#1
8th Oct 2020 at 8:52 PM
Last edited by LittleCheshire : 9th Oct 2020 at
1:24 AM.
Genetics, You Feel Me?
Listen, I love legacy and or generational play—please ignore the fact that I have not made it past Gen 1 in the very many saves I have played over 8 years—and I absolutely adore the main thing that comes with that time of play;
watching the genetics play out. I wanna
gush about discuss that with the community today. Granted, I am only truly experienced with the
pet side of the Sims 3 genetics equation currently, but they're still genetics and they still fascinate me a lot, so I personally will be focusing on them specifically and will let others more experienced with the genetics of the Sims talk about the genetics of the Sims.
Acknowledging that there are people who think that the Sims 3 genetics for pets are awful, I actually have to disagree? To me, and going of my own experience with the Sims 3 and
The Red Plumbob's Comparison Videos for the Sims 2 and 4, I think they're the best in the series. I think that the reason people believe the genetics in the Sims 3 pertaining to the pets are severely lacking is that in a vanilla game with no modifications to the code when you breed your dogs or cats and they have more than one baby, one of the babies will be a fucked up clone of the other one. Which means if you bred two dogs of the same fur and body shape i.e breed and they had more than one kid one of those kids was gonna look nothing like their parents, body and fur shape wise. Everyone thought this was a bug within the game for the longest time, and I did too until earlier this year, but it turns out it's not a bug but a
feature. Ah, well, this is EA, of course it is.
But after fixing that, I have to say that just sitting and playing with genetics, whether that be in CAP or in-game, has become one of my greatest joys and how I've been having fun with the game while I wait for the day where I can complete my desktop comes. But to touch on the other games it would seem as though in Sims 2 and 4 that when it comes to the pet's genetics there's a lot of Either/Or going on. Does the baby pet inherit mom or dad's exact body shape? Does the baby pet inherit mom or dad's exact coat? Does the baby pet inherit mom or dad's exact eye color? etc, etc, which in my opinion makes their genetics kind of...uninteresting? But hey, if the Sims 2 and 4 genetics for the pet side of the equation is way more in depth than I'm thinking and making it seem please scream and shout at me about how I'm incredibly wrong, I wanna have a conversation about this. Moving on to the Sims 3 and how they handle pet genetics, I love how if you breed "twin" pets, i.e same dog or cat but unrelated to each other, or purebreed pets, i.e same breed of dog or cat, you won't get an exact clone of the parents. They'll be the same breed of course, with the same body and fur shape, but the resulting offspring will have a very slightly different
coat, and that absolutely delights me because of the realism of it all. Of course, I understand that that would piss some people off because of the line of thought that if you breed clones you should get an exact clone, but honestly I'm too delighted by the realism to care. Oh and crossbreeding, don't even get me started on how much I love crossbreeding the animals in Sims 3, I think it is done so, so well. I can smash together a German Shepherd and Rhodesian Ridgeback and can look at their offspring and tell if they inherited their mom's
skull shape. How fucking cool is that? And I could truly go on and on about crossbreeding, how I think the game handles the inheritance of physical features and how the game does the mixing of coats and creation of new markings, so let me cut this post off here and just say that smacking together two animals with coats that you would swear up and down would clash
horrifyingly only to get a surprisingly drop dead
gorgeous result is one of the best feelings I ever get while simming.
So in conclusion, I think the pet genetics in the Sims 3 are handled very, very well, minus the whole "bug that is a feature" thing, and can and will write a whole ass essay on it if appropriate. But for this first post I chose to focus on the pet side of the genetics in the Sims 3 because that's what I have experience with, but I wanna hear about the Sim side of things as well, which I'm sure the rest of the community here can share their insight on. I've seen quite a few mods that remove some things, like mutations and the weird inheritable puke green hair, and mods that do a new take on the genetics for the Sim side of things, and even Nraas has an advanced genetics section. So I can only guess that the genetics for the Sims in the Sims 3 aren't done really well, or at least not to the satisfaction of the community. But hey, I've never taken a deep dive into the genetics for the Sims so I can be absolutely dead wrong, feel free to say so if I am! As a last note, I have heard that the genetics for the Sims in Sims 2 are done a lot better, so I'd like to hear about that as well.
Let the conversation commence?
Oh c'mon. There better be a point to all this stress I'm under.