Paradox Interactive has completely cancelled "Life By You"
Paradox Interactive announced today that Life by You from their studio Paradox Tectonic is now fully cancelled, after previously being delayed.
Very surprising. The game looked like it had a lot of potential and could've been the most popular sims alternative, but it's suddenly been cancelled.
I guess no game is better than a shitty one, but can someone please make a modern sims game that's not EA and their endless DLC crap.
Endless DLC is literally the paradox business model. I happen to find it an acceptable compromise for continuous development of the games I like, at least the way paradox does it, but lets not pretend like this was going to be different from a business model perspective.
My problem with endless DLC isn't the cost, but the fragmented result of each 'feature' needing to stand separately and not interact with any other DLC feature. You end up with some really janky gameplay where nothing works intuitively and the stuff you can implement is all hurt by those limitations.
Not to mention the sheer code hell that all this results in with an exponential increase in possible install states to account for. Which the devs just give up on and the game becomes a little buggier with every new expansion.
Honestly think they should move to a sort of MMO model. Charge for the most recent expansions and older DLC eventually gets merged into the base game. Cuts down on complexity and most of your sales will happen in the first year anyway.
While true, I think Paradox does it better than Maxis. First, you almost always get some stuff for free. Second, it's usually more substantial (or it's art packs or whatever, which you don't need but are fairly cheap). Would this game do it well? Who knows. Just having them competition would force them and Maxis to do better though.
All this said, I pirate most of the DLCs for Paradox games. I'll buy the first few near release, but when I want to revisit a game after a few years, likely just for one playthrough or less, I don't feel like spending $100+ to catch up, and I'd like to see where the new content went. I've given them plenty of money where I feel no moral issue with doing so.
I still have hope for Paralives
A 64 bit version of Sims3 would fix a lot of the constraints of that game, but it'll never happen.
I don't even care about the DLC, I just want slightly less insane DRM. I can't play the sims 4 right now because of a server outage despite the game already being on my computer. Why do they even need DRM for a free game?
It's a shame. But based on what I saw about it, it looked like maybe they had some delusions about using LLMs for character dialogue, which seems like an insanely complex feature to build into an already complex game.
Why? It can't be much more than using one of those chatbot girlfriends. I know there could be delays as it takes time to generate but it could have a local version that just is a stripped down version that just processes dialogue. Probably requires a beefy GPU though.
Oof. Wasn't this the one that was going to have in-depth object customization? I was looking forward to it from a dollhouse-building perspective. Even if it wasn't great, having some competition might convince EA to allocate more dev resources to the Sims, which has ruthlessly embraced the "minimum viable product" philosophy for a long time.
i dont know if its MVP or if they are just taking as low a risk as possible on their investments. they have no financial incentive to try anything new
Well HECK! I have been advertising this game to every gamer I know, finally a Sims game that's not EA... :( I was very hopeful when they delayed without a new date, just take your time and get it right. Dang, I was really looking forward to this
Paradox is just as bad as EA with DLC. Look at Stellaris, or Victoria, or cities skylines, or surviving mars
Yeah, but having the games in competition would force then to try to win players to their side over the alternative, for both of the games. It would have been nice to have an option when playing this genre.
Have a look at Paralives
Thanks a lot for sharing, i've wishlisted that!
I'm not really that upset considering it was going to end up the same as The Sims (with its content in DLC piecemeal) anyway, coming from Paradox.
It visually looked like an asset flip simulation shovelware game you can find all over Steam by searching for the shit with the worst reviews, too.
Sad. In a way, it is amazing that The Sims 3 is 15 years old now and still, no game is able to match it.
There's some ageless classics. HoMM3 came out 25 years ago and is still pretty much the top of its genre. Freespace2 more or less shut down the spacesim genre 25 years ago, as well...
boo. Oh well, at least there's that other sims-like in development i'm blanking on the name of.
There's also AlterLife.
My biggest complaint about Sims-likes is that the visual style always looks too serious. It gives me the feeling that whatever I'm going to do with my not-Sims, it's gonna be something that makes me regret my real life.
You wanna know what I did the last time I played the Sims 2 though? I repeatedly held parties at my Sim's house and then lured the guests into a room they couldn't get out of. I also used the moveobjects cheat to collect police cars whenever a cop showed up to shut the party down. By the time I was done I had amassed around 70 urns, many hysterical immortal Sims (Sims with households can't die while visiting someone's house in the Sims 2), 4 Police cars and a fire truck.
The Sims has a mischievous air to it that tickles the devil on your shoulder and begs you to listen to them. None of the Sims-likes I'm aware of seem to have the same air.
Edit: now I want to play the Sims again.
This ain't right
My Sim grew weed and played PC games
Kerbal Space Program has a similar vibe, and other space sims take themselves way too seriously to be fun.
RIP KSP2
Well, this is fucking depressing…
well we still have paralives right as an upcoming"sims killer"?
im interested in it but i don't know if it will kill the sims
No surprise. I was really shocked when I saw the videos they released a while ago. Game ran like shit and looked even worse.
Yup... It looked like a really bad attempt at photo realism in 2024. At this point you either need to use cartoon-like graphics or some sort or actually pull off the photo realism.
It was pretty obvious that game was never going to reach either of those marks.
I was definitely excited for the prospect of a Sim's competitor, but this wasn't going to be it... I think they did the right thing pulling the plug.
Stylized graphics would have not helped with the performance, or the mismatching scale of objects & people, or the garbage UI structure, or the garbage game structure. The whole thing was just amateurish and cheap looking.
I love ACNH's style where people are cartoony, but furniture is more detailed.
Honestly that's for the best, the game looked awful all around.
