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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."
This game is fun for about 10 minutes. With the orignal (offline) Sims, the novelty aspect of the game was great. It was new, it was unseen before.
With The Sims Online, you basically end up with a graphical chat room. The tasks you perform are repetitive and dull. Each involves clicking on something and staring at the screen until that task finishes or your happiness levels go down far enough to finish it for you. Fix that up, rinse and repeat. All in all, the game ends up being a glorified IRC chat room that you pay for.
The only partly redeemed quality is that you can build your own houses and have people come over, but that is severely hampered by a silly limit on the number of objects you can put in your house, so in the end you end up with lots of money you can't spend after doing all those boring tasks.
Finally, the biggest pet peeve I have with Maxis over this one is the fact that instead of fixing the bugs and finding ways to increase the limits and make things more interesting, they take a sack full o' money from McDonald's to advertise their products and waste development time throwing it in.
That being said, all MMORPG's have problems at startup, and hopefully they can get their act together and make it a decent product. As it is now, I'll stick to IRC.
I downloaded the free public beta version of Sims Online a few months ago for my wife as she was an avid Sims player but was becoming bored with the offline versions. After a couple of days of Sims Online, she just stopped playing the Online version because there really was no new concept to the game. It was basically the same offline version with the added chat features, and the chat features really added nothing to gameplay and certainly aren't worth a montly fee.
EA, sadly, has a history of trying to make MMOG and failing. UO is the exception, but then again, EA bought Origin after UO was in production.
Just look at the last two MMOG's they tried to make work: Majestic (dead) and Earth and Beyond (Life support). Granted they were good ideas, but EA can't make the shift in thinking from producing box games to MMOG's. Farming out their jobs to a contractor in india effectively allowed them to get rid of a collective 150 years of online gaming knowledge (Kesmai Studios).
I just don't think they'll get it right any time soon.
You've gotten better at reading inane comments (300)!
That being said, I do play MMOGs as I said above. Yes there's a socializing aspect there, but it's a hell of a lot more fun to battle mutants and warbots in a post-apocalyptic wasteland with Deux Ex style character management than go to the gym in the game and pedal my ass off to up stats. Better to do that IRL than in game anyway.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Execellent point. Alpha world blew because you had to walk around to find someone to chat with (more work than IRC) and there wasn't any interesting or useful interaction with the world around you. Sims Online seems to be just a better implementation of the same sucky idea.
And yes, I'm bitter that no one ever enjoyed the house I had built out of rectangular blue blocks.
I dunno. A lot of people pay $23 per month just to use AOL's chat rooms, and $5-$15 fees for online dating services. If Sims Online gets big enough for a lot of people to forge relationships, they will maintain a subsistance subscription level. The "boring" skill system would be less boring if you're chatting while doing it (think online spelling bee). And it might entice people to get an alternate internet provider...$10 for juno and then $10 for Sims Online is still less than $23 for AOL. EA should forge a relationship with one of the sub-$20 providers and offer a "sims internet service," the Sims being a more successful franchise than even AOL last year.
It seems like Sims Online's biggest mistake isn't the online engine so much as the speed. You can build a sim up really quickly in the original game, getting a two or more promotions in an hour and plenty of dough. If I had to take a few days to do the same...well, I wouldn't.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
It seems that the Sims online missed out on the advancement to create those bonds. Many of the things I heard from players were along the lines of, "well, when you play the sims you have to keep all your sims happy, alive, etc. When you play the sims online you can just live in other people's houses, you don't really have to work to keep your sim alive and happy, and there's really no reward for keeping them alive and happy." I think the sims needs a much more interesting beginning and a much more challenging middle so that, by the end, players who may have become uninterested and less challenged have formed bonds that cause them to stay in the game.
I do security
Later add-ons continued this trend. I have five neighbourhoods with about 20 people each, my wife controls three of them and I control the other 2. We sort of compete in affluence and general look of houses (each neighbourhood has one or two "theme" houses, a la Trading Spaces, such as one I built with an olympic sized pool in the courtyard). It's kind of fun playing "against" her.
But Online, the sims gives you one person. You're competing basically to see who puts the most time in the game, not who plays more creatively. Where's the fun in that?
Really, the game we're anticipating most (we use a Mac) is not The Sims Online, but Sim City 4. SC4, besides allowing you to input your sims, continues the whole "multiple simulation" idea by giving you a peninsula to build a few cities on.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
From what I've read, they made a HUGE mistake - they eliminated the SIMs!
They should have kept a ratio of at least 3 simulated people per human player. Then instead of trying to get other people to come to your shop or whatever, the primary goal is to get SIMs to come into your place. Live visitors would just be icing on the cake. (And make it hard to be so dull that you lose ALL your sims - always have one SIM hang around, commenting on how dull and empty the place is...)
So you could play a nightclub owner, or run a successful for-simoleans fire department, or maybe sell appliances at CRAZY prices with ads on SIM-TV to pull in the crows.
Advertising should play a major role in the game, to attract SIMs and other players to your place. Real world products could be advertised and sold by players who purchase a franchise or contract to sell the product. (And naturally the SIMs will favor real-world products over fake ones - "Coke(tm)" over "Fizzi Pop".)
In addition to explicit advertising, the game should simulate "word of mouth" - the more sims enjoy your place (or use your services), the more sims will come - until it gets too crowded, or they get bored with it because you don't change it enough, or changed it from what they liked. The game masters would tweak the SIMs' interests - effectively implementing fads: one week they're into Country Western and trucks, the next they're into 50's retro and hotrods.
Instead of having lots of servers, most of it should have been simulated on the player's PC - the servers just directing SIMs to the PC and occasionally analyzing your place to determine how much they are enjoying it. And of course support players visiting each other's places or using each other's services - now motivated by 'spying' to see what is attracting SIMs.
This game had really great potential - perhaps they can re-work it and save it yet...