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Scholar
Original Poster
#1 Old 23rd May 2018 at 1:04 PM
Default From Sunset Valley to Skyrim and Back: a Simmer's Journey
Well now, I've stuck loyally by Sims 3 for nearly a decade and shall continue to do so. I've sat patiently (for anything up to twenty minutes) waiting for my saves to load and I've faced unexpected crashes philosophically. And if there was some glitch or other I couldn't sort out myself, I knew there were people here on MTS ready and willing to help.

Sims4? Not knocking it in the least, I assure you. But in my case it would probably require a new computer, which I can't afford. Nor does my budget stretch to buying the base game and all the packs. Gaming is an expensive hobby - all the really popular ones are! Plus (very probably) more problems to overcome, more disappointments - nope, I can't can face that.

Well recently, on a whim, I bought a copy of Skyrim: Legendary Edition and I've become hooked. I was surprised to find it ran at all on the somewhat aged laptop I'm using, but run it does and very well. And although, as I said, I intend to stick loyally by Sims 3, when I sit down at my desk intending to get on with one of the various Sims related projects I have in hand (not least a certain story about some Scumthorpes) I find myself more inclined to load up Skyrim. And this for the simple reason that it only takes a couple of minutes for me to get back to Tamriel, as opposed to the long tedious wait I have to get back to Sunset Valley or whatever world I'm currently concerned with.

And more and more, whilst wandering the highways and bye ways and the city streets of Skyrim, I'm asking myself: why can't Sims 3 be more like this? I don't mean with quests and monsters or battles, I mean with beautiful scenery, realistic looking characters and smooth animation without even the briefest of freezes. I really want such a game!

So my question is this: what difficulties would there be (if not for EA, then for somebody else) in creating a life simulation on the same lines as the Sims games, with the same quality of game play and realism as Skyrim?

No doubt those whose knowledge of such matters is more profound than mine will give me reasons why such a thing would - or would not - be possible. I would be very interested in hearing the views of other simmers on this.

Legend is history as we would like it to be. We pick through the dusts of time for what is worth keeping and, here and there, we occasionally find treasure.

Simblr: Elyndaworld *** Wordpress: Tales of Nantrelor
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Mad Poster
#2 Old 23rd May 2018 at 2:20 PM
Sounds to me like you're looking for a version of The Sims Medieval that's not......well, The Sims Medieval. It was an interesting idea with a fairly decent execution, but they scaled it all wrong. Tiny world, repetitive AS HELL quests, limited creative freedom and one singular, underwhelming expansion pack.
I see what you want, and I hope dearly that something to that tune is going to be made....but let's not forget that it already has. There's a whole bunch of open world RPG games that implement a great deal of the functionality that makes TS3 TS3. I mean, it's this close to being an RPG already. If you have an open world, character customization, skills and homes you can furnish, you're practically there already. Skyrim has all of those things, I believe.

So the question I'd ask is, what do you mean? I don't really know what that would look like, a hybrid between Skyrim and TS3. I can't really imagine that, maybe because I've only played the latter or because there haven't been any games that match that description closely enough. I've played Fallout 4, which is an RPG with strong Sims-esque elements, but I think that's quite different.

Actually - give Fallout 4 a shot when you get the chance. Long-time Fallout fans aren't too keen on it but it seems to be quite popular among certain Simmers. I don't play it anymore but when I did, I had a great time. Don't forget to mod the creepy oversized insects out if you hate them as much as I do.

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#3 Old 23rd May 2018 at 3:33 PM
I think I can describe the combination. But some of the reason Skyrim has less lag is that there is less that it's loading in and processing on the fly. Certain events are hard-coded. (And I would really like to be able to tell that big, strong, male Nord werewolf that deciding to hang back because he's developed a fear of spiders, while making that tiny female Breton go on ahead is somewhat... off.... She was there, too. She has just as much right to be afraid of spiders as he does. Well, ok, maybe a little less considering that he doesn't knock them back across the room when he screams at them. But still....)

The Sims has to account for unplayed sims getting involved with each other, sims having babies, kids going to school while parents work, sims dying, etc. And none of it can be hard-coded. You don't want to wreck your game because Mortimer Goth died in a fire before marrying Bella. So all of it has to be processed. In Skyrim, you know that if you can avoid those Al'ikir warriors, they will be there forever (even though the guard has told them to leave town...) so you can just keep dodging them and have someone to keep Adrienne from getting herself killed in a vampire attack.

So instead of "At this time of day in this location, under these conditions, these characters will be present" you have "At this time of day, in this location, who will be present, and do we need to drag more people in?" And then you have the non-scripted interactions between sims. If Skyrim ran on the Sims engine, there would be constant brawls between the Imperial supporters and the Stormcloak supporters rather than just the scripted encounters and dialog.

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Mad Poster
#4 Old 23rd May 2018 at 3:45 PM
Good point, yeah. Instead of SimSkyrim having more freeform, less scripted NPC interactions, why aren't unplayed Sims running on some sort of script? Any sort of social occasion involving more than 3 Sims is bound to devolve into mayhem. If Sims had some idea of what they could and couldn't do, it'd be a whole lot more realistic and orderly.

Personally I wish there were some way for Sims to be classified as archetypes. Maybe the game could assign each Sim to a group (e.g. nerd, playboy, bro, housewife, evil mastermind) based on their traits, their fashion taste and their tendencies as directed by the player. Games nowadays do smart things like that.
The Sims doesn't really do anything like this. TS4 kind of classifies its content by style, by ethnicity, by color etc, which is kind of a step in the right direction. It knows blonde hair doesn't typically go with dark skin. It knows when a Sim is wearing an outfit that's classified as being hipster. I think something like that has a lot of potential.

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( Join my dumb Discord server if you're into the whole procrastination thing. But like, maybe tomorrow. )
Scholar
Original Poster
#5 Old 23rd May 2018 at 9:14 PM Last edited by Elynda : 23rd May 2018 at 9:44 PM.
Yes, I suppose I was thinking more of something that was more a cross between TS3 and TSM, with the same graphics quality as Skyrim. A pipe dream I suppose: I have a romantic inclination to towards all things medieval. I liked the basic concept of Sims Medieval, until they messed it up with Pirates and Nobles. And when you'd played through all the quests it did get repetitive. It is early days with Skyrim for me, my heroine has just completed the Bleak Falls Barrow mission and is about to face her first Dragon. The inclination to just live a quiet life is sometimes strong.

Legend is history as we would like it to be. We pick through the dusts of time for what is worth keeping and, here and there, we occasionally find treasure.

Simblr: Elyndaworld *** Wordpress: Tales of Nantrelor
Mad Poster
#6 Old 23rd May 2018 at 9:57 PM
It's gotten a bit stale now but when I first played GTA V, all I could see was potential for a hypothetical future Sims game. Those graphics. That world. You could even run that entire world, people and all, if you turn 99% of the population into a bunch of lifeless NPC extras like in GTA itself. GTA V has 3 protagonists that are simulated continuously, plus a bunch of "recurring" characters that are out and about as well, and then there's a bunch of randos that get generated on the fly, to populate the area you're in.

That TS3 couldn't simulate 100 people in 2009 was pretty lame already, but if a game couldn't do it in 2018 it'd be absolutely pathetic. And there's nothing that says you can't have a freeform world like in GTA or in Cities Skylines, and not have a build mode. What you just need to do is, you need to unload all the performance-hogging crap the moment it goes off-screen and load it back in quick enough that it doesn't completely ruin the experience. Like GTA, only a bit scaled down and a bit more heavy duty. Hell you can even make most of the lots decorative like in TS4.

People say that TS3 was ambitious for a title from 2009, but I've come to disagree. It was cool, but not revolutionary. Other games do, and have done things that seem much more ambitious in comparison.

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( Join my dumb Discord server if you're into the whole procrastination thing. But like, maybe tomorrow. )
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