I agree with you that calling the dev team lazy is going too far, but the feeling that there is a lot missing can't be denied. especially the quality of the hairstyles, facial hair and clothing is laughable. now this isn't something that falls under the category time constraint. The Sims is probably the most successful game franchise ever owned by the biggest gaming company out there, I'm sure they have the money to finance the extra week it takes the team to add a few more meshes.

...the key is, that they're not interested in selling a fully loaded game, that would go against their tradition of expansions, stuff packs and now pay downloads. I'm realy tired of being milked....they're not lazy they're just greedy.

I agree about the 'lack of story' I really enjoyed the rich story they created in the sims 2. All of the characters had 'memories' too which made for interesting stories about their past. I like the whole 'where's Bella?' mystery. The sims 3 doesn't have a story that's anywhere near as interesting.

Also, from a machinima point of view, the lack of animations such as getting into a car, no change table for babies/toddlers, not being able to bath a baby/toddler, even the way they collect the dishes (by magically 'swooping' them up) - these and many other animations (or lack of) will be more limiting to machinima directors than what we have in the sims 2.

Creators aren't limited to the 3D artists. The design team, the programmers, the artists, etc--everyone involved in the project is a creator. And if all the people working on the game had more resources and more time, what you and I are playing right now would frankly be a much better product. Instead, they did the best with what they were given by the people higher than the designers. The designers themselves couldn't have been lazy, and if they'd had a choice, they would not have "stripped the sims down to what it is."



http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html <-- Here is a pretty amazing article about how EA treats its employees, which I encourage everyone to read. It might make some people think twice about calling the team who worked on Sims 3 lazy.

Lazy is definitely the wrong descriptor and the real problem is in ea pushing the game to be released long before it's done. Like I've said before, this game needed to be pushed back at least another month or two and have been worked on with a team double the size with half the workload.

[edit:had some further thoughts] This engine is the basis for ea's income from the sims for next 5 or so years. They probably focused too much on making money off this game without looking at this as a future investment for the easy creation of EP's and items in the store. But now they have to dedicate at least part of their team for future ep work to fixing the problems that shipped with the base game.[edit]

When people say "the animations/hairstyles/clothes/camera/whatever sucks," it's directed at the people who actually put in the hours to make these things. The pit boss isn't walking around saying "crap up that style a little bit, if it's too good we won't sell as many units." Sadly, a good majority of the people who play Sims 3 don't see the real creators as "their people," evidenced by everyone who's complaining about the laziness of game aspects (animations, no movies, etc). It seems that very few people actually realize the work that goes into a game of this magnitude.

EA's decision makers are the ones who push the hours and they're the ones who demand content be created and taken out to sell later. They ARE the bad guys here. Just not enough people realize the crowbar separation between the decision makers and the creators.



Money invested into the game is money taken out of the profits. The decision makers at EA are going to do cut every corner they can in order to max out revenue for the short term. That means they're going to cut staff. They're going to cut wages. They're going to increase hours. They're going to drive their team into the ground, and then when the game goes gold, that's it. A small team stays behind to patch, and the rest go on to work on EPs. Quality isn't even remotely a concern for the bigwigs at EA. But the creators, on the other hand, would much rather put something out into the world that is real quality. If they'd had any say in the matter, this thread probably wouldn't exist right now.

Then,why don't they just let them take their time,not put a deadline so soon.

Sarasvati, you have a good point that the unpolished feel of TS3 is more likely the result of EA's terrible production policies rather than the development team itself, but I would like to add that it doesn't change the fact that they still put the game out of the door broken. On top of that, they had the whole of TS2 with its expansion packs to work off of, and they still messed up small things like path-finding. The idea that these problems stem from laziness probably comes from the fact that there are full-time programmers who worked on this game for years, didn't notice these problems, and didn't fix them until after modders did on their own time with no tools to start with.

That being said, my resentment is absolutely pointed at the higher-ups in EA who thought that it was okay to throw out an unfinished game for the sake of short-term profit and fix the problems later. And, as you pointed out, that is the least of their sins. This thread should probably have been titled, 'Are the Sims 3 creators being given too little time?'

Money....

Sadly enough, if you have worked in a typical corporate environment in just about any industry since the 1980s, this would seem relatively intuitive.

Stuffed shirts and shareholders in general only care about profit margins. Since pricing on games is pretty much fixed, the only way to improve margins is to cut overhead, which means hiring people as cheaply as possible, making them work a whole bunch of unpaid overtime, and cutting/half-assing as many features as you can get away with and still have a decent portion of the consumers be willing to hand you more money for expansion packs/DLC that adds or fixes the features that make the game "complete" in the eyes of the fanbase and devs.

Or something like that, anyway.