Sim-Dud?

Lumpish Scholar writes ""The Sims Online" was one of the most anticipated releases of 2002; but (according to this Los Angeles Times story in the Baltimore Sun, "'The Sims Online' sold 105,000 copies, or only about a quarter of the initial shipment in December," and (as quoted in this article in the New York Times), "the company's president, John S. Riccitiello, said the number of subscribers was half what Electronic Arts expected." (Check out Google News for more articles, and a registration-free partner link to the New York Times story.) Meanwhile, the game's customer reviews at Amazon.com have an average rating of only two (out of five) stars."

Comments

Buyer Beware

[asv108]

I bought the Sim's online about a month ago, because of all the hype surrounding the release. I played it for about 2 days, and came to the conclusion that it is just too time consuming except for the die-hard Sim's fan. Another problem with the game is the replay-ability factor. The secret to any online game is replay-ability. The Sims online gets boring real quick and I can't imagine only having one computer to play this game. If you only have on computer, Sim's online prevents you from web surfing, iming, or any other activity while playing the game.

BUYER BEWARE, I purchased the Sim's online under the notion that I could try it out, cancel my account, and sell the game used on ebay or amazon. Even after canceling my account, the person who bought the game told me that EA said the game was registered to another user. EA is trying to strongarm the used market, and force everyone to buy the game new.

Developer Chat

[Bruha]

We had a devloper Chat over on www.warcry.com You can find the transcript right here.

For the amount of people that attended it they did ask some good questions and the team that's working on SO are a good fun bunch and answered a lot of questions I was surprised they skipped over like other publishers tend to do. Ala Microsoft on any hard question about Asheron's Call or Asheron's Call 2 during their dev chats.

The Cardinal Problems With The Game

[UberOogie]

1) Maxis SEVERELY over-estimated the demand. Because of this, there are too many shards and not enough players.
2) Skills dominate the game too much. Everyone has got to keep their skills up, the skills houses dominate the game, to the detriment of other types.
3) The economy was crippled from the get-go. The only real way to make money with a property is to be a money, skill, or cybersex property. Selling isn't implemented, so sales properties are useless. Casino games have been on the back burner forever, so games properties are useless.
4) Wrong priorities. Instead of getting out fixes that can make the other property types useful or fixing the bugs, they spend time on their corporate sponsorships. The ads don't work if there's no players to see them.
5) Ignoring the core audience. Everyone loved the Sims because you got your own house to mess around with. The fact Sims Online is specifically geared AGAINST that model is insane. All the newbies try to start up their own property, so you get UO all over again. The bar for property ownership needs to be much higer. What is needed is a core group of houses and services, instead of thousands of closed or abandoned houses.

Re:Its a better one player game

[Tridus]

I've played Simcity 4 on the PC, and was horribly disappointed. I mean horribly, I haven't found anything this disappointing since Diablo 2.

The region system they came up with doesn't work anywhere near as well in practice as in theory. The game constantly wants to "reconcile" the edges of the screen to match other regions, even when it doesn't need to be done. This regularily destroys anything near the edge of the screen.

Want to put a power plant in a neighboring city and buy power from it? If you figure out how to actually do that, let me know.

Want to spend time building neat stuff? First you need to individually adjust the funding for every school, hospital, and police station in your city. Not doing this makes it much harder to get anywhere at the beginning, and its just a pain in the ass.

Changing cities is slower then hell.

And so on, so forth. Looking at one message board, there is a person who discovered that the transportation model is based on people driving at 6mph. Thats just lovely.

It looks beautiful, but the game just ends up being more like work and not any fun.

Notes from a Sims Online Beta Tester

[Dolemite_the_Wiz]

I Beta Tested the Sims Online and didn't think it was anything special.

Here are my comments:

- I spent over 60% of my time downloading updates. There were always updates I had to download. At one time Players had to download a 70MB update. This update came from one source (EA). When updates come out

- The Sims world seems to be too homoginized, too politically correct. If you want to add some fun, let players choose if they want to be crime lords. Let players be whomever they want to be.

- The UI isn't too intuitive. People who don't play the Sims have a huge learning curve.

- Finding a place to start isn't easy. There should be some sort of 'want ads' or gathering place for new people.

- Their monthly prices are not worth the minimal gameplay you get in return.

- The game can consume too much of your time. This can become very adicitve for some people.

- What am I working towards? Nirvana? CEO? President? Playing this game is like a cross between watching fish in an aquarium and watching grass grow.

- If this game is to be a Simulation of real life why can't there be variables to have sucess and failures? I'm not able to gather a bunch of investors for a business venture and see if I can used the pooled money to become a mega conglomerate. I want to sell stock! I want to sell junk bonds!

Dolemite