I've never been happy with EAxis' version, as I am far too familiar with Shakespeare's plays. It annoys me that they apparently just took and mashed a bunch of loosely associated ideas together without any thought as to how they related back to the plays. (That's not even considering that quite a few of the premades look like utter dweebs - which admittedly is fixable, but an added nuisance).

I don't think I need to go into details - anyone who knows their Shakespeare will know how big a mess EAxis made.

All but one of the "improved" "current" Veronavilles use the basic EAxis template - the exception is "Veronaville 2.0", which attempts to be more faithful to the plays as written (and made some attempt to de-dweeb the characters). Unfortunately, that version has some very, very serious problems (the Default characters are not in the Default family but still register as Default, the Townies are split into four or five different pseudo-families, the Strays family is nameless, the accompanying University is buggy, etc.)

The "Beginnings of" versions offer a chance to sort things out from the get-go, but it's a long way from Gen 1 to Gen 5 (and you may still run into the "dweeb" issue).

So then, what would you start with, and where would you take it?

I haven't really thought about it, but now I'm going to!

I haven't played beginning of Veronaville, but I'm currently playing beginning of Pleasantview/Strangetown, and one thing that's super fun about it is being able to create all this extra lore around the core families that rounds out their stories and gives them a real history, at least in my mind. So if I were going to make my own "purist" Veronaville, I'd probably start with all the ancestors and let the game help me create the story. That way, you'd get all the Shakespearean character names, too.

Also, don't call Tybalt a dweeb. It hurts his feelings.

He's not that bad if you take the mask off. Romeo, on the other hand....

By the way, have you watched Leto Mills' videos on Veronaville and Shakespeare lore? I thought they were really well-researched and interesting, and may help with creating a "purist" Veronaville.

I was a bit put off by Leto admitting to using modernized transcripts of the plays, since I don't have much difficulty with Elizabethan English (except some of the subtler idioms, which are often explained in footnotes).

I've also seen two other (older) film versions (besides of course the 1968 Zeffirelli): the glossy 1936 version (everybody was way too old for their roles, which was unfortunate, but they did the best they could) and the relatively bland 1954 version (Juliet's actress was a one-hit wonder).

The videos do make it noticeable how very much Shakespeare recycled names between plays, so you can't always be sure the references EAxis gives are correct.

What would a *real* "purist" Veronaville look like?

Probably absolutely nothing like the Veronaville that my Sims and I have grown to love!

Although I play Veronaville, I never read Romeo and Juliet in school, and until this this August, I had never seen it in a theatre either. The only version I have read was Charles and Mary Lamb's précis for children in their Tales from Shakespeare published in 1807. I read that around the time I was starting to play Veronaville in the hope that it would help me to play it. But this year I finally saw a production of the play at the Edinburgh Fringe. I enjoyed watching it, but it was about as far from Shakespeare's original as my Veronaville. (Romeo and Juliet were PhD students in rival biological research labs, called Montague and Capulet. It even had a sort of "happy ending" in that it ended with Romeo and Juliet going off into the sunset together, after the heads of the labs, Professor Montague and "Lady" Capulet had died as a result of their own stupidity.)

If the Royal Shakespeare Theatre ever does a production of Romeo and Juliet at Stratford on Avon, I'd like to go and see it, but ideally I'd like to take Andrew and Julian with me. As knowledge-hungry teenagers growing up in Veronaville, I'm sure they must have interesting insights into Shakespeare and his drama. By the way, Andrew and Julian style themselves as "Two Young Gentlemen of Veronaville".

Honestly, this could be said about many themes Maxis has attempted, even the TS3 worlds that are heavily themed still feel lacking in areas. I've never been the biggest Shakespeare aficionado, so honestly my suggestion on how to make veronaville a purist would be more about the neighborhood design and layout and less about the families themselves.

I'd start by, and I know this sounds odd, but a complete remodel of Veronaville's terrain. The canal and river are fine, as is the general Tudor theme of its buildings, but the road layout is just horrendous. Could you imagine being a real person and trying to navigate the roads of Veronaville? All those waffleton neighborhood blocks and roads that seemingly lead to nowhere, for what is supposed to be a small town with only three families feels less like a rural medieval-inspired area and more like a concrete jungle with all those empty square plaza-like areas.

What I would do is first remove a lot of the unneeded square road areas and just make it two simple roads that follow along the river. I would relocate the farm area from behind that mansion (I forget what family owns it since been awhile since last playing it) and I'd move the farm further down south along the river. Then there is the god-awful vegetation choice. What's with all the walnut trees? Nah, let's remove those and put down some pine and birch. Pine on the outer skirts toward the edge of the map and birch more center-like.

Those rocks, which i know are for the neighborhood cloud effects... but let's get rid of them. The cloud effect in TS2 neighborhood view never looked right to me, it looks less like clouds and more like something that's being smoked out of a polluting factory.

I would keep the Tudor theme, since Shakespeare and all that, but I would edit each lot, so each feels different enough. One problem I always had with Veronaville was that the houses felt really cookie-cutter, as if Maxis just made one house and copied it into the bin and then spammed it back down with minimal changes. This cannot be. Every house must be unique!

I would use Criquette's embankment set(s) to fill in the canal and make it look more detailed and less depressing. Lastly, add some OFB businesses, so Sims have more to do than visit what I think I recall being the only community lot?

As for families, and their stories, I got no idea.

I didn't do Romeo and Juliet in school either. I had a somewhat independent teacher in 5th and 6th form who decided that instead of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet we were going to do Macbeth and Othello instead. I read Romeo and Juliet later on my own (struggled to get through Hamlet).

Does Veronaville really start with only one community lot? And it predates being able to take sims to Bluewater or Downtown. *shakes head* Out of curiosity, what is the lot?

Nope, there are four: https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Veronaville#Community_lots

We read Macbeth back in middle school (I think) and Hamlet in high school. Found them to be depressing...

That's more or less what I did, except for the detail that I did them in 4th and 5th year. I've never seen Hamlet or properly read it, but the school took us to see a production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead!

Veronaville starts with four community lots -- Veronaville Market and 431 Globe Street on the Tudor (English) Eastside, and 5 Pentameter Parkway and Stratford Strip on the Italian Westside. As Maxis made it, Stratford Strip is the only place that sells clothes, while Veronaville Market, and 5 Pentameter Parkway are the places to buy groceries. 431 Globe Street is the smallest of these lots: it sells magazines and video games, and also has pinball machines to play. I have only made minor changes to these lots (including adding a single clothes rack in Veronaville Market), so in my game they are much as Maxis made them. I'll post pictures of them in the pictures section. Unlike Pleasantview and Strangetown, Veronaville comes without a public swimming pool. That's why the first thing I built was the Swim Centre. When it first opened, this was little more than a big hole in a large field, but it did mean I could see my Sims in the lovely skimpy swimwear I'd been downloading and making for them. Over the years I've been playing it, I've added a lot more shops and other venues, especially in the northern part of the Italian side, which was left largely undeveloped by Maxis. I've named the roads there leading away from the Canal, the Via Venezia and the Via Commerciale (sorry if those names are wrong -- I don't speak Italian!).

I have always concentrated on the ordinary townsfolk of Veronaville rather than the leading families. But two of the characters I've added have a Shakespearean connection. (1) Jamie Siddons, a teen who lives downtown in Mendoza Lane, takes his surname from Sarah Siddons, a famous Shakespearean actress in the 18th and 19th centuries. And (2) of course, since Maxis gave us Desdemona (as a child), I just couldn't resist adding little Othello Moore, who is of course black. He's a lovely gentle little boy, and I just can't imagine that he'll ever lay a finger on Desdemona to harm her. Thanks to the Childhood Crushes mod, they're already in a relationship.

I must have been a terribly precocious child, because I was reading Shakespeare on my own when I was grade-school age. (You get a lot more out of it re-reading as an adult, believe me, heh heh!) Between that and my aunt's King James Bible and some other really odd above-my-age-grade reading, even Chaucer (in college) wasn't so difficult - mostly like reading very thick phonetically-written dialect.

Anyway, back to Veronaville - what I liked about Veronaville 2.0 was that it expanded the map and the available families (more places to go, more playable Sims, and fewer stupid decisions - Bottom is just not supposed to be a female child!). Unfortunately it's bug-prone, and a bit iffy as regards stability. I'm currently trying to see if I can back up far enough to get rid of a particularly pernicious bug that resulted from some strange adventures in babysitting (the Teen sitter Ran Away when I tried to gussy her up "on the job", the game hosed after I quit without saving, and the bugs have just proliferated ever since).

So if I wind up having to start from scratch, I'm probably going to do it my way (esp. if I can get the 2.0 terrain and lots copied over - there seems to be a trick to Moo's tutorial I haven't quite caught on to yet).

I remember Othello Moore as the child whose father wouldn't let him get an education and used him as child labour lol. Although one of my sims still remembers him as the boy who never wrote back to her when she sent him a penpal letter.



Ugh, yes! And what sort of parent names their female child Bottom? Bottom was Nick Bottom's surname! Nicky or Nicola would have been much better if they had to make her female.

I think the community lots in Veronaville are rather pitiful, and there is one shopping center, if I recall correctly, that is basically a copy of the shopping center in Pleasantview.

I'm always tempted to make over Veronaville, add more lots, and make it more cohesive in design, especially on the Monty side of the canal. Unfortunately, I rarely have the patience to do much building. It's definitely lacking a restaurant for the Montys to run. Also it would be fun to really lean into the Shakespeare theme and add lots like a theater, a public square where there could be duels, a church and tomb (and a Friar Laurence character!), some kind of tavern, an open-air marketplace, etc.

You could just expand on Romeo and Juliet, include more characters and settings from that play (where is Juliet's balcony?), or if you're going to incorporate other Shakespeare plays, perhaps design different areas of Veronaville to support them. For instance, there could be an enchanted woods where the fairies from A Midsummer Night's Dream live.

I would definitely introduce other families and reduce the number of Capps that are there at the beginning. They could be different houses, as in the play. Also, the townies should all have Shakespearean names as well.

I haven't seen Veronaville 2.0 -- apologies if I'm repeating ideas from that hood.

ETA Ani Bats has made over some Veronaville lots that I think are inspiring.

All I can say is- I have absolutely no idea why EA chose to loosely base a hood on Shakespeare. And I have no idea what they were aiming at with the architecture or sims (apart from showing off what you could do in the game with character creation and building). It only makes sense if you take it as completely unrelated to anything else, or if you look on it as the unique culture in which @AndrewGloria 's sims live.

Veronaville 2.0 added a variety of shops and other community lots, including a wedding chapel (on the Capulet side - the "real" names are used) and a swim center (on the Montague side). Their version of Romeo has orig. Mercutio's head, and looks much cuter; Mercutio is not his brother, but just a friend (and belongs indirectly to Escalus' family, being the son of Escalus Prince's widowed sister Edina Steel - Paris is his first cousin, the son of Escalus' late brother and lives with him). Benvolio is Romeo's first cousin and lives with him at Patrizio and Isabella's - Isabella is much younger than Patrizio, possibly a second wife, and they actually are Romeo's parents (not grandparents). Benvolio is the son of Patrizio's brother Emilio and wife Amelia, who perished in the Great Fire that resulted in families taking in orphaned relatives (and may have started the feud - that's optional). The Montague house includes a restaurant-like area, but neither Patrizio nor Isabella have particularly high cooking skills or any Culinary experience (which is odd).

Escalus is in the Politics career with a LTW to become Mayor (he's not there yet).

Farther down (or up) the Montague side is the Faerie household, where Oberon lives with his nephew Puck (both much improved by de-makeupping and makeovers). He and Titania are estranged, and he wants to get back together with her and reclaim his adopted daughter India (this is the only real gender-bender in 2.0 - if you remember the play, Titania's adopted orphan was a boy).

Lastly on that side of the river, we have the six Tradesmen, aka the "rude mechanicals": Peter Quince, Francis Flute, Nick Bottom, Robin Starveling, Tom Snout, and Snug Joiner (who had no last name in the play, so gets an "occupational" surname here).

Across the river, we have Titania Summerdream and her five daughters (counting India) - the other four are Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth and Mustardseed, and they are hers but not Oberon's (a deadbeat, possibly dead, father named Daemon Featherlight apparently left her with two sets of twins). The household also includes a cockatoo named Eglamour. Titania has a (presumably potion-induced) crush on Nick Bottom, and he is not at all reluctant to reciprocate.

And we finally get to the Capulets: once again a generation has been removed - Juliet is the daughter (not granddaughter) of Contessa and Consort, while Tybalt is her first cousin and the son of (deceased) Cordelia (Contessa's sister) and Caliban; the household includes live-in housekeeper Angelica Nurys, who has her own apartment over the garage.

Consort was apparently originally a Troy, son of Hector and Andromache (another generation deletion). His sister Miranda(!) married Albany Castus (the Castus family is not matrilineal) and they have one daughter, Rosaline (Romeo's Rosaline, whom he had a crush on at the start of the play - in the game he likes her but she doesn't care for him).

Moving on down, we come to the Hamlet cast: house Denmark includes Claudius, Gertrude and Hamlet (Jr.), while a supposedly resurrectable Hamlet Sr has a tombstone in the back yard (this may or may not work, depending on the method used - can't say I recommend the Resurrection Potion). Their neighbors are the Corambis family (Corambis being an earlier name for Polonius): Polonius, Laertes and Ophelia.

The attached University includes a fraternity (Aragon Fraternity: Pedro Don, John Don, Benedick Padua, Claudio Florence, Conrade Mastin, and Borachio Dolon), a sorority (Nouvelle Sorority: Beatrice Messina, her cousin Hero Messina, Margaret Nabal, and Ursula Herlinde), and two dorms, one vacant, one occupied (Midsummer Night's Dorm: Demetrius Faucher, Lysander Carleton, Helena Viotto and Hermia Francis).

There are also an assortment of accidentally pregenerated Townies and Strays.

There are, as far as I know, no scripted events, other than certain Sims being "tuned" to be attracted to certain other Sims - you're on your own.

======================================================================

Still can't get rid of that bug. I've got one chance left, and if that doesn't work....

======================================================================

If you don't like the idea of a Great Fire (I don't), an alternative possibility is a major flood (notice the levees either side of the river, and the fact that no premade house has a basement).

I think they found the Romeo-Juliet storyline and tudor architecture elements irresistible, then they just threw in some random Shakespeare references because they saw the potential for a theme. But I'm glad they did, Shakespeare's plays got my imagination going ever since I was six and my dad bought us som cartoon versions of The Tempest, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet . I would probably have loved it if Veronaville was "clean and purist" and very nerdy! But figuring out how that version of Veronaville would look is well beyond me. Bottom's name has always felt like a disaster to me, and it got on my nerves first time I opened the neighbourhood that Beatrice and Benedick are siblings and children - I felt robbed of an opportunity to try and play a version of my favourite Shakespeare comedy there, so I suppose I would have changed that. And Veronaville needs more different families anyway, so I suppose I would have sorted them by play. And the Capp and Monty sides should have been separated by a generous buffer of unrelated families, homes for families representing the other plays.

Problem is far worse than I thought - the game itself is corrupted.

===================================

Finally got to the bottom of it, and it's something I wouldn't have expected. Using the "No (Rod) Humble" hack results in a deleted Sim and a stub file with no data. Rod Humble is cited as a "Universal" Sim that isn't safe to mess with. This probably explains the strange "Unknown" Sim with No Character Data who has been messing things up for the last week or two.

Ditched that mod and replaced it with "Picky Humble" https://modthesims.info/d/688169/picky-mr-humble.html - which I have to hope won't result in a split Humble file (but at least I'll know what's going on if it does).

@AnMal - absolutely agree about Benedick and Beatrice, and it doesn't help that I have gotten the bug multiple times when Beatrice has lost her family ties to Benedick and ended up being very attracted to him or vice versa. I have tried a couple of clean versions of Veronaville, but it always seems slightly buggy--no idea why. Well, it's made for some interesting gameplay, at least.

One issue with (most versions of) Veronaville is a lot token that EAxis forgot to delete, which keeps the scripted events from running. Instructions on how to get rid of it here: https://pentawa.tumblr.com/

As far as I remember, the only plays set in tudor England are Merry Wives, the Henrys and Richards I think, so I'm not sure what that's doing in Verona! And Puck et al were in Athens. So I think Veronaville is definitely in an alternate reality. But very cool, I love the mediterranean style lots.

Problem wasn't, or wasn't only, the "No Humble" mod. And again it was something I would never have expected. This thing https://modthesims.info/d/522139/sp...t-summoner.html lives in the Downloads directory, but the game - and SimPE - reads it as though it's expected to be in the Neighborhood directory, and it shows up in SimPE (and HoodChecker) as a stub file with no character information.

This may, or may not, be an issue, but it is certainly an annoyance. Things that annoy me tend not to remain in my game. (At least I probably won't have to reinstall the whole cottonpickin' game!!!)

"Merry Wives" is Tudor all right, because Queen Elizabeth allegedly asked Shakespeare to write a play about "Falstaff in love". (Shakespeare, being the savvy dramatist he was, realized that a straight-up romantic plot would never work, hence all the broad comedy.) The only Tudor Henry play is "Henry VIII", which was co-written with John Fletcher. All the rest are pre-Tudor (although Henry the eventually-VII comes in at the end of "Richard III" to clean house - don't get me started on Shakespeare as pro-Tudor propagandist!)

Veronaville as EAxis made it is random mix-and-match (and even more so with the ancestors). Aliens really wouldn't fit in, hence the inclusion of Fae Folk. Delijume's "Veronaville 2.0" plays it a lot straighter while retaining the mix-and-match feel (and adding more Fae Folk). The Fae element can always be taken farther still by adding Fae and half-Fae characters (not sure how Midge's Fairy mods would work with this).

Maybe nick bottom was trans, who knows, i had memes about malvolio and benvolio being trans and dead and used the names malvolio and belvolio as names of a couple one all white angelic themed and another all black demonic themed. Not even gobias koffi from 3 is completely like tobias funke was, except IIRC arrested development came back during that era

No, I'm pretty sure Nick Bottom (from the actual play) was cishet - and a major egoist. (He already was a bit of an ass, so giving him an ass's head was poetic justice.)

Benvolio is from R&J, Malvolio from Twelfth Night, and there's no common meeting ground between them. (Somebody's been reading/seeing Good Omens a few too many times.) Some Simmers queer-code both Mercutio and Tybalt, and try to get them involved in a quite different way than fighting each other. Uphill work, but doable.

1) maybe then he had a daughter that got adopted by titania and oberon and turned into a fairy. Bottom could mean something else in fairy language.

Fairies could know… the true name of everything, independent of what humans call them. (See: The Tricou names)

2) Ive used the names malvolio and benvolio as nondiegetic ones.

3) the trope is that they don’t hate each other but are just very culturally attuned to the feud. Some say the shakespearean mercutio is romantically into romeo or benvolio instead. Shakespearean tycutio don’t hate each other either.