(PC) The Sims Online
GameSpot – Classic Sim video reviews
Oct 18th
GameSpot has been uploading their older video reviews to YouTube, and Chry was kind enough to let me know there are videos for The Sims, Unleashed, Vacation, Sims 2, Nightlife, University, Online, and The Urbz (with such an overly-excited reviewer…). Check them all out and you’ll soon tell yourself “Holy cow, I feel OLD”
Progress on The Sims Online Restoration
Sep 20th
It is good to know that the team behind the Restoration of The Sims Online is still hard at work! Below are some of the recent videos they have put out recently. Supposedly it is in the pre-Alpha stage with an estimated closed beta sometime in (late) 2012. Thanks to Frankie and a few others for keeping me updated on this project! Good luck, TSOR Team!
My biggest fear (well other than this project getting scrapped by people losing interest) is when it gets nearer to completion, EA is going to be failing their lawyers around and shutting them down. If that happens, it’s going to be one of my last straws in putting up with them…
TSO Restoration – A plan to bring back ‘The Sims Online’
Jan 3rd
The Sims Online was a game well before its time. It was a shame to see EA pull it from their servers back in August 2008, when it was re-branded earlier that year as EA Land. A number of fans still played the game when the doors closed, so it’s to no surprise there is interest to re-create the game and to introduce it on private servers. That’s the purpose of TSO Restoration. How does one reverse engineer EA’s platform? The answer to that (and many other questions – including the legal aspects of the game) can be read from the following interview conducted by The Alphaville Herald:
Urizenus: How does one do something like this, especially now that the original TSO is no more? Do you reverse engineer EA’s platform?
Ghost: Unfortunately, because the TSO servers are no longer online – we’re unable to gather any more packets. This means we’re no longer an “emulation” project. Everything except perhaps the art and graphics is being recreated by our team.
Urizenus: So you are building it from scratch. Will it be aesthetically identical to the tSO we remember?
Ghost: Yes, our goal of the project is to make it look and interact exactly as the original TSO.
Urizenus: So the same motives then. What about all the usual interactions? tickling, dancing etc?
Ghost: You will be able to do all of the interactions. In fact, there is no reason we can not have more than just the original interactions. Our team plans on not only providing the same TSO experience for free, but also adding improvements to the game. What is to stop us from supporting unicode with special characters? Why not raise the tile limit and have size nine or ten lots? These are just a few of the ideas our team has in making the game more enjoyable.
Urizenus: What about the possibility of having users provide custom content and custom animations?
Ghost: As we saw in EA-Land, the TSOClient definitely has the potential to support such endeavors. We will pursue such capabilities in the future. I can’t promise you that custom content will be in our first release though.
Top 10 Most Disappointing PC Games Of The Decade (2000-2009)
Dec 21st
Big Download Blog put together a list of the top 10 most disappointing PC games of 2000 thru 2009. Two Maxis games made it onto the list: The Sims Online (at #5) and Spore (at #1):
Despite a promising start and a vast audience, the game was a total bust. Why? Because there was nothing to do. As it turned out, the magic from the single player experience didn’t translate very well into an MMO experience and few people wanted to pay for access to a glorified chat room. EA relaunched The Sims Online as a free-to-play experience called EA Land, but that didn’t work out either. The game was finally shut down for good in 2008.
The game finally released in 2008, and as promised, featured impressive technology that let gamers run wild with creativity. Unfortunately, although it was a cute toy, Spore wasn’t much of a game. The concept went in too many directions at once in its attempt to satisfy both casual and veteran gamers, so it ended up appealing to neither. Not only did the game stifle creativity by forcing players to stick with certain body parts in order to progress, there was no point in giving peace a chance. Of the five game modes, all but the last (which let players freely roam space) were far too shallow to be fun. Even though it sold well, there was a great deal of controversy regarding its Digital Rights Management policy, which only allowed the game to be installed on a limited number of computers, practically inviting people to use the pirated version and avoid the hassle. The Spore Galactic Adventures expansion released in the summer of 2009, which refocuses the gameplay and generally makes it more enjoyable. However, it can’t be overlooked that the original game fell well short of its high expectations.
Disappointing…like the fact of this lady trying to ride a mechanical bull…
Goodbye, The Sims Online
Jul 31st
August is 1 day away, and if you’ve been following the news, you’d know that EA Land (formely The Sims Online) is shutting down. Maggie “AutumnKiss” Olsen, an avid player, gives her farewell thoughts on the game.
After reading her article, I wish I had spent more time with the game. I only played it for a month and lost interest due to the lack of the ability to create custom content…
It was the players who made this game what it was. The Sims Online, later known as EA Land, was not a game in which you grouped together and went out to kill or maim mobs while progressing through dungeons for loot drops. No… this was a social game. One of gathering with friends and creating your own entertainment. EA did not provide players with guides on how to be entertained; they provided tools with which players could devise their own. Some called it a glorified chat room. Others called it genius. I call it a part of my life I’ll never forget; a pivotal moment in my life that spanned 5 years.
Along the way, I met some very amazing people, many of whom I still chat with today. Even after I quit playing the game several years ago, I was a part of the community – and I will always be a part of this community. Just as they will always be a part of me. To those who were always there for me, I thank you. For those whom I was able to be there for, I thank you. Each and every one of you has been one of the bricks that have supported me these last five years as I have journeyed on my path, and I will never forget you.
Tom VS. Bruce – The Sims Online Challenge
May 14th
August is slowly creeping up, and The Sims Online aka EA Land will no longer exist. If you are still playing that game, then I suggest you to take a look at 1Up.com’s article of Tom VS. Bruce – The Sims Online. It is a pretty humourous read and gives you a few ideas in case you want to challenge your own friends.
“The Sims Online” changes to “EA Land” and now “The Sims Offline”
Apr 29th
It is with mixed emotions that today we are announcing the EA-Land experiment will soon draw to a close. Since 2002, EA-Land / TSO has attracted a very special group of players (of which you are one) and we certainly appreciate your participation in the EA-Land community. The lifetime of the game has drawn to an end, and now we will be focusing on new ideas and other innovative concepts in the games arena. We’d like to thank everyone who has taken part in this online community as a unique experience in the virtual world.
Below are some facts about how the site and service will be closed. Please see also a special message from the team that maintained EA-Land, to the community that played it.
Key Facts:
- On August 1, 2008, the game EA-Land / TSO will no longer be in service and EA will focus these resources on future games
- Your subscription billing will end now, so that at least 60 days of your EA-Land experience will be at no cost to you
- You may cancel your account and subscription at any time by contacting customer service or by managing your EA account online. To do this, you must log on to EA-Land / TSO to cancel within the game
- Starting immediately PayPal cash-in will not be available anymore
- EA Customer Support at support.ea.com is available to help answer any questions you might have regarding your account
If you are a paying subscriber as of April 29th 2008, EA would like to offer you one of the following two gifts as a token of our appreciation:
- $15 off any game at the EA Store at www.eastore.ea.com, or
- Three months of Club POGO(tm) Subscription Time
Paying subscribers please insure your email contact information is up to date as details of this offer will be sent out to you within 30 days.
Again, thanks you to all of you.
Electronic Arts
This is a huge bummer. EA Land seemed promising, so why the sudden change of plans? Was it the fact that they don’t care to offer free online play or did EA Land bomb much like The Sims Online did? Perhaps their resources will return in another game…
A Special Message from Luc and the EA-Land Team
We share the sadness of the entire community in writing this blog to announce that the EA-Land experiment is being brought to an end. Decisions such as these are never easy and the rationale for closing EA-Land is particularly complex. Regardless, it is hard to see the end of the collective investment of emotion, time and friendship.
This development team over the past year, in partnership with your amazing community contributions, worked to deliver a re-engineered TSO architecture ported to DirectX9, with a stable economy, variable pricing, the beginnings of custom content (bitmaps, chairs and sculptures, skinning), integrated web-services (enabling Facebook apps and user created widgets), and kept pace with new features pushed weekly (cash in, free play, across-world mini games, etc). The team is a very dedicated crew that spent many nights and week-ends making it all work.
We would like to thank the community for trusting us over the last 10 months and enabling this opportunity. A special thank you to the few thousand who have been with the game since the original beta! (A big thank you also to all the users who came back since December).
Thank you for uploading 30,000 pieces of custom content and proving again that development teams should build worlds involving their user communities. We are particularly proud that the top entrepreneurs in this new world are custom content makers. Personally, I have been most motivated by your participation in all stages (from design on the wiki to testing in TC3 and feedback all over). I think that this smart and well-connected community is one you should be proud of.
Thank you for helping us, pushing us and making us more flexible, wiser, and smarter!
The virtual worlds are still in their infancy, I sincerely hope we will have the opportunity to be creative together again.
We miss you already,
Luc,
(With the help of: Greg, Larry, Sarah, Uri, Cort, Randy, Parizad, Mark, Lee, Margaret, Paul, Michael, Audrey, Laurent, Alex, Minkz, Vishwa, Cindy and Bing)
Source – UOEM
It’s a Simulated World: Part Two
Apr 11th
Valley24.com has part Two of their “It’s a Simulated World” writeup. In this article they discuss the worst of the Sims series, as well as the copycats that tried to imitate the sucess of Maxis. I strongly have to disagree with most of the games on the list, especially SimCity 3000 and Animal Crossing…But I do agree with The Sims Online (failure from a business standpoint) and Singles (which just looks plain awful).
The Sims Online (2002) – The Sims has no real final goal, and the same can be said of most MMORPGs. But, in order to get people to pay a certain amount of money a month to play what they’d already playing for years, The Sims Online had to have some kind of hook: hence, the free enterprise system that could’ve only come out of Ayn Rand’s naughtiest dreams. And if extremely limited capitalistic competition with online strangers didn’t float your boat, all of the God power that makes the Sims games famous disappears as The Sims Online reduces the amount of controllable characters to one—and in real-time, too. At best, The Sims Online was an expensive chat room that let you watch tiny meters grow.
Allakhazam interviews Luc Barthelet of EA Land
Mar 31st
Allakhazam was lucky enough to snag an interview with Luc Barthelet, a Senior Vice President of EA. His current project is EA Land, a revamp of The Sims Online. Many questions are asked and some new details were announced. If you’ve never been familiar with EA Land, then check it out – it’s completely free! Here are a few questions from the interview.
AutumnKiss: With all of the changes being planned and executed, how do you think the future of EA-Land will fare in comparison to past disappointments?
Luc: I hope we will be able to implement user content games and user content editors inside EA-Land in the next few months. This will have a huge impact on the overall game.
AutumnKiss: Editors? As in, true custom content?
Luc: Yes. Rather than using external 3D program, users will be able to create chairs, sofas, tables, etc within the game with shape editors and materials.
We’re incredibly excited about the amazing things the players have been able to do thus far with custom content.
One thing we’re close to releasing (it is still in internal testing) is that players can change how the picture on their bio looks! We’ve been working hard to make sure what we do is very user friendly. For example, for the bio pics, players can simply upload a picture, and once it is approved, they can drag it to their bio.
The Sims Online…now Free!
Feb 12th
I remember playing TSO back when they had their 14 day trial when it was released. It was actually pretty fun, but the lack of any custom content and the fact that you have to pay monthly killed it quick. Well, that is no longer the issue (unforunately it is 5 years to late, but better late than never).
What is EA-Land?
I would like to introduce you to EA-Land, a world that is free-to-play, and based on a re-engineered The Sims Online architecture. Yes, free.
If you played The Sims Online before, we have played together and I would like you to rejoin us in the game: My avatar is MaxisLuc (yes, I work for Maxis/EA). At the beginning of last year I assembled a team to improve The Sims Online. After months of ongoing hard work, we can say proudly that we have been successful and we have made this game fun again!
- Former Members Of The Sims Online: You can come back for FREE right now by just downloading the game and REACTIVATING your account. If you do so before March 2008, you will get your earned ‘account based’ privileges back (gifts, skill locks etc…) when we run our ‘amnesty’ program. So make sure you are in game before that event!
- New to EA-Land and The Sims Online: Sign up for free!
EA-Land will host all of The Sims Online cities.
The Sims Online (TSO) was made of 12 different cities (AlphaVille, Blazing Falls, etc..) and we are moving all of those cities inside EA-Land (this is called ‘the merge’ by the users!). We have a huge new map: it is 100 times bigger than the previous size of any city. We had to add a whole new zoom level to let users see it. The internet is faster now than when TSO was launched, so we have been able to let each house have more simultaneous visitors. A lot of new users are constantly joining us and we expect more. If you played TSO before, I think that you ought to own your lot in this new land, and I want you to have the ability to grab the best location before we open the gates. As an EA-Land subscriber, you will be able to have several Sims in the same “city” unlike in TSO where you were limited to one Sim per city.
EA-Land has been re-designed with Smart Users in mind.
We have a blog where we explain all the things we are working on and the events we are running in the game. We also have a very active wiki web site, named “Game Blueprints“, managed by the community where you can work with others to design the game. We have already implemented many features designed by the users! The stratics forum community continues to be very active.
We have made some big changes already to the game, and many more are coming over the next few months. It is difficult to say which ones of the recent changes are the most important as users have different reasons to play the game, but let me tell you about the changes that I particularly like:
Custom Content
Users have now the ability to upload custom content. Like in the original Sims game, the goal is to let you customize the game completely, but in EA-Land you can see and buy the customizations of the other players! Players have already uploaded several thousands pieces of custom content. I suspect that by some time this year, all of the content of the game will have been replaced many times over by custom content. We started with the ability to upload bitmaps (easiest for the new creative users), then moved on to chairs and sculptures. You can now make your own portraits in the game and “skin” objects like in Sims2 but using your own images. Because we are approving all of the content, this user content is safe to be viewed by everyone! We are working with the main user web sites that have been providing custom content to the Sims users for years (e.g. http://www.TheSimsResource.com) to make sure that their content will be made available in the game.
New Economy
We heard from the community that the economy was broken in TSO. That was true, too many users were billionaires, and the goal of the game was mostly about extracting money from Maxis. I can now say with satisfaction that we have fixed the economy on EA-Land. This took many features, from establishing a real estate market, where users can easily buy or sell lots to one another, and a dynamic object pricing market where the prices of objects purchased from maxis is based on supply and demand, enabling stores and entrepreneurs to earn a living. We also enabled users to buy simoleans directly from Maxis. While there is no need for users to do so in the game (we give subscribers simoleans every week), it can help new users build their dream house faster with a simple paypal transaction secured by us.Web Services and Social Networks
The internet has changed so much since the launch of The Sims Online in December 2002, we had to change the way we think about online games. We have opened the access to most of the in game information to the internet through web services. For example this enables you to add Google or Yahoo widgets to your computer (or iPhone! ) and see if your favorite lots or friends are online.We are providing you with privacy settings so you can decide if or which of your avatar will broadcast what information to the internet. Sims User web sites are already using this feature to create some amazing community sites. We also built avatarbook, to show how that information can be seen and connected to social web sites like Facebook (login to face book and add the “avatarbook” application.
You can search MaxisLuc for example: http://apps.facebook.com/avatarbook
And there’s more to come! We are looking forward to seeing you in the game and having fun with us!
Sincerely
Luc Barthelet,
“MaxisLuc”P.S: This game is continously in development. if you find that you have problems login or installing the game, please check the pages on this site: login issues.
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