we know they could've been aiming for the midest of the mid. It doesn't mean the game was in a good shape, the game still looked extremely rough right on the release week, and considering the obscene recommended specs required to run that game and pairing that with the yikes that was the lack of art direction, graphics, and poor animations, it is obvious that the game wasn't being developed with proper quality assurance standards in the first place, and don't even argue that that's ok just because it was in early access, if you're going to publish a product in early access, even more when you're a game being developed and published by a PROPER publisher, art direction, and changing everything about the art style afterwards is just not something you do at the final stages of development, this is literally one of the first things you have to do before makign assets and putting all your money into a game's development, the state the game was in was NOT going to change in any meaningful way, this is an issue that was created by the development team from the very beginning and I have no doubts in my mind it was one of the reasons the project was canned, just because a dev spoke out about the situation doesn't mean the state of the game was in a better state than it seemed, because it really wasn't.
Ariana what are you doing here 😳, I agree that paradox will always be shady for just firing them without warning and I double agree that the game was always looking worse for wear and it was kinda clear that the art direction was not ever going to drastically get better. I was excited for this game so much but the character models is just something none of us could avoid and releasing that into early access would have killed any growth in potential fanbase
@@cerbzzz7147 omg hii, and yeah, the character models were just really poor. and it's not something you can just change midway through early access, you can definitely tweak it but changing everything altogether is just not viable, something as fundamental as a character creator in a life simulator should be consistent right away, people that said that it would get better after early access def don't understand that you can't really just go and change the main character models for the entire game a more than halfway through development just willy nilly, cuz them what about literally every single npc, every single past character created by players, like, it's so crazy to me that people bring up this argument
The whole thing makes me really sad; people are out of work, less competition for EA, and we're out a potentially fun game. Plus, and this is my personal opinion, I loved the art style. Paralives and Inzoi might end up being fantastic games but to me, LBY's style settled right in between cartoony (like TS4 and Para) and hyper-realistic (like Inzoi). I agree the characters really needed some help, but everything else reminded me so much of TS3 and that's what I was really excited about.
Don't think Inzoi will be fantastic though, there's no building, only decorating. The main reason I love Sims is because of the buildings. Inzoi also looks like a demanding game on the computer, but the gameplay from the trailer looks boring. Was looking forward for LBY because it reminds me of Sims 2 & 3, which I love
@@user-sd9sn7wf3ostop saying things you are not sure of just to discredit the game,it’s weird! THERE IS BUILDING IN INZOI, it is a life sim so why not? AND IT WAS SHOWN IN THE OFFICIAL TRAILER TOO! like did you even do any research? Did you bother to watch the trailer? They have modular stairs,unlimited floors,lots,media projectors,walls that you can turn to glass at a click, different wall sizes,many building tools that are still in the works,many community lot assets already in the game,you can even change the signs in blissbay to make it more personalized.
@@user-sd9sn7wf3oThere is building in inzoi,and free lots to build on,please just say what you actually know and are sure of and stop trying to discredit the game by straight up lying.
I start to believe that all the assets they used are from they Unity store. They can say that they didn't as much as the want, but even comparing the gym equipment to that other game: it looks like the exact same. Both games have the same style of walls and floors. Even looking at the weird blue shading on the floor near the walls, it's the exact same between LBY and that game. Nothing looks coherent in LBY, I get that devs might use placeholders for many things, but nothing was in the same style, almost like everything they used was pre made. Need icons for UI? Whatever, they can find pre made ones to use. Need icons for food products in the inventory? Again, whatever they can find and use. It doesn't matter that they don't match the other icon set at all. I hate to compare it to Paralives, but I will. In Paralives they also said that they use placeholders and that things will change, but it's clear that everything in the game is something that they just made quickly, by themselves. Everything is matching because they already decided their art direction and when they make assets, or temp UI elements, they all match to each other. This is absolutely not the case with LBY. LBY really felt like an asset flip game. Sure, placeholders can be changed. It's not too hard to leave something like matching icons to later part in the development, but having the game at this state, weeks from the supposed early access really shows that they either didn't care about their art direction, didn't care having an asset flip of a game, or totally lacked the recourses to make assets on their own.
Thank you for this video, Satch. Those character models aren't horrendous, but they're not good. That, coupled with the environmental aesthetics, it really does look like Sims 3, and as much as I love Sims 3 it's not an aesthetic I want to go back to in a newly releasing game. Personally I didn't see myself playing this game much if at all, but I am very sad it didn't release for all the people who were looking forward to playing it.
Life by You always seemed to me like it wasn't being made to be a game, it was being made to as a response to the Sims players' hatred for EA, it looked like a weird combination or the sims 4 dlc content and the sims 3 gameplay and graphics 💀
4:40 unrelated but I found out I lost my job from a public post it was horrible was supposed to have a shift that night but the bar perminently closed with no notice given 😢 so can imagine how horrible it would have been for them too
compared to the other life sims coming out life by you was my least favorite. i wouldve given it a try just as an option for a new game to play tbh. graphics and art styles are a huge factor in whether i like a game or not and i really was Not into the look of LBY at all. it reminded me of the "pudding people" look of the sims 3. ts3 ended up being pretty great gameplay wise (crashing 24/7 aside) so i still had hope especially since it was so early in development. im already super excited for inzoi and paralives i hope they continue to work hard and take the time to iron out any bugs or glitches before release.
Thank you, I thought it was just me getting the Sims 3 vibes. Maybe that is the Ron Humble influence. I am skeptical of INZOI too. I pray Paralives works out. EA/Sims need competition.
It’s a real shame that the graphics are all anyone could seem to focus on. It did look dated, but I personally put more emphasis on gameplay over graphics, and the gameplay looked quite decent. I still play The Sims 2 more than any of the others in the franchise because the gameplay, to me, is the best.
I think graphics go deeper than that. When people say “graphics”, what they mean is mostly a mix of visual quality and art direction. LBY had a nice visual quality in terms of nice frame rates, looking smooth, being a modern 3D game etc. The art direction however, is usually what makes or breaks the game, and LBY had terrible art direction. When you make a 3D HD game, you have to make sure the game itself looks captivating because you can see everything with more detail. That’s why TS4 works so well despite its flaws: it just looks amazing because it’s bright, cartoony and visually solid, which totally matches with the identity of the game. LBY looked too dark, moody and weird and not in a good way, which you have to consider when you’re supposed to play that game for a bunch of hours straight. I can see that working for more serious games, but not a life sim.
@@angelant96 art direction was certainly an issue, as it stood, the game characters looked rather disjointed from their surroundings, and that's just one example out of many. The overall quality and polish, even for this stage though, hardly feels inspiring either, and that's comparing to games like Paralives. Got to admit though, the reason I had trouble going back to earlier sims were mostly graphics related
What gameplay? All they shown was few gym animations. Walking. Really awkward RPG style dialog.... more walking. Ton of empty lots. one animation for planting seeds and watering them. More walking. More huge huge empty world with maybe two NPCs to interact with, where the only thing you can do with said NPCs is... have a fake RPG style dialog. What they created essentially is a bad looking game engine/ mod tool, and expected players to create the game itself with the tool they built. It was doomed to fail from the start. They didn't have any vision to what actually the game is going to be. Not in art direction nor in gameplay. It was a case of "here you can make your own dialog" or "here you can make a new chair." Where was the gameplay? There was non.
Maybe it’s just me but life by you graphics actually gave me more faith in the game as I thought it would be more substance than just pretty objects and clicking. So much for that though 😅
I'm disappointed that Life By You was canceled just because I felt like it had potential, although I haven't been very impressed by what I've seen and wasn't planning on buying it unless it looked way better. I'm really putting all my faith into Paralives now, lol.
Why dpes everypne have to bring up the statement of one delusional dev? Their game looked bad, they were using free assets, not even the paid ones. It was also optimized just as poorly, it had a 16GB minimum requirement and 32GB recommended. Imagine how much more bloated it would've been once people started modding t. Does anyone seriously think another 6 years and $20M would get them anywhere?
People keep ignoring this!! Like forget the characters being ‘ugly’ there hardware requirements were insane for what the game was. They had bigger issues than “ugly” characters. This isn’t a gameplay over aesthetics or aesthetics over gameplay issue.
I am shocked about Life by You but was not liking what I was seeing anyways... Paralives looks much more interesting as far as style and what it has to offer.
Theres nothing wrong with using premade assets as thats what they exist for. But its weird for them to lie about it if they really said all the furniture was self made. They used an exersize equipment unity store pack and ironically its also the same one that gym simulator game uses. Im sure much of the other assets were also bought which explains the size and consistency problems.
I think people are forgetting that it was still in development. The graphics could’ve been improved before release. Though even as it was the characters still looked better than in the Sims 3.
The concept of LBY was so interesting to me, I still feel sad seeing the footage and knowing that we won't get to play. There are a lot of life sim players who aren't really interested in modding a game, so their judgement is based on what they see rather than having ideas about what they could do with the tools available.
It was being published by paradox and I’m sure the original team working on the game didn’t want to go the route of ENDLESS overvalued DLC that paradox is known for and as that is a HUGE profit margin for Paradox they didn’t want to go any further.
The Sims' wants/aspiration system pulls the weight of giving th game some purpose and direction, guided by the personality traits you chose, making it feel personal and upping investment.
I don't really think that LBY would be such good simmulator game. It seems like there was a lot of micromanaging going on from shopping each product to selecting each line in coversation, it seems cool but any micromanaging mechanics that we observed in Sims games gets very boring very quickly (MWS I'm looking at you) and good simmulator game gives more general gameplay mechanics that can be used in many different ways (example: whims in TS2 and TS3). Also graphics were terrible, so I don't think this game would manage to push TS4 out of the table. I think that companies that want to do game that replace TS4 should focus on something simple that would have more engaging and in depth mechanics instead of doing open world all life careers and dialogs fireworks that makes it hard to develop and would fall flat at the end anyways
Since Life By You had been delayed the first time in July 2023, Paradox market cap decreased from $3M to $1.2M, a lot of shareholders left. Now that Paradox cancelled the game and closed Paradox Tectonic, the company is stable. This sacrifice saved the company.
It seems like such a nuclear option to pull the game entirely when it was so close to early access release, something must have been mega-fucked up behind the scenes. Like maybe some of the core code wasn't working or was patented and they couldn't fix it? Whatever it was, it's so sad because EA needs a reality check for real!
I didn't expect life by you to be any different to the sims 4 in the sense of having no gameplay without expansions and game packs. paradox did the exact same thing to cities skylines that EA did with the sims- make the base game as bare as possible and make all your money through overpriced dlc and i would've expected them to do the EXACT same thing with life by you if they continued to make it
Tbh I know there's a market for this kind of 1:1 with real life style of sim game but this and the others that are under development currently just don't look fun the way the Sims is. Like I don't really need to live my EXACT life again lol, I don't need the characters to be exact replicas of real human beings. I've been kind of surprised how hyped people are getting for these because they don't look like...games? I know people are burnt out on dealing with the Sims but these alternatives are looking so serious
Humans have reached the limit of how complex software they can make before it dissolves into bug soup. In Sims 4 this happened so gradually that the frog never jumped out of the hot water, but with LBY and Cities: Skylines 2, the games were bug soup at the time they met the public, and this did not go well. The future of human game development is smaller, limited-scope games, and it is hard for an AA publisher to retreat back to that level. In the future, I believe AI will be able to overcome the human complexity limit, and we will get more advanced games again. InZOI is made with a lot of AI, but I doubt 2024 AI is capable of this yet. I expect delays or quite limited gameplay (but sexy characters).
To be fair, if there was a company that could be perfect for the DLC selling machine that Sims has become, Paradox seems to be a grest fit, as they love milking series, though yeah, they also have a habit of abandoning games too, though this seems a bit different as they don't usually give up before even early access.
That sucks because it such a surface level issue. A game that is pretty to look isn’t necessarily one that is fun to play. Gameplay should always be the foremost priority for video games
I was beyond excited for this game and honestly the graphics didn't bother me, I felt so excited for the level of customisation and the game play. So much so ive gone back to playing the Sims 3 😂 the sims 4 is just leaving a really sour taste in my mouth at the moment, probably from being ripped off
Maxis/EA hasn't had any real competition in the live sim space, allowing them to get lazier and more cash grabby. Is there a chance other competitors are actually paying attention to the dissatisfaction among Simmers and sensed an opportunity?
EA: THE SIMS is THE MOB!!! But I agree with you on all counts. Life By You was UGLY though I was hoping that this was a rough cut and eventually when it came out it would have fixed the UGLIEST parts. If I was InZoi I would lock up TIGHT because there's an EA sniper in the trees waiting for them to emerge!! .... no seriously.
I never really thought it'd release as it always looked like an indie dev made it or a small indie dev team. Never looked finish nor polished at all. I hope if they get another chance at making a life sim game they make it look good instead of the whole generic simulator game type look all sims made by indie devs seem to have.
The huge issue was choosing to use the Unity engine in the first place. That engine--and the company behind it--is a trash fire. Any true sims competitor needs to be able to build a suitable engine from the ground up. This requires the courage to make a genuine investment into their people.
As far as the Unity Engine is concerned, I agree with you. But I don't agree that a game developer absolutely has to develop their own engine from scratch. The best example is the Sims games from EA. They all use a proprietary engine. And what do the games have in common? (especially Sims 3 and 4) They are extremely buggy and unstable in many places. Another example is Bethesda. Their games have also been using their own engine for over 20 years, which is updated and adapted for each new game. These games are also famous for their bugs...
The games that I have hundreds of hours in are usually ones produced by smaller studios (10 - 50 people). The issue with the games industry is the shift in mentality brought by turning it into a business rather than an expression of art, and that ultimately means that games with simple mechanics and aggressive monetization models flourish with large publishers. Touching on the Sims 4 explicitly: EA have employed Paradox's monetization scheme and refined it. The more sick aspect of business minded people is the explicit targeting of younger generations fully understanding they're easier to condition in buying products that are subpar (Google's executive board even admitted this to their shareholders which got them in trouble with COPPA). It's not a new phenomenon, but it's unfortunate the death hold it has over what is suppose to be a creative driven industry.
LBY was atrocious. The gameplay, as shown in their videos was bland and the graphics were worse than Invu and the Sims 3. Everytime i would read all those annoying comments about "Idc about the graphics" etc, I was rolling my eyeballs SO hard!!!! Graphics ARE what a video game is based on ffs! It's not a board game, it needs good visuals. Granted, not everything has to be 100% perfect but JC, it was the hottest mess ever.
