Is Paradox doing okay? They own several franchises I care quite deeply about so I certainly hope this is a good decision cut their losses and not deliver a dud and not cost cutting to shore up worsening finances
It’s kind of wild that the game went from being 4 months away, to a year away, to cancelled. I was very willing to believe they just needed more time. I’m used to thinking that if a game is at the point where the studio is advertising it for release in a few months, it’s impossible that the project would get completely shitcanned. Why were they advertising it and putting up a steam store page if it was still so up in the air?
An entire simulated town that you interact with and take part in still sounds like a pretty fun idea. I know it’s not the same genre but I hope Streets of Fortuna can pull it off.
Sims 3 tried to approximate that, though in reality Sims that you couldn’t see around at the moment had a very simple alternate simulation instead of the full sim for those you were watching.
The illusion mostly worked and you technically had a full seamless small town you could visit and interact directly with.
Sims 3 was also an unstable nightmare, but it was made for what is now 15-year-old hardware and, I assume, held together with shoestrings.
They got rid of the seamless part in 4, instead splitting the world in tiny groups of a couple buildings each, meaning even EA probably thought the open town was too much trouble. Too bad because the separate blocks are a lot more boring too… Like most of the Sims 4 really.
That’s kind of like Tiny Life. It is similar to the Sims but with retro graphics. Lots of people bought it as soon as it hit early access when a lot of core things were missing.
I mean you aren’t too far off. Honestly I wouldn’t mind it. I would rather have a feature rich simpler looking game than something that’s fancy and shallow.
I’d be more than impressed by something just basically recreates the original Sims experience.
Although I’d love to see that happen more frequently, this is simply not realistically doable for most commercial games.
Almost all of them use licensed third-party libraries which are integrated deeply into the game’s code base, but which can’t legally be distributed as part of an open source project. So in order to be able to open source a modern commercial game, you’d have to put in quite a lot of work finding all of your code integrating with commercial libraries and either replacing or removing it. And if that’s not enough, you’d probably have to have your (expensive) legal team check the entire code base for any infringements just to be on the safe side.
All that work for no monetary gain just isn’t a very good business case. So, unfortunately, I wouldn’t expect a lot of modern games to be open sourced any time soon.
And assets, don’t forget assets. If you use any bought assets from assets stores (Unity / Unreal, heck even textures from textures.com), the licenses don’t allow you to redistribute those in raw form.
Even if you’re using only things you have copyright to, it’s still not a good idea to license it under same terms as code. Code licenses =/= art licenses
That’s usually not the case. Most assets are entirely cosmetic. It’s why when things get messed up you tend to see purple floor, wireframes or checked test planes. As far as coffee is concerned art assets are usually just “what do I make this look like”. As far as physics and interactions goes it’ll do exactly what it was supposed to before. That’s not too say it’s not valuable, but whoever gets the code can by the pack, put in the right asset references in the right places in the code and be exactly where they were before.
Add comment