My Thoughts On Paralives Now That I've Played It and It Has Been Out For Awhile
Honestly I meant to get to this a bit sooner, however when the game first came out, it was beyond buggy. It was beyond buggy in the sense that my paras kept getting stuck every five to ten minutes making the game almost unplayable to me, so I have to ask the development team to fix it, and they did, but it took a little while.
Initially I played with a couple of premade Paras just to get the hang of how it works, and than I made my own family and began building a house for them.
It wasn't the most impressive thing, because I'm not used to the build mode. One thing that should be added is the ability to see object hit boxes or if its being blocked so that it cannot be used. Build mode is really good overall. Its a lot like the Sims 4 build mode, but better for the most part. The fact that "move objects" is practically always on by default can cause problems like the ones mentioned above.
The way foundations work is kind of odd and takes a bit of getting used to, but its really nice to be able to make split level homes with a garage attached the foundations without having to use a cheat code like "constrainfloorelevation off." It tends to look really bad when you do that in the Sims 3, but not in Paralives. In Paralives you can have one door on top of a foundation and another door on the ground level in the same building and unless you're just not very good at building, it should look fine. I didn't include a garage in this early attempt at building in the game because one, the lot size is kind of small, and two, cars are not yet in Paralives, but should be added via a patch at a later date.
I love the object variety and how you can change the size and height of curtains, so they any curtain can fit just about any window, and you don't have to worry so much about them clipping through other nearby objects. The Sims 3 suffers from that problem, for the most part, Paralives does not.
Another issue I had was the fact you don't have the ability to assign beds in this game, so every time one of my paras had to got to sleep, they kept heading to the nearest bed, rather than the one in the room that I intended for them to sleep in. I kept having to cancel the sleep interaction on them, and than tell them to go to the correct bed. It is kind of annoying.
The height sliders are something I really like about the game. Its great that you can make Paras that are different heights, unlike Sims in any of the Sims games so far. It really makes a difference as far as realism is concerned and making other paras stand out. I'm also especially glad that teens are shorter than when they become young adults, unlike with the Sims 4
The way conversations in Paralives with the "together cards" is much different than in any Sims game and I really like it. Even through it means you don't have as much control, it mixes things up in a really good way
( Note that "together cards are not pictured below, but otherwise this is what it looks like when two or more paras are talking to each other )
Another thing I don't really like about the Paralives is how little personality the children have
the only thing that defines them as individuals beyond their gender is a single thing that they are good at. As you have personality points that you can apply to them, but you level those up over time, so it really doesn't define them because any other Para can eventually end up with the same number of personality points dedicated to the exact same things as them in the exact same way. I can understand children not having as developed a personality as older paras, but children and older should at least have access to all of the lifestyle options. Let kids be slobs, neat freaks, early birds, night owls and vegetarians, so there will be at least a few more things about them that will give them more of an individual personality to let them stand out. Why not have a child that has trouble with school because they don't like to get up early, or gets in trouble for not cleaning their room?
I love the fact that Paralives is an open world much like the Sims 3, unlike the Sims 3, so far Melino, the only town that's in Paralives so far, seems a lot more alive than worlds in the Sims 3 generally felt. Even during the first couple of days when they still hadn't fixed the issue with my Paras getting stuck, at least Melino didn't feel like a ghost town.
I'm going to briefly mention careers. The game does indeed have them. So far they're basically all just rabbit hole careers, although they definitely function a bit differently than in the Sims. You level up your career by working hard, and you get to choose a lot of different benefits, in addition to or instead of, just making more money.
I'm not going to touch on how Paras Level up their personality yet, as I'm still mostly figuring that out.
The game doesn't have occults, or even pets yet. The latter is a bit surprising given the fact that the first character they showed us was a dog. I'm a bit disappointed that pets weren't already in the game at launch, but we should be getting them in a couple of years at most. At least you won't have to pay for them, if the developers keep their no paid DLC promise. I'm still a bit torn about that, even through it could save me and other players a lot of money, only because I think it might mean they won't be able to develop the game as much as they otherwise could have.
I have not played Inzoi, so I can't really compare the two games. Overall, I think Paralives is great, but it has few flaws that need to be fixed. I would say if you love The Sims, especially the SIms 3, but want something a bit different, you should consider getting Paralives and buy it while its in early access. That way, you will not only not have spend as much, but you can give feedback on how to improve this already decent game.
There's already a lot there, especially for an early access game, much of which I have not even touched on here, so buying it now is definitely worth it. In the meantime, I'm going to keep on playing Paralives, because I'm really enjoying it.
