Vivaland Discussion Thread
 

As we are allowed to chat about Paralives and Life By You here, I will start a new thread for this. Thank you to Simsample for the heads up about this.

If this is single player also I may be interested in this. I like those characters much more than the Para and I think the building and graphics look good so far. It seems like they speak which is something that I like far more than what is being done in LBY.

So, I am curious to learn more about this.

Your thoughts?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlyTJRglQso

The website says "all households are owned by real players", so it seems to be veering more into Second Life territory. Honestly, I'm not against that on principle, but online games tend to have more aggressive monetization practices which is why I avoid them. However, a social life sim game COULD be fun under the right circumstances.

Looks like it could be fun, a different direction to Paralives and Life By You. I really like the idea of having a more simple life sim game to play with others, although it's always risky (remembering SimCity and Sims Online).

What's funny I talked with someone at a park and rambled about Sins, competitors and somewhat online games the franchise had (inckuding FreeSO). And boom yesterday through another thread I discover THIS, lol.

I like how many variety of choices we have right now. Each competitor being somewhat different.

The beginning of that trailer says "can play solo or team up with 8 friends."

We know very little about this game, but the trailer still did not keep me interested. Multiplayer feature should not be the main focus of a life simulator.

I wonder if they went this way because there were already two other strong contenders in the genre (Paralives and Life By You)? Good thinking to make a new game in a genre where eveyone's interest is currently focused, but do it in a way that others aren't. Could be an interesting addition to our arsenal of life simulators!

I liked that the interaction menu feels quite similar to that of the sims, also that the appearance of the characters is quite good, although as in the rest of the games, it seems that they have not yet worked on expressions or things like movement of the eyes.

I hope they make an offline mode, since in an online game it is implicit that simulation and gameplay are put aside for a chat with boring dynamics and associated purchases.

When I fire up Sims 3 it always says hey you are not online. Yep. I know that and I am staying offline. :D


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I would only want to build on my own. A lot looks good there though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOvUmkXo8A8

and:
https://vivalandgame.com

I always thought of multiplayer as a feature of a game like Second Life or maybe The Sims Online which are not strictly life simulators (I am not sure about TSO).

I just fear that the multiplayer mode will affect other features of a life simulator. Also, I have so many questions about how multiplayer will work. We will see in the future when more details about the game are published.

EDIT: I have just realised that there will also be single-player mode which is good. That means that the focus is also on another aspects of a life simulator like families, careers and so on.

So far this is looking good to me. I would probably just do single player. The build mode with the object placement, curved walls, color wheel, and so on looks as good if not better than Paralives to me and I do not like Para at all and like these Viva so far much more. The graphics are looking good so far. Better than the other 2 IMO. Clear and not a horrible shine or too bright presentation. Not some awful IMO bloom. And I like might not be a grind to play with all the reading perhaps to come in LBY with no speaking and is the base solid enough without too much player tweaking needed?
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Not sure how it is better, when Paralives has advance and more building/customization festures that been shown so far. Unless you mean geaphics.

I maybe should have worded that differently. I was pleased to see the curved walls, the free form object placement, and a color wheel, and so on. So this game will have them as well, and this is at least at a comparable level to the other 2 games it seems, at least as far as these things go. It is looking good to me so far.

I'm not sure this sounds like Second Life at all. Second life was/is not a game, more like a very elaborate chat room. I'm not dissing it in way, just pointing out it didn't have gameplay features exactly. If this has gameplay, it sounds more like Minecraft in the sense that you can choose to create a collaborative world with friends, but with more Sims-like features.

It doesn't seem like an alternative to TS, but like something that could be fun in its own right (and with the right friends)

I don't see why it couldn't work though; for example my daughter and I have created a Sims 2 neighbourhood and sims together, and we take turns to play the neighbourhood by sending the files back and forth. So I could quite imagine how much fun it would be to share the gameplay together, and work in real-time instead of having to wait to see how the game is progressing. Sims 3 touched on this with the Simport thing, where we could send characters to someone else's game (in real time) and they would play them and send them back. Then my character had memories associated with the exchange, and their characters had memories of meeting mine. I would still like to play alone sometimes, but a joint collaboration could be very entertaining. I can see how it could go badly though, in the last edition of SimCity I was trying to build a region with other players, but they kept holding onto cities without abandoning them correctly. This meant that I could never make the region work properly and ruined what had been done to that point. So I hope there is a way to continue a house or character or area if the other players abandon it.

The Steam page mentions 1-8 players multiplayer, so I agree it is nowhere near to the scale of Second Life. If the simulation part of this game will be as elaborate as a Sims game, I will be impressed. So far the store page does not show workshop support, which makes me wonder about mods. There is not much information about this game yet.

@simsample It would be fun to play a neighborhood of sims 2 in the forum

I don't think that social aspects and a The Sims-style game can never be enjoyable. So I'll remain cautiously optimistic. We now have a few single-player life sims on the way and so this will one not being that is okay with me. I do hope it has a sturdy single-player gameplay, though.

Back when when I was on TSR, way back when, there was a house build that each person did one of the rooms. That was kind of fun to see how it went. I might dabble in multi-player with one or 2 people just to see how it works, but generally I want to play solo. Also it would depend on the save system. If we can have multiple ones where we can retain just our work but also have one with others, that would be good so if others in our opinion mess things up for us, we have not lost what we have done.

To play the Sims 2 on the forum we could make a simple neighborhood, in the first round each player must build a house and a family of a few Sims, and from there on in each round the player must play the neighborhood for a few days. If we all use the basic anti-corruption mods it could work. It would be fun to see the photos and stories that happen xD. I don't know, it's something I thought about quickly xD

Well yes, but Paralives can do soo much more (object stretching being one of them). So ut genuinely threw me off, abd albeit misleading, to call it better But to each their own. Some may like a closed world of TS4 and call ir better than TS2 and TS3, so I might argue much even when it can make my eyebrow raise up

I have no interest in the object stretching, for example, so far, so for me that is not a plus in Paralives, and I never said a word about open or closed worlds, so.........................? We have seen a lot from Paralives, more than from this, so who knows what the end results will be? Each person will evaluate what is liked or not in each game and try as wanted. As it should be.

Not even rugs, paintings resizing? What about window resizing? Or plant/tree/rocks resizing. For building that seems useful, I thought.

I absolutely love the resizing we can do in sims 4, but things like stretching a counter or bed, no. I miss resizing when I am in 3. But in my 20 years or whatever it has been now in Sims have never wished I could change the width of a counter, for example.

But I do understand that if the capability is programmed into the game for some things it can be used for others as well.

So far of all that is in the works I have the most interest in Vivaland IF they have strong single player play as well as multi-player which has about zero interest to me. Odds are I will get the free Renee just to look at it and then delete it pretty darn fast. I would have more interest in LBY if the characters spoke. That is a big drawback for me. And as I have said many times I will not play the Para as totally dislike how they are being done.

So each has good and bad points and of course I and many of us want what we think is the best all to be in one game and not spread across several. Sigh...