Scream

however it is doing a massive disservice to the paralives devs and their game to compare it to ts4 currently, instead of ts4 when it initially released; a buggy, glitchy, ugly, claustrophobic, boring mess with no pools or toddlers. keep in mind as well that the paralives team is only 15 people and EA is a massive corporation worth 50 billion dollars.

It’s ok to not want to play the game now in early access I don’t think anyone is demanding that you do but this is very normal for early access games. Actually it boots and runs so it’s doing better than most early access games.

Also yeah did ya’ll just forget what Sims 4…THE FOURTH IN THE SERIES…was like on launch???? ONE MAP. NO POOLS. Then they charged us roughly 7.2 billion dollars for expansion packs to get the things we wanted which Paralives promises they won’t. I think they’re on their second patch already.

I'm also finding myself more frustrated with people not reading back in a chat before talking, not using the search function in discord (unlike Google search, this one still works decently). There's currently a major bug affecting mods loading correctly and people are popping in every few minutes to say "is it just me or are mods broken?" and this could be helped at least a bit by pinning a message about it or having some auto-reply function but this isn't at all unique to this game. I'm not used to the frequency I guess - my main Sims modding haunt isn't super active (especially now that there's a new game in town).

I do hope people start to temper their expectations for Paralives - I've been seeing a lot of (at this point) unearned glazing of the game for features that are hinted at but not actually functional (relationships, things to actually do on community lots (restaurants and shops have the bare minimum of functionality rn), emotions, etc) and the things that do exist need a lot of work - builds are precarious because you can accidentally remove all the floors or all the walls in a way that undo can't recover. I get the frustration, I get how jaded people feel over the state of TS4 and the larger Sims series, and I understand how exciting it is to have something new that could (maybe, someday) unseat The Sims as THE lifesim that scratches that itch of ts2+ts3+ts4 combined, but we're very much not there yet. I want people to be more honest with the game as it is and not confuse it with what it could be some day. I worry that these sky high expectations combined with ever shorter attention spans will lead people to try to speedrun what little content there is (like people are doing with Tomodachi Life) now and declare the game trash or a cashgrab and not the work in progress it clearly states itself as.

Early access is basically a way for smaller game devs to outsource their QA to the buyers. Now we can have a discussion about how ethical that is as you are essentially paying to do work for them….but a lot of game studios do this.

Paralives is honestly one of the better early access games I’ve seen as it:

-runs for most people

-is a game

-has graphics

-they are supporting it with continued patch releases