You are right, this won't be a priority. It is a problem for me because I always take snapshots in Sims(-like) games, trying to document important points - a sort of visual diary which, however, does not make any sense if you can't tell what the characters were actually doing at the moment.

Discussion about this game has really taken a nose dive since last week. I suppose that's what happens after censoring and banning everyone who tried to have a serious discussion about the game at launch. I checked the forums today and it seems that the biggest topic this past weekend was public outrage about a Youtuber who's opinions the community doesn't approve of. I guess that is what passes as constructive over there because I didn't see anyone get banned.

The active player-count is also nosediving as the hype is running its course and people are having to face the unfortunate reality that there's less gameplay here than Sims 4 had at launch and it's more buggy, too. "But it's Early Access!" has been a convenient way to hand wave away valid criticism, but it doesn't realistically retain players and hype, does it? Because at the end of the day nobody wants to play an over-glorified tech demo for any length of time. And Paralives has been over-glorified in every sense of the word..

Also let's get real - nobody honestly thinks that the card system is any good, do they? I heard one person say that the cards are essential for paralives to be different from The Sims... Like seriously, why? Even if you don't like The Sims, latching onto a feature just because it is the one thing that The Sims doesn't have, doesn't automatically make that feature good for the game!

Cards might work for a mobile game that you play a quick session on the train for some quick contextualized gameplay. But they are not going to work in longer and larger storylines for those of us who have the imagination required to keep a save going for that long. How many times are we going to see the same cards over again 100hrs in? What about 1000 hours in?

It's a feature that people are latched onto right now because it feels distinct and it enhances the cute and cozy vibe of the game but they aren't considering its practicality in a life sim, and as a result it will end up having development time sunk into it for no actual benefit long term.

The Sims formula was successful because it was a systems-first design, where the storytelling came about from a complex mix of traits, likes & dislikes, wants and fears, and relationships, driven by intelligent sim autonomy and reactions. Stories weren't generated by a pop-up card. They emerged from systems interacting. The cards in Paralives right now are a crutch for these missing features and should not in any way be developed as a substitute.

The same can be said about the storyteller. The AI storyteller's in Rimworld all reached an inevitable conclusion in that game. After 100hrs most players disable it because it gets in the way of the more intricate stories they want to tell. The Rimworld devs have not developed any additional AI storyteller's since the launch of the game because they realized it is ultimately obsolete in what is already a deep and complex systems-first design with virtually unlimited storytelling potential..

I know I'll get hate for saying all this but I'm just stating the reality and how I see it. The priorities of the community for this game is all wrong and they will steer the direction of this game off a cliff into safe and cozy indie-game land.

The storyteller in Rimworld works different from Paralives storyteller. In Rimworld all it does is determine the frequency and severity of 'events' (diseases, disasters, traders, raids, infestations, etc). It doesn't determine starting conditions like in Paralives, because that is the role of the scenario (editor) in Rimworld. Without storyteller in Rimworld (can only be disabled through dev mode) , you disable all events, including traders. It is part of the core of the game lol. There is no way that most players disable that and that the devs see it as 'ultimately obsolete'. There are even loads of mods that add a specific storyteller to the game. Your remark about this makes me doubt that you play Rimworld.

Also, why would anyone be against the storyteller in Paralives? Having options to tune your gameplay experience is a bad thing? I hope they will expand on this.

As for the state of the current game in Paralives. Yes, the game is seriously buggy. And lacks content. Still, the building and character creation is already solid. It lets you customize almost anything already. The action queue is already more solid than TS4 action queue has ever been. It also deals with autonomy the way it should (player actions takes priority). Also, the city feels more alive and para's actually leave and return to their house according to working hours. And are not available during those. Just this alone already makes the town feel more authentic than a TS4 neighbourhood ever did to me. I also don't think the card system is a bad idea, just that it is bare bones right now. I've seen plenty of suggestions to improve upon this without discarding it completely (which would be a major set back in development also).

I also expected that the game would be bought by many impatient life simulation fans that are desperate for a new version. Same happened with InZoi. And they probably claim to understand what Early Access means (but not really do :p) and expect the game to be feature complete now.

My biggest fear concerning Paralives right now, is performance.

Another day, another problem - but this one could be fatal.

As I said, I sent my first couple to bed and left them there. My original plan was to create a new (male) Para, put him in a flat and see what happens. I quickly found out that was not possible; I also found no way to make an NPC playable. I ran into the same problem in TS4 and in InZOI; in those cases I (sort of) solved it by creating several separate games but in case of Paralives I noticed there is always just one save and that stopped me: I don't want the new game save to overwrite the old one and therefore lose my couple. I am not sure. of course, so I'd like to know if anyone tried that and if a new game creates a new save or overwrites the previous one.

BTW, Steam forums: I haven't been banned (yet) but I saw one of my answers disappear. In it I wrote that AI can be used in a good way and offered an example. Tabu. Bang.

I haven't tried to create a separate save, but have made many extra characters and installed them in houses around the town.
The Paras that aren't being played carry on appearing round town without progressing, and you can clickback on their house and go back to them, or any other family.
Currently this is like sims 2. They plan to add optional story progression for non-played characters later.
I must admit I had simply assumed you could make back up saves, or start a new game without losing previous work, I just haven't done that so far. It would feel odd if that weren't possible.

That's what i was trying to do. How exactly did you create them?

At the top right of the screen there are three dots. Click there and a menu appears centre screen with various options. One of those is 'create new household'.
That new household will be live once you have made them, but you can go back to your original family by going to map mode (M) and clicking on the house or plot of your original character.

So obvious and yet I managed to miss it. Makes me wonder. Thank you for your help!

The storyteller hardly does anything right now except set your difficulty (which you can customize to your liking) and give you random cards at the end of the day. The problem with the storytellers is not that they exist, but that they can't do more yet. Like Rimworld, I expect the storytellers to set the frequency of good and bad things happening around town (not necessarily WHAT good and bad things, just how often they might occur).

I don't mind the cards at the end of the day, but I need way more risk and reward. What if there's good cards but a chance it could lead to a disaster? What if there's a bad card but you'll get a good reward if you manage to overcome it? This is where I'd like to see the development of the storytellers go. It would definitely create a bigger difference between each storyteller as well. Ricardo would be the high risk and reward storyteller, Maxance would be the middle road of course, and Stella would basically be all good cards.

Occasionally they pop up during social interactions but they literally don't do anything except help you level up your relationships or add new relationship tags. The storytellers is an amazing system and I don't see anyone complaining much about them. They aren't literally telling your story, they're setting your difficulty/chaos level.

If you actually play Rimworld, I think you would better understand their role in the gameplay and how they work. I agree, it doesn't sound like you've actually played Rimworld before.

I played quite a bit of the game, and I think there's a good foundation there. I would understand if some people hold back getting it now though.

To me, there's a couple of things I'm not 100% on as they are now. The interaction cards and the lack of consequences. But I hope that would eventually be something added. Like I think the vandalism should have consequence. But it's cool that it's present in the game, at least. And I'm torn on the cards. Because I'm not a fan of having a huge pie menu with loads of things, having to try to find one interaction. But also, I don't like that there's so few and they're out of my hands, you know?

But maybe that will be something adjusted over time. I do like a LOT of the things they've done with the game though.

I've been playing Rimworld for a long time and I feel like the game has outgrown the 3 AI storytellers by a wide margin.

I'm not a modder, but one of the only mods I am using disables random events such as eclipses and solar flares. Why? Because I've seen these events 1000 times already and they don't actually add meaningful to the story I'm trying to tell with my colony.

After a while, you'll have seen every solar flare, disease, raid, and quest the storyteller can throw at your colony. Eventually, these events stop feeling like stories and start feeling like routine obstacles that you solve the same way every time. Meanwhile, RimWorld's simulation has become deep enough that compelling stories can emerge naturally from the colony itself, without needing constant intervention from the storyteller.

If even RimWorld's storyteller becomes repetitive after enough time, how will the Paralives storytellers avoid the same fate? If Paralives ultimately becomes a shallow simulation + lots of cards/events/storyteller interventions, eventually players are going to recognize a finite set of story situations.

My concern right now is that the cards and storytellers themselves are currently compensating for a lack of simulation depth and I question if the developer will continue using them as a crutch. I believe that would be a very bad design choice. I'd rather see development effort invested in autonomy, relationships, personalities, and life stages, than in systems that generate stories through cards. Cards are easy to add, simulation depth is much harder, so I'm worried cards will become the path of least resistance for Paralives.

You don't need mods to disable specific events. You can disable any type of event that you don't like in scenario editor and save it as a new scenario for you to start. I do the same with 'Zzzzzt..', the shortcircuit. I mean, you can research to build a rocket, but not a circuitbreaker? In Rimworld the storyteller determines frequency and severity of an event (how often , how many attackers for example). Not whether they happen.

It makes no sense saying that the storyteller in Rimworld becomes repetitive. They just roll the dice and a different storyteller has different dice.

Same goes for Paralives. Paralives is like Rimworld storyteller and scenario editor combined. For now the difference is barely noticable because the live mode game systems havent been fleshed out enough yet. So it mostly the starting conditions that you set (or leave be) that are noticable. An example is the disease you can get from work in Paralives. This is clearly a proof of concept. The system is there, but it still has to become more elaborate. More situations, different diseases. And hopefully, either through vanilla or mods, we get the option to disable diseases in the storyteller settings. The system for this is already there, because you can already mod it.

You are jumping the gun here when it comes to paralives and for Rimworld you simply don't understand the task of the Storyteller in that game.

Just wait first what they plan to do with the together cards and see if they take some of the suggestions about them to heart and flesh it out to make it more engaging. But the coming time they are probably more focussed on squashing the gazillion bugs.

That is exactly why it is repetitive. It rolls a dice on a finite number of global events happening.



The task of the storyteller is to trigger a chain of events (for example; a colonist is killed in a weather event, causing a loved one to have a mental break, causing something else to happen, etc). The problem over time is that the origin of every story becomes "It all began when a solar flare hit the colony!". Can't you see how that can get a bit repetitive for a veteran of the game?



If I start seeing a pattern where gameplay problems are being addressed with additional cards rather than improvements to AI, autonomy, relationships, and simulation, then I'll become increasingly concerned about the direction of the game. At that point I think it's worth the community having a serious discussion about whether cards are supplementing the simulation or replacing it.

I personally wouldn't mind together cards, if they came with more different animations. I do understand people who don't like them. This is coming from a TS2 player. Having all these interactions that have multiple different animations is making it hard for me to adjust to together cards.

I see the solution in making more different animations for together cards. They need to be more varied. The team should put an argue category and a play category with the cards. This is not copying TS, in my opinion. However, that shouldn't be the team's priority now; the team has to fix bugs.

As for the storytellers, I think it is a nice addition, but I feel like most of them only make the game easier. I haven't bought Paralives yet, so take everything I said with a grain of salt.

To shift the topic a little.

I found a temporary solution for my paras living on empty lots (I am too lazy* to build or sort through steam workshop right now!)
I've been sending my houseless residents to call on other households and using their facilities
One in particular, I've decided has set up as a house plant sitter and is occupying her neighbour's home during work hours.

I'm sure this situation will be fixed, I ought not to be able to raid stranger's fridges, or occupy their beds while they wander round aimlessly all night.
Hopefully by the time we get to the fix stage, a few creators will have set up some delightful home shops and I won't have to tackle the steam pile.

*Lazy, also known as actually enjoying exploring and live mode and wanting to make the most of that.

Paralives - Steam Stats!

Someone please correct me if I linked a faulty source.

This means that the game sold over 500 000 copies, which is amazing! That makes the total profit of over 19 million dollars (I think canadian)! It also has a review score of 90%!

This is more than enough for the team to grow and to make this game even better...

Oooh this was quick, a website cataloguing Paralives content!
Not entirely accurate, but it looks pretty!
https://paramakers.com/

@Casimir wow that's impressive!

The link is good. Here is another one, to Steam Charts, which gives you the number of players ATM.

Paralives: 21.215
TS4: 28.924
InZOI: 2.678

The numbers are changing all the time but I don't think that ratio does, at least not much. TS4 is still ahead, though not as much as I expected - but look at InZOI! I wonder what its future will be. They had more than a year head start over Paralives and they blew it; I wouldn't be surprised if Krafton abandoned it in the end.

I'm an idiot.
I thought you always have to click on another para and use the "Talk With" interaction before you get the bar filling up and get the conversation cards. Turns out, if you select both paras to do something, you get the bar filling while they are doing this. I had a father and daughter paly hopscotch together and the bar keeps filling up while they play.

I'd say expect the Paralives numbers to go down a bit once people run out of content to play. Build mode and paramaker will keep a lot of attention for a while. They're quite robust and customizable.

But for the long term until live mode is more situated, I think the paralives numbers might go down some more. Maybe not as low as Inzoi (I heard Inzoi's build mode is not as flexible, which could be a reason for those numbers)

Oooh, I'm still not downloading mods because I am too lazy to update things, but I am seriously tempted by this one;
A 2D functional town map.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Paralives/...pperlot_viewer/


As a side note, it looks like the script modders are using Nexus to host their mods.
https://www.nexusmods.com/games/paralives

I noticed some things last play :

- I used the cheat to add an existing para to a household. This does not work well I have noticed. After adding them, they cannot use their phone to invite others, it is greyed out. Only the paras you originally created for that household can. Also, if you then switch household, the added para will return to their original household. Their portrait will then show in both households lol. This might be the reason why there is no invite to live together option yet.

- A flaw in the together card system. Let's say you are setting the mood for a first kiss. If you have a para that has 'good at romantic relationships' social perk, it will give you more flirty together card types. Which sounds great. But it also means that the chance on getting the First Kiss together card, becomes lower. Simply because the system has more cards to randomly chose from. I sent feedback about this, because it makes it feel even more random.

- Sometimes wants don't track progression. This is just a visual glitch and they still complete. It worked for me with the 'do something for x hours' and 'earn 200 paradigms' etc wants. There is one want I haven't been able to complete though, which is 'learn something on the computer'. Tried everything, learning about, practicing something, for hours. Nothing.

-Smart action queue? I sent my para to eat from yesterday's pizza and then added bathroom and shower to the queue. While they were eating, the pizza went bad, so I added the clean up pizza to the queue. When they finished eating, they cleaned up the pizza together with their plate before going to the bathroom! I don't know if this is just a weird positive glitch, or intended. If it is intended, I love it.



No,the pool of events are determined by the scenario. This is also where you can disable them. By default almost all events are selected. The storyteller just throws a dice on which event is chosen from that pool. And which storyteller you chose determines how often the dice are thrown, in what intervals and how strong some events hit (Randy being random about this all, so cant be repetitive). So if the event is not in that pool, it cant be chosen by the storyteller. So, you are complaining about the wrong thing.

So , if you want to have a less repetitive play through. Start playing around with the scenario editor. You can create your own scenarios, it is very easy with the ingame options. But can also find modded ones if you want. Maybe you would have more fun with an edited scenario to your preference and then use Randy Random as storyteller to make it less predictive.

I have my homeless paras squat in vacant buildings. After I started doing this, I found one in particular right in the centre of town that seems like it was designed to imply just this sort of situation.

So, I'd love it if you couldn't direct your homeless paras to just wander into someone's home and use their stuff without knowing them and them being okay with it first, but if you COULD direct them to do so to an unoccupied lot and let them just squat!

I find this video interesting because it shows how extremely modded parafolk might look like in the future. Notice how the parafolk in the video doesn't have the original outline that contours the entire body or the harsh lines.

This is just proof that the artstyle of the game is not off-putting, but that people look for a way to enchance it, or they want to make it more suitable to their own taste.