The relationships seem to function a lot better than the sims. More depth. I'm still wondering about other life stages. Will they not be included upon release? I hope they've at least started working on them. I can't understand why they would release this as early access so incomplete. Granted, it's okay for now, but a life simulator with only one life stage? I may be wrong of course, but I get the feeling they've bitten off more than they can chew. Life simulators, with open worlds, and unlimited customization can't be a easy project to take on. I wonder why they even presented it to the public without being further along in its development. As of now I do not see this as a true competitor against the Sims franchise. I want too, but I wouldn't buy this product as of now, or any of these new life simulators to be honest. Paralives aesthetics are not for me. Looks like a mobile app game. I'm kind of disappointed.

TS1 started with hardly any life stages, yet people enjoyed for what it was. Maybe players are too spoiled nowadays, but if we gonna not call it a true “competitor” despite it not taking the crap for what TS4 is bashed on (no open worlds, closed building, no interactable vehicles), then we can the contenders moop and hardly simulators of any kind


Rod humble imo is taking the right chunk of bites and tackling, much like other competitors it with the right amount of considerable bites without getting burned. It’s the simmers with unrealistic expectations that want to be fed and expect for Will Wright jump in and introduced himself as the top chef in the ketching while holding a platter of lovster terminoid of a indie burger joint we are situated.

If we wanna keep our expectation realistic, we should take. For all you cared, it would have made no difference had Para and LBY team gad revealed their development up to this date, but for us - we appreciate it. Better than being given nothing and left following nothing but the dreadful Maxis catch-up

If we wanna keep our expectation realistic, we should take. For all you cared, it would have made no difference had Para and LBY team gad revealed their development up to this date, but for us - we appreciate it. Better than being given nothing and left following nothing but the dreadful Maxis catch-up [/QUOTE]


Wanting different age groups or aging up in a life simulator in 2024 are not unrealistic expectations. Sims 1 came out in 2000. Half of the simmers playing now weren't even born then. That's like saying we had Pong or Frogger and we loved it!! Yeah for THAT time. As for revealing it too early, you can't miss what you don't know. Another year or two, with proper life states, family mechanics, better animations, and clear concise methodology regarding gameplay, the majority of us would be thrilled to have this marketed at face value. Early access would be justified. I don't understand why people are steadily giving game developers a pass for minimal output and unfinished products. This will literally be sold to the public in a couple of months and it's not ready. Or maybe I'm unsure of what the gameplay is exactly. Is it a build your own life simulator? Because that's what it's looking like to me currently. They're giving us the tools to "make" our own simulation, which is dope if that's your "thing". But as for me, I don't want to build a game, I want to be able to add, adjust and create using those tools on what's already there. I can't justify paying for early access, and unfinished products anymore.

If it were easy, we would already have a knockoff of the game of “House”. InZoi is the game that is the closest to offer to family players. At this point, all three games each have diffrent cons, so as far none have proved to have high customizability and in-depth gameplay be at the same time in the game so far resourcefully possible. So its either a take or leave situation. The only thing I still waiting to hear how do autonomy in these all three games work.

I don't think not wanting to see babies tied to cribs again, is an unrealistic expectation. All the Sims games came out with flushed out characters of other life stages except TS4. I think what people expect is that LBY doesn't think of other life stages as an afterthought like Maxis did with TS4. Yes, LBY will get a lot of players to try their game, some who are so done with EA/Maxis, and others that expect more than what Maxis did with TS4 since it seems it's going to continue for eternity. It's not going to be a take or leave situation, we all know how lazy it was of Maxis to build shorter adults as kids in TS4, and YA adults as just a tag on pixel rather than a different life stage and or teens as something to fill agent slots, and babies as objects.

We hope Rod knows why TS4 isn't all that to some players.

LBY will allow pay cc without early access. Here is the link to the video from which I found out about that information.

I agree with one comment below the video. This game is like playing for mods. I agree with games being very customizable, but that is less important for us players that cannot code or create 3d models.

This is a wrong move in my opinion because LBY will probbably have a lot of DLCs, just like Cities Skylines. Why would I pay for DLCs and then for mods that the community made? Imagine someone making critical fixes for this game or an overhaul of animations and then putting the mod behind a paywall.

I understand that creating 3d models, textures and lines of code is not easy. That is actually the only good argument for having pay cc in my opinion.

New video about character traits, background and likes/dislikes on YooToob.



In the actual interview Rod Humble mentions monetizing mods through Youtube and Patreon. Something that already happens for Sims 4 mods. As long as people don't ask money for mods in a direct mods, EA can't really do anything about it.
So far, there seems to be no mention of paid mods for Paradox' mod platform,fortunately. Which to me is more important. The moment Paradox themselves starts monetizing mods like Bethesda does, I will not buy LBY.

The videos certainly improve when FakeGamerGirl does them.

Creating a Custom Character

Outfit creator seems powerful. Creating your own work outfits for the game's careers. Even work outfits for your own created mods. Also how you can easily create new townie outfits to randomly dress the townies. Some of those things you need NRAAS mods to do in Sims 3.

Character creator seems a lot more elaborate than what I saw before in one of their older vids. But maybe I am remembering wrong. I didn't know you could change the length of that many physical properties for example.

One thing I wonder about though. It is nice to be able to save your played character so you can maybe transfer them to a new world or share them with someone. But it would be also practical if you could save a character 'look' from character creation. So, without developed skills/funds etc. And without having to start a game first. I mean, how else do you create twins for example?

EDIT: Just realised something. The flag that you can set to make an outfit unavailable for townies can be used to create themed worlds. For example, put everything that is not medieval on 0 so it does not randomly spawn on townies. And create medieval looking outfits (requires CC ofc) and just enable them.

A Day in the Life Tutorial with FakeGamerGirl

Pretty bad animations, horrible characters, they should postpone again

I liked this video of gameplay. Yes, the animations need work. I really like the world and the map options and other options which seem pretty user friendly. Loved a messy character won't do the dishes unless forced. Nothing bugged me more (actually lots of things bug me about Sim traits) than a sloppy Sim standing up after eating and cleaning up the table and dishes after Maxis listened to complainers that they wanted all Sims to clean up. Then don't play sloppy characters was my advice. Maxis actually patched the game early on after an EP or two to make sloppy Sims do the dishes more often. I think the tuning was done around the time of Pets in TS2, if I remember correctly. Traits matter but no longer as much in the later games.

My question for the developers of LBY this time would be, ok, sloppy, messy is good, but what are the consequences of living in such a messy house? None I would suspect since Rod wants a very happy game.

This is starting to look a lot better IMHO. If I run a graphics filter to get rid of those washed out exterior colours, like I do anyway for various Sims games lighting issues, and I'm away and playing.

Must say I liked having a gaming person doing the play-through. Maybe give it to LGR for an opinion

Like TS3, they really need an art director who can tie all of this together.

Pretty cool how you can create custom lot types outside of the world and then place them in any world.
The last part of the video though, where he showed the lot in the world, made me a little bit worried about the game's performance (how textures were loaded in from the building). Also the routing at the bottom of those spiral staircases looked a little bit off?

Also:

I'm hoping they'll demonstrate to us that you can make the shoulders a bit wider, and also have the arms a reasonable length!

I wonder if the issue with these bodies is that there's TOO much freedom. Like, little to no guardrails so it's easy to accidentally make something that's anatomically strange looking.

That could be really fun! I was only pointing this out because, so far, I haven't seen anyone make any sims with longer arms or broader shoulders. But of course, I've probably missed some information, there have been a lot of videos released lately.

I have been following their Reddit, and I am in their private discord. Here is the confirmed scoop: Yes, you can adjust the shoulders and arms with sliders.

However, the default anatomy and skeleton they are using to animate/rig have those proportions. Many (as in thousands of) people made it known through Reddit and YouTube, in many comments and posts about these problems. they claimed they delayed it previously to fix these issues but because early access is so close on June 4th they cannot do anything about it. They are a limited team of 20 people, and they do not have a character 3d artist and they have limited skills in doing so. Speaking from experience, expecting them to change such fundamental problems this late in the pipeline is unrealistic and near impossible if they don't plan on scrapping all the animations.

Rod Humble might think this looks normal because he was a CEO on Second life who saw avatars have these short arm ,narrow shoulder, small hands, forward rib cage, proportions with unnatural animations and paid mods.Second Life is a good example: no matter how many paid mods you use, the basic anatomy looks the same and it looks dated. Modding alone cannot fix these issues.

Despite the rig being unable to be fixed with sliders. They really expect us to edit every generated character, npc, townie in the game to give them normal anatomy?

I am disappointed to learn that the Life by You team has resorted to silencing anyone on their subreddit or discord who brings up these concerns. Citing (I kid you not) that such constructive criticism is "mean" and that "some people have those proportions in real life so it's insensitive". It also, "not supposed to have an art direction... because its life by *YOU*" and that it's more "moddable for different play styles" this way. And they "can't see the problem, we should explain even further" how the characters don't represent realistic human anatomy. Despite months of claiming they have been working on or going to improve they have not but have improved other graphical aspects like the environment. These are merely excuses because of their limited budget and they still have not hired a professional 3d character artist yet.In fact, they recently just hired a dedicated animator. edit: I stand corrected they still have a job vacancy posting for senior animator and just posted last week looking for "qualified people" to add to their development team.

So basically, what you see right now is what it will be I guess It's something we must accept.

I have seen more life simulation, open-world games in early access on Steam right now made by small teams or a single person that has more gameplay , art style, graphical fidelity, and polish than Life by You in its current state.

It's also confusing because apparently, every video we see on their YouTube or social media is an old or different version with different settings configurations on different computers, according to them. They claim they all work remotely, so they don't always show the audience a consistent build. This makes it confusing for our expectations, but this might be a cope excuse they are doing on purpose for us to remain interested until early access. The truth will be eventually revealed on June 4th.

In my humble opinion, I have seen what Maxis has done. Life by you' publisher Paradox doesn't have a good track record right now with Cityskylines 2. I don't like how the Life by You team is handling constructive feedback and has already begun gaslighting. This is not a good sign. In its current state, I will not be purchasing the early access but I will be watching for the final product.

*edit*
minutes ago, Life by You just uploaded their latest update video to YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIUhfRWlrxo

*edit again* For those of you were not invited, missed, or don't have access to the private official lifebyyou discord. Here are the links to latest transcript of 'Ask the Team' Q&A's:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeByYou/...e_team_qa_0502/
https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeByYou/...e_team_qa_0430/

^Damn, this is not good. I'll be honest... this really looks like a bunch of amateurs attempting something that is above their skill level.

We've been complaining about the character proportions since we saw the first video a year ago and they STILL haven't done anything about it? And they dismiss any feedback because it's "mean"? Oh come on... This is exactly what Maxis does too.

I don't have much hope left for LBY. It's very disappointing, especially since I was one of the people who (almost 10 years ago) begged Paradox on their forums to make a life sim game

Is this confirmed in the discord? If so, that means they're bigger than Paralives, not nearly as big as EA, and likely totally eclipsed by the inZOI team. I think one of the biggest problems is some people imagined because this is Paradox, they would be on the same level as EA production-wise. Unfortunately, I could see this turning into the old-as-time itself disaster story of the tiny inexperienced team that was way in over its head and ultimately was rushed and manhandled by a corporation. We can already see this manifesting with the current state of the game launching early next month. The discourse will be tasty to pick apart and...also slightly familiar?

And if I'm completely honest, the game as it is looks pretty terrible anyway. I really hoped it would turn out different but as time has gone on, I haven't seen the turnaround I wanted and it almost seems as if it's too late to expect it sadly.

Oof. That's rough news to hear. Like I said a while ago, I was concerned about the direction the game was heading after the disaster fall out from Cities Skylines 2. I was hoping Paradox would take a drastic 180 and start paying attention to LBY a bit more with budget and resources.

But it looks like they're just playing the same old game as usual. Rush out a product incomplete (to be fair, it is Early Access and not a full release like CS2), seemingly no budget or funding to have a full team, etc.

As a patreon member, I've seen how much Paralives has changed over the years. At first, they also didn't have an animator or a 3D modeler who understood anatomy completely. This was around the time of Maggie and Sebastian reveals. The character models back then were hobbled together by people who weren't well versed in making well animated models, which is why the hands and feet were especially small and other anatomy issues. When they hired more people, especially their animator, they scrapped everything and started over so that the animator had a good base to work off of.

It might not be too late for LBY to take this route but they need to do so ASAP. They're already addressing this issue WAY too late in the game and need to address it right now. The longer they wait, the harder it will be to fix. Paralives was still very early in development when they were able to start over but LBY not so much. It'd be like Paralives starting over with their character models right now. A huge and costly undertaking.

I've seen a lot of people talk up Rod and he did seem to have good credentials having worked on other Sims games before but.... I don't know. The content he's put out and the priorities of his team doesn't give me any confidence that he'll be able to take this project to greater heights. I'm not sure if he really "gets" it or what people are looking for. The fact that the "people" are seemingly the lowest priority for them is astonishing. What's the first thing you hear from life simmers who are tired of the Sims usually? "I still play around in CAS to make characters and take pictures and then I close the game." I'm all about game play for sure but... if there's clashy cheap looking graphics (aka not a matter of stylistic preference, but that there's literally no style) then it will impact my enjoyment.

I think I am going to put off purchasing early access for this title now until I see something I like direction wise.