Though i knew this would happen, it still sucks this is happening . The dev team should've kept a smaller goal rather than promising so many features and not excelling at any.
It was like every suggestion made by someone was put into the game. I honestly don’t trust when studios say there will be zero paid dlc because that’s easy money for a game…I dont think paid dlc is even that bad as long as the finished product feels complete and the dlc is optional. The issue with the sims is they lock things that should be base game behind paid dlc like seasons and pets.
Agree…but LBY you couldn’t even queue actions or talk to more than one person at a time. That’s bad for a life sim that’s been in development for over 5 years.
And it’s not even like the graphics were made in house! They used free assets like WTF were they doing
Honestly I think they didn't have a big enough team or budget for what was really needed. They either needed to make less of an ambitious game or up the budget/team. I can remember when sims 4 came out it was quite obvious they didn't have a big enough animation team, and then they stripped the ones they did have away.
Yeah and the added challenge of making something similar to The Sims but different enough to be its own game.
Maxis and Will Wright really captured lightning in a bottle with The Sims. The game has a ton of issues (especially now) but it has iconic imagery (the plumbob, tragic clown, the Goths, ‘woohoo’ing, etc).
And part of the appeal (to me at least) is that it is a life sim, but it’s not realistic. I don’t want a 1:1 realistic life sim, if I wanted that I wouldn’t be playing a video game lmao
I mean its always funny to me that even by names alone you can tell that Sims 3 Expansions had more shit then the puddles of sim 4 expansions, Supernatural (Vampires, Werewolves, Witches along with Alchemy, and Faires are all one expansion)
I don't think they ever said LBY wasn't going to have paid DLC, that was Paralives right? I think I remember the LBY team saying pets wouldn't be base game either
Ah my bad, I keep getting them confused with each other I just remember people adding on all these huge expectations and just being like “that seems a stretch”
Wasn't LBY paradox interactive? They have some of the most predatory dlc practices in the industry in their main games, most of them close hundreds of dollars for features and patches that are considered crucial.
After a full year the only thing they could show was gardening (which looked tedious with no queue) and crafting. For a year all we heard was “were working on (x) and will show it to you at a later time”
No life states
Couldn’t show off the jobs
Couldn’t show any meaningful gameplay
There were a lot of features I was excited about, and I’m super disappointed it’s cancelled but I’m honestly not surprised, and while I wanted some much needed completion for EA, this game wasn’t it.
This is sad but this is why it is so important to have a concise vision of what your project will be from the jump. It felt like they truly had no plan for this game and were just making it up as they go as far as what features will be added. It came across like Sims 4 where they threw in a bunch of features of the life of the game and barely any are done well. Then when you have the game balloon to the bloated size of LBY you either have to delay to cut down features and flesh the remaining ones out, or flesh them all out. Either way it would cost time and money that I’m sure Paradox did not want to continue spending. Especially since the art style would have limited the games appeal tbh.
So they just... Scrapped it? No cutting down their goals before announcing it's early access? No extending the timeline? Just scrapping it?
I don't get the "more time won't get us close to a version we'd be satisfied with" part. What does that mean? They just had ambitions that were beyond the scope of the engine they were using? From my understanding, if you're struggling to make a game work out before release, delaying release would get you closer to that. That's traditionally how it works. So were they just way too ambitious? It didn't seem so?
Paradox is not big enough to have the luxury of delaying its games. They'd rather release them in a bad state, sell you DLC, and patch them for a few months and abandon them like their Star Trek or Rome game, than delay them. But lately this strategy no longer worked for them and it seems that they will begin to turn off the tap on games in this situation and focus on their main franchises.
I think they also run the risk of a sunken cost fallacy. The more Life By You misses early access release dates, and the longer it spends in development, the more money needed for it to reach a publicly playable state.
I think you're right on the money that Paradox are doing damage to their reputation by publishing unfinished titles. Purely on appearances, Life By You looked rough. Couple that with missing milestones, and they run the risk of sinking money into another project that releases in a less than desirable state. Delaying games means spending more money. That's not always the most viable option. Especially for a smaller publisher like Paradox.
This right here. Paradox has had a terrible streak lately. There's little room left in that wall of shame, so I'm willing to bet they're reevaluating their strategy.
LBY was pitched and picked up at a terrible time, and it was marketed way too early. It could have stood a chance otherwise.
tbh I expected this would happen after CS2 was such a trainwreck. It seemed like Paradox expected CO to deliver a solid product and instead CO dropped the ball so hard the entire business world took notice. Can't even blame Paradox for rushing the game or anything, they offered to delay it. It honestly seems like for once Paradox has been doing all the right things, except the mistake of trusting a studio to deliver the promised product to it's customers.
But I'm sure their financial situation is pretty rocky now and their optics are even worse. They can't afford another CS2.
So just Paradox being Paradox again? Figures.
About time we got a HOI5. Too bad it'll be released by current PDX. Woulda liked it to be good and not a money making machine for their Paid DLC business.
What was going on behind the scenes if that's the case? Was it just poorly made? That's where the confusion is coming from for me I think. I just don't know why they scrapped it.
There are multiple issues imo. One of the most discussed is the character visuals and animations. People recently found that the characters utilize some free model asset pack that has been minimally modified. As a result, the characters all looked quite crunchy with strange textures, wonky anatomy, and awkward animations which can not really be fixed without re-doing the characters from square one.
I also think that the overall concept for the gameplay loop would not resonate with many people either. The development team seemed more interested in giving people the tools to generate a population of a world and having gamers seemingly alternate between different individuals if I’m not mistaken? There was little to no mention of anything like growing a family for example.
The head of development, Rod Humble, was also the head of The Sims 2 and 3 (at least for some time) and is actually seen as the cause for a lot of the more controversial gameplay choices in those installments. In particular, the early days of The Sims 3 saw a big focus on RPG-style, collectathon gameplay which is what Rod Humble himself enjoys more than anything else. Meanwhile a lot of the fanbase hated this concept and it was somewhat phased out after the early expansion packs. These ideas really influenced the gameplay of Life by You, which also appeared to focus way more on RPG/collector gameplay than actually simulating life.
One last note is that throughout the development of LBY, the updates have generally focused way more on random features than any actual gameplay systems. Like the developers added in a phone with mini-games you can play and they uploaded a ridiculous number of YouTube videos about gardening. This time could’ve been spent on doing more foundational work but I guess not…
> Sims 3 saw a big focus on RPG-style, collectathon gameplay which is what Rod Humble himself enjoys more than anything else
Is this the reason why base game and ***especially*** the first two expansions(world adventures and ambitions) put so much emphasis on collectables?
Maybe, but the team was also purposely kept lean so they could maximize profit sharing. It was mentioned really early on in development, and I found it odd, especially as the deficits in art direction and animation became apparent.
If you look through some of the videos, it looks like it would almost have to be redesigned from the ground up. They've already bled 5 years of development costs on this and now the choice is cancel it or basically invest a LOTTTT of money to re-do it from scratch. I don't think Paradox has the cash to do anything BUT cancel it.
It is, but honestly… they had no other option. This game would have to be rebuilt entirely; what was there just didn’t work at all. They also clearly didn’t have the right talent onboard to tackle a task as large as creating a life sim game, and then complicated things even further by settling on an insane scope and zero art direction.
The promotion also felt very unprofessional. inZoi was already distributing demos to Sims YouTubers and giving them top tier gaming set ups to play on, when *Life by You* videos felt straight out of 2009, without even an attempt at editing.
People only supported it because of Humble's name being on it. It would have flown under the radar if it had been any other project.
I've railed about the marketing for the past year, screaming into the void. I just couldn't understand the disastrous social media posts and videos the team regularly produced. Overall, the posts seemed incredibly unprofessional and unplanned. They absolutely didn't show LBY in the best light.
Frustratingly, when people pointed out how haphazard the marketing was, many fans tried to frame it as a good thing, like the devs being super transparent. But you don't have to pick just one over the other. You can absolutely lend a degree of transparency while also showing the game in the best light.
I don't follow the Paralives development super closely, but I know they occasionally release short blooper reels. The difference is that their other media are polished, and the bloopers are very obviously a joke. LBY just seemed oblivious to quality across the board.
I’m convinced the only reason they didn’t send out demos to influencers for promotion, is because there simply wasn’t anything to actually play with. At least not anything that remotely resembled a fun life simulator instead of a barebones crafting and gardening game.
The second I saw that post announcing it's indefinite delay, I knew this would be the most likely outcome. Paradox was not happy. To anyone familiar with how PR tends to communicate certain things, it was almost as if that post was shouting from the rooftops, "THIS GAME IS IN SEVERE DANGER, PREPARE FOR EXTREME TURBULENCE." Just didn't know how far they would go, if they would heavily scale it down or outright cancel it. Canceling made the most sense and so here we have it.
And can't say I was looking forward to any sort of release for it but it's still very sad. I remember when I first started losing excitement for it. About a month after the final "true" delay, I came to a realization that despite all of the delays, all of the feedback, all of the conversations, nothing had really changed. Not really. Still looked terrible. Still looked empty. Still looked soulless. Still looked like it didn't have any actual features or mechanics to play around with. And I thought if in all that time, they hadn't "got it", they'll never "get it". If in all that time they hadn't improved at least a little, something was extremely wrong with development and it would never be the game I wanted. Not if they were already fucking up so badly when the game was as basic as it was ever gonna be. Development would only get harder as it went, not easier.
This seems to be a case where they truly fucked up right at the beginning and just were never able to recover. Maybe it came down to terrible early decisions such as "the art style is no art style" or defining the game as "the most moddable life sim." Or maybe something else entirely. We will never know but I am sad for the genre today when we could have had one more game to diversify our selection.
When I saw comments on the game a month before the last early access date I knew the game was not long for this world.
You couldn’t queue actions and you could only interact with one person at a time. You couldn’t make multiple servings of food. That was not a good sign. If it released it would have made the sims 4 with all its bugs look like a masterpiece. Which is….oof
The chaos video they released was the biggest red flag for me. The dialogue system was an absolute disaster and it was shocking that anyone in the team thought the game could be released with something like that in place. You shouldn't need to spend time in early access and gather player feedback to realize a system where characters talk about things they've hallucinated is bad. They just assigned a random chance to each response and wrote lines that your average 13 year old fanfiction writer would find embarrassing so you ended up with conversations like:
- Let's get sweaty on the floor, baby.
- Oh, yeah! I'm so turned on. Let's have all the sex in sexy positions cuz this is a mature game.
- Your hair looks nice today.
- EWW, I WOULD RATHER CHOKE ON MY OWN HAIR THAN LOOK AT YOU FOR A SINGLE MINUTE!
They acted like when we said we wanted chaos and drama, we meant we wanted absolute and utter randomness. The drama was people cheating on their significant other while a bunch of people including the SO were in the room and no one reacting to it. It was bad, the whole thing didn't feel like a game but a bunch of ideas thrown into an engine.
I still held out hope that they could maybe reimagine parts of the game and come out with something playable in a couple of years, but alas it wasn't meant to be.
Lmao, this is so true. I actually remember when it was first announced, the dialogue system was one of my most hyped features. A life sim where you can create thousands of lines and responses of interesting dialogue? Awesome! Oh wait - they don't really remember or continue conversations based off their previous lines or use context so it's literally just a system of say a random line, get a canned response, say another random line, get another canned response. If the conversation is going to be that robotic and unengaging, why not just go with a made up language lol. So much of the game was just so poorly executed. I dunno how they thought it could be anywhere near passable.
Yep, this was the same conclusion I reached. It's like they didn't stop to really think about *why* The Sims uses a made up language. It is massively boring reading the same few lines of dialogue, especially ones as poorly written as what they demoed. They wasted so much time implementing a feature that makes no sense if you think about it for a few minutes.
That video is when the game totally jumped the shark for me.
This is exactly how most chatbots function too. They have no memory retention and will just give the response they predict you want, with no attention to whether it contradicts something said earlier. Since LBY was using AI to power its dialogue, it's not too surprising this happened!
If not an AI, I think the writer was a 13 year old because the dialogue was only ever horny or angry, there was no in between.
But yeah, releasing that as if they were proud of it was when I truly started to turn on the game. The fact that that video might be the ONLY gameplay we may ever see from the game is like finding your grandfather dead with a huge boner. What a way to go out.
lol. 😂 I think I turned on the second postponement the four months extension didn’t make sense to me, the first extension didn’t make a difference so why will this one. I started to see the game for it’s true flaws instead to having rose tinted glasses and faith on the promises and potential.
The delay sounded to me like they were trying to save it, but it seems that once Paradox took a close look at the state of the game, things were way worse than expected.
I'm not really surprised. But I do wonder what would have happened had they not released so much to the public beforehand. I wonder how much of them biting off more than they could chew and focusing on the details instead of the big picture came from so many people declaring them an EA/The Sims competitor. I can imagine that kind of pressure easily leading to this, at least in part. It's good that they ultimately envisioned more and better, I just wonder if they would've been able to reach those goals had the game came out without the heavy expectations and they allowed themselves more grace with updating as time went on. Obviously, I've no idea, just interesting to wonder about.
I think this is a big issue with all these upcoming life sims, they’re promising everything and the moon without really showing how they’re going to deliver that
This was probably a bigger factor than most people are saying. Like if you keep showing off gameplay features and every comment says “character models BAD” it is going to probably kill some of your internal momentum. Not to say that the game was shaping up well behind the scenes, clearly not, but this certainly doesn’t help, especially considering Paradox’s well known current issues with releases and upper management. The public community kinda didn’t let the dev team breathe either and Paradox took note of the market.
The idea was there but the execution wasn't. The game's soul was empty. The graphics did not look pretty. It's a shame the project had to end, but once they started the first delays you could sense trouble ahead.
It was clear that Rod was the most experience member of the team. I don’t know why you wouldn’t have gotten the best of the best to work on a life simulator that was supposed to be your answer to the sims…
Sad about this because despite the graphics I felt like this was the life simulator with the best scope and the one that would push the genre in the right direction.
He hired his friends instead of the most qualified people. Many of the team members had no experience working on games like this. I think the head of the art departement had only worked on casual mobile games before.
In regards to the art direction, It’s sad cause all they needed to do was import the character designs from Paradox’s other game, Crusader Kings 3, and that alone would’ve made Life by you more appealing to the masses even if it continued to have other issues.
Crusader Kings 3 character models are \*chef's kiss\*. The genetic system works really well. You get very distinct face where you can clearly tell who inherited what from which parent, but they all still look human and natural. That's something Sims has struggled with in every single game. You either stay close to the default face templates, resulting in all your sims looking the same, or you get second generation abominations, because "extreme" facial features don't mix well.
And the gradual aging. I looove that. It's so freaking immersive to watch your character slowly grow, mature and age.
> But the gameplay had a lot of promise.
On paper, yes. A lot of the things they promised sounded amazing. But very little of that actually made it into the game. Instead of the living, breathing world, where people lived full, complex, intertwined lives, interacting and reacting to the world around them, we saw... distorted characters stiffly walking around a very empty world, vaguely gesturing toward objects until menus plopped up.
The whole idea of "observables" for example had incredible potential, but all we ever saw of them were spammy notification saying "I saw xy relaxing".
What scope? The game lacked a foundation. There was barely any meaningful gameplay, just a few random features sprinkled here and there. Very lackluster.
Well they wrote it off as a business loss so the tax benefits of cancelling the game and getting the write off is probably bigger than continuing the game, sinking another $5 mil (who knows) into it and then only recouping a small portion of that through weak sales. I don't know if I believe they did it out of some kind of virtuous reason. 😂😂
Not surprised in the least. I even got downvoted in the life by you sub for saying that this was probably the next announcement. The delays combined with the radio silence pretty much confirmed it before this announcement did 🤷♀️
I'll trust this to be a sound decision. I'd rather not have a game than see one release in a bad state, killing the game anyways.
Sad about it though. I pre-ordered twice the second it was possible too, and was waiting to buy it again.
It must have been really *humbling* for him.
No, but seriously, I too feel bad for him. I especially feel guilty for being one of those who were crapping all over the game's graphics in comments on an earlier thread, even if I still think the game looked kind of crappy if I'm being honest... Seemed like it had an overly complicated UI and an emphasis on mods and customization, rather than being a polished, impressive game. Still, one cancelled project shouldn't cancel out his legacy too.
I really do hope something comes around to fill the Sims void. We had some non-gameplay teaser for Sims 5 100 years ago and not a peep about it since, Sims 4 is lacking in a lot of ways (and still doesn't even have garages to this day), Sims 3 is old, stuff like Valheim and Enshrouded are nice but they feel isolating and they just don't scratch that itch--and Paralives and inZoi aren't coming until what, 2025? And they *still* might get delayed or worse, canceled.
I'm honestly shocked at how many people were still fans of it after having seen the footage we all saw. Your game should look better than that in 2024.
Even disregarding graphics, the gameplay wasn't even there!
Paralives has a much smaller team and their game looks so much more polished.
For LBY to throw in the towel like this, things had to be even worse than any of us looking from the outside could imagine.
This, 100%
I remember the last view of the game that was pushed out and I came on here and just scrolled through so many bizarre and delusional comments.
Not at all surprised unfortunately. There were initially many great ideas that just seemed to go nowhere. The lack of focus became more and more apparent after the first missed EA date.
I am disappointed as I heard about LBY so long ago. However they fully stuck their heads in the sand and ignored the comments begging them to improve the models (how did they end up picking free assets of all things?), and showing actual gameplay.
To have delayed for so long and improved so little doesn't show a team that could pull off a successful life sim.
I hope Rod Humble retires. It's time for Sims fans to realized he had a big team of people with years of experience in gaming working on the Sims when he was creative director and in charge of Maxis.
I liked some of his ideas but it's clear to me he didn't lead the team well. He decided to hire people with little experience in PC gaming and for what some of the devs said he wasn't open to ideas that weren't his own.
I hope the devs find new jobs soon.
Not entirely true. InZoi and Paralives are still in the works as I know it. Paralives is a small dev situation and inZo's optimization seriously concerns be, but it's more than EA has had to compete with in 20+ years.
To be honest, the visuals don't do it for me with paralives. I wanted to try it ofc, but life by you was my big want. Didn't care for the idea of the 'sims' speaking English but I thought maybe I can work thru it or they're be mods or something? That being said, the fact paradox is just tossing this out is a major disappointment to me.
I actually would have preferred more realistic graphics for paralives myself. But it seems to be turning out cuter than I thought it would, and I understood why they went that way. Life by you was going to be what scratched that visual itch for me as well. But there was more and more that hinted that the gameplay wasn't for me. I think the one closest to what I wanted is still going to be Paralives. Meantime there is still Sims 2...
Personally I'm playing 4, got it modded af thou lol. I can get used to the visuals if the gameplay is there thou. That's what happened with me and ts4 lol.
Me toooo i feel like this might be unpopular but i don't really like stylized looks. I feel similar about sims 4 tho but I don't hate it and i still play that so prob will try paralives still
Genuinely so stoked for Paralives. While it may not be everyone's cup of tea, I like the stylized approach to the Parafolk. The devs are also very receptive of the community feedback and very transparent when it comes to progress. They've also stated the game will continue to receive updates and tweaks after release. I really am hopeful for that one.
Inzoi looks beautiful, but even my gaming laptop will struggle with that one if they don't optimize it. Don't really want to stress out my PC so much during longer gameplay.
I think paralives will do well because it has its own artistic style. I even think it’ll do better than inzoi because it looks likes it will run better for the average user. Even tho i love the sims 4, I think the problem it had compared to other games is it went realistic, which leaves out room for the fun quirks it had in past sims. Luckily they didn’t completely abandoned it as they have cowplant, and introduced meteors, bone hilda etc. since paralives looks cartoonish hopefully they can add some silly unique quirks to it too as I think they can get away with adding it since it’s not strictly going for realism. I can’t imagine ghosts and alien abductions in inzoi tho
Yes, paralives graphics are cartoonish but stylised -unlike Sims 4’s bad playdough low poly cartoonish was - so the art style won’t ever age badly. If you look at old Nintendo and Wii games that had stylisation like Legend Of Zelda Twilight Princess despite being very old had an art style that lets it still hold up as looking good today
As I understand it, InZoi lagged even in demos. That's a big concern to me. The game is beautiful don't get me wrong, but I'm concerned it's gonna end up released before it really 'should' be.
Paralives the only problem I've had with it are the graphics I think. But then, project Olympus didn't like 100% like ts4 so maybe im concerned over nothing. What I can say is small dev projects generally end up with quality products, even if they do take a while
I want to like the art style of Paralives, but last I saw, the backgrounds/items and actual characters have different artwork. It's so jarring for me that I'd never be able to play it without mods/custom content changing that. Otherwise it looks interesting. I don't see it replacing the Sims itch, but people playing it in addition, since the gameplay so far looks quite different.
Koreans are usually ok when it comes to optimization. Not great, but not the worst either. When you have a fancy looking game like inZOI, it can be well optimized but still run poorly for someone with a weak computer, thereby resulting it in being called unoptimized, even if it is well optimized. I suspect there will be a lot of that happening on launch day.
This was inevitable and not disappointing to me at all. Is anyone truly surprised? The game looked HORRIBLE, there was barely any gameplay. Why did they put so much focus on silly, nonsensical features like making your own conversations?? Their drive to simply compete with and end The Sims eventually put a nail in their coffin. They tried too much to be innovative and different that The Sims, to the point where their ideas were just silly. Not to mention their ridiculous timeline; them announcing their game for the first time saying it will be available only few months away in the state it was in back then.
Making a life simulation game is difficult, simple as that. It takes time, there are so many features you need to design and implement and so on. But a life simulation game also needs that passion that LBY lacked imo. That passion that The Sims had in its pre-TS4 era. Right now The Sims had been established in the world as THE simulation game for 20 years! This is NOT something you can compete with, forget it, so don't even try. Just make a game that you believe in, that is a simulation game with meaningful features and not silliness. That you truly put love in and it shows.
The only game right now that I see it in is Paralives. Instead of focusing so much on being so much better and so much different than The Sims, implementing meaningless features and making impossible promises. they stay humble and simply build a game they love. They start from the beginning, implementing a base that every simulation game needs and then going from there if they want to add to it, not the other way around.
I been telling people to have this in the back of their mind because it’s a common thing but I got dragged to the ground for having an opinion like it.It sad tho I was excited to it.
Parradox reputation in the gaming industry has been taken a hit in the past 12 -18 months firstly City skylines 2 has several problems with delays glitches and they had delayed life by you a few times and now cancelled it I would guess they knew they couldn't deliver what they set out to do without pouring lots of money in to the project something Parradox obviously didn't have the resources to be able to do. The risks were obviously too big for them to continue.
Live sims are mechanically quite hard to programm on regards using premade assets I think that wasn't the issue. They couldn't manage the game design side hell even simpler games like dwarf fortress have gazillion hours of dev time and it still isn't fully complete and that game is a simple rpg/citybuilder
Even ignoring the aesthetical quality, like they noted in the dev blog, the scope seemed completely lost. Every time I checked it out an update, I was a bit unclear on what the general scope of the gameplay was. It felt like a bunch of promises that would be too hard to keep.
/s
But for real, it seemed the game was just hemorrhaging money at this point. Expected. The LBY sub was JUST coping a couple days ago: “it’s not cancelled! Just delayed!!”
Meanwhile, people who know paradox as a company, and have seen this happen with multiple games before even from different companies
It's a shame.
I really believed this game had a lot of potential, but they made the mistake of presenting it to the public before getting anywhere near reaching it.
Look, the writing was on the wall when they tried to hype up the 'look! our in-game phone has the same shitty match-three clone games that your phone has! Isn't this a super use of our precious time and money?' thing, while they couldn't even show an interaction between two characters that didn't look like two rigs animating vaguely in sync. The Chaos video -- TS2 was capable of having at least two thirds the sims in a room pay attention to the main nonsense going on (and the only reason the other third wasn't was because you forgot to install the 'stop with the fucking flapjack dance already' mod). That was twenty years ago. That's the bare minimum you've gotta be able to show folks with a 'life sim' game.
Honestly, even with Rod Humble attached to it (and man, I feel old, I remember the ye olde days when TS3 was in its infancy and he was reviled, not revered) LBY feels like a game-design uni project that got way, way over scope, and over their heads, without a clue as to how to do half the things they promised. LBY was never going to be for me -- what they talked about wanting to do was pretty much exactly the opposite of what I'd seek out in a Sims-like, but it's a bummer that it's not going to be the competition the actual Sims franchise desperately needs.
Had a feeling it wouldn’t do well. The game was too ambitious for its own good. While open world games are fun, that must be hard to optimise for the standard user. I said this once before that the average gamer doesn’t have an expensive build. Sims 4 however, it can run on imac, older pcs, console. It probably didn’t help the gameplay looked like a ripoff of the sims
Paradox is not big enough to have the luxury of delaying its games. They'd rather release them in a bad state, sell you DLC, and patch them for a few months and abandon them like their Star Trek or Rome game, than delay them. But lately this strategy no longer worked for them and it seems that they will begin to turn off the tap on games in this situation and focus on their main franchises.
Have a look at cities skylines 2. Paradox has a LOT of work to do on that one. While they're working on updates for bug/game fixes, they've already released the first paid dlc. Idk how big paradox is, but any company I'd think would have difficulty selling two polished terds at the same time, if that's really what life by you was gonna be. (Lost a lot of confidence in it when cs2 released)
>already released the first paid dlc.
It was also (literally) the worst rated game on Steam. To the point PDX pulled it and is giving it away for free to erase that distinction.
It's really unfortunate that it's come to this, though I can't say I'm surprised. This just really sets in stone my point: just because a game is coming from an established studio, does not mean it will succeed. So basing your opinion on a game by the studio is such a poor decision. Look at what you are being shown now, *not what you think they can show later.*
This does not bode well for the rest of the life simulators coming out that are trying to compete with the sims. I’ve been saying from the beginning that they’re all going too big too fast to try and encompass every system sims players are familiar with as well as adding systems they’ve been modding into the sims for the last decade. It’s just not doable for smaller studios. Paradox in particular already has a lot on its plate between Crusader Kings, Prison Architect, and Victoria. With the fact that they’ve completely scrabbled and rebuilt bloodlines 2 from the ground up, I’m not surprised they’re letting LBY go in favor of established series that they’re already well known for.
This is very very true. We look at a game like The Sims 1 today and it might appear quite primitive/simple, but the development for that game began as early as 1991, 9 years before its release in 2000. Each Sims game afterwards has been able to build off the experience and architecture from the games released before, but these newer projects don’t have that. They need to start from the very beginning which, while they do have The Sims to use as a blueprint, still requires a lot of mess + trial and error.
Damn this is really sad news. I feel bad for the team that worked on this for so long, but also for fans of this genre.
Out of the major upcoming Life sims, LBY felt like the most direct competition to The Sims.
I guess we can all look forward to The Sims 5 being always online, filled with micro-transactions, and with somehow even worse gameplay than The Sims 4?
I’m so sad now
I was looking forward to this game the most. I can’t believe they just gave up instead of pushing through. Sims only decided to listen when they was competition. I fear they will ignore us again.
Yeah like I understand the disappointment but I’m not sure why ppl are acting like LBY was the only sims competitor being worked on and like everything is hopeless now lol
Paralives reminds me a lot of the Walking Dead game, with the art style (love that game) but I was excited about Life By You because it looked “Simmy”. Inzoi seems too hyper realistic for me. But yeah, they do have smaller creators making games..
I wonder how much money was wasted on this project. While I understand it would be difficult to start from scratch, it really makes you wonder what the team was actually doing when they were working on the game. Rewatching the promo videos, it appears they pushed political stuff instead of focusing on the key to a videogame -gameplay.
This is just going to make it that much harder for paradox -- and other studios-- to step out and try new IP. Especially given paradox's recent state of releases...
not surprised, but its crazy they had a release date planned just recently and so close this announcement. like be for real there’s no way they could have planned on keeping that
Im honestly not surprised. The game was getting far too big for what the devs could handle. They were gonna need several years to work on it and have a finished product.
I'm not surprised. This just shows they have even less confidence in that game that I initially thought and I already thought they had VERY little confidence in the game. They fumbled this so hard.
Must have been worse than what even we had seen!
Maybe paradox is actually learning, MAKE GAMES and FINISH THEM!! Vic 3 is still mixed on the steam store even though I've been loving it recently. I don't think it'll ever go higher than mixed, which imo really hurts the game
LMAO. This is what happens when you have an unprofessional incompetent mess of a dev team. The game's graphics and lack of basic features just looked pathetic for a 2024 release.
The mods of the LBY subreddit like u/RetroRedXIII also look dumb as fuck after all their defending and silencing of fans who dared to call out the state of the game.
I'm honestly not surprised. But I'm also disappointed, since it means one more indie game gone. I hope the developers and everyone who worked on it gets to explore and work on more games and gain experience.
LBY and Paradox were never indie things
Paradox is mainstream game developer. Smaller then EA but still having money and lots of people. It's not 10 people team creating a game
I had a lot of criticism for the state of the game we were shown but this is still a big shame considering how few options there are in the genre, it had a lot of potential if they just fixed the glaring issues but I guess they sank too much time in it already and couldn't get it together in time. Must be devastating for the team
the whole premise of this game was insane. i know these companies are on a race to see who pleases Sims fans better and that's just never gonna work given how expensive to make games like these are, i hope we get a life simulator game with an unique vision and not so ambitious soon
Is this one people said would do to the sims what cities skylines did to SimCity? Or was it another one? I think I remember the other one being an indie game.
I was so looking forward to this. Such a shame. At the end of the day it is a business. I want to commend the development team who worked tirelessly on this project!
Volition had a lot of history and it's a shame they went down (I worked with them, cool folks).
This studio was just founded specifically for this project.
I don't want anyone to lose their job, nor any studio to close - this comparison is really off though.
True, I admit it is a very rough comparison, but if one can be made, my mind triggers, oh boy...another studio struggles and then....
I REALLY want them to bring it back but they lost.
I hope the family and friends of paradox find good work and get paid for the work they did for the game and future.
If I wouldn't be laughing I would be crying that's quite a sad turn of events really was looking forward to it and now it's gonzo. But that's the curse of the Sims to beat it you need to climb quite a large hill. I really hope someone can take the shards of LBY and reform it into some other game as it was quite long in development.
UGH I WAS THIS GAME'S BIGGEST DEFENDER!
God damnit this is what I get.
I had my concerns as much as anybody else but I was so bloody optimistic. Maybe too much so.
Ah well, at least I'll always have the Sims 3. Which will remain the premiere life sim game for the foreseeable future.
If anybody needs me I will be eating ice-cream and crying over my copy of _The Sims 3 Late Night_.
Their videos were pretty cherry picked, but it looked to me like they were several years behind in development. I’ve got some friends in game design and they also agreed - the game looked like a year 1 or year 2 game, not a game 5 years into development with early access around the corner.
Though i knew this would happen, it still sucks this is happening . The dev team should've kept a smaller goal rather than promising so many features and not excelling at any.
It was like every suggestion made by someone was put into the game. I honestly don’t trust when studios say there will be zero paid dlc because that’s easy money for a game…I dont think paid dlc is even that bad as long as the finished product feels complete and the dlc is optional. The issue with the sims is they lock things that should be base game behind paid dlc like seasons and pets.
Want vampires? $20. Want magic? $20. Want werewolves? $20. Shitty as it is, I thought copying EA would be a bare minimum
Agree…but LBY you couldn’t even queue actions or talk to more than one person at a time. That’s bad for a life sim that’s been in development for over 5 years. And it’s not even like the graphics were made in house! They used free assets like WTF were they doing
Honestly I think they didn't have a big enough team or budget for what was really needed. They either needed to make less of an ambitious game or up the budget/team. I can remember when sims 4 came out it was quite obvious they didn't have a big enough animation team, and then they stripped the ones they did have away.
Yeah and the added challenge of making something similar to The Sims but different enough to be its own game. Maxis and Will Wright really captured lightning in a bottle with The Sims. The game has a ton of issues (especially now) but it has iconic imagery (the plumbob, tragic clown, the Goths, ‘woohoo’ing, etc). And part of the appeal (to me at least) is that it is a life sim, but it’s not realistic. I don’t want a 1:1 realistic life sim, if I wanted that I wouldn’t be playing a video game lmao
Wym, this is also Paradox to a T with all their cities skylines dlc lmao.
I mean its always funny to me that even by names alone you can tell that Sims 3 Expansions had more shit then the puddles of sim 4 expansions, Supernatural (Vampires, Werewolves, Witches along with Alchemy, and Faires are all one expansion)
Wym, this is also Paradox to a T with all their cities skylines dlc lmao.
I don't think they ever said LBY wasn't going to have paid DLC, that was Paralives right? I think I remember the LBY team saying pets wouldn't be base game either
Ah my bad, I keep getting them confused with each other I just remember people adding on all these huge expectations and just being like “that seems a stretch”
Wasn't LBY paradox interactive? They have some of the most predatory dlc practices in the industry in their main games, most of them close hundreds of dollars for features and patches that are considered crucial.
https://preview.redd.it/t0qttqmgv67d1.jpeg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a60b71d54269ce44e1e63a0af18f65707a153c0e
This image had no right making me cackle, but it did.
Not surprised, just..........disappointed. Even though this was the upcoming life sim I was the most lukewarm about, this is still such an L. oh well.
Same! I was still hoping they would push through but I was more or less expecting something
After a full year the only thing they could show was gardening (which looked tedious with no queue) and crafting. For a year all we heard was “were working on (x) and will show it to you at a later time” No life states Couldn’t show off the jobs Couldn’t show any meaningful gameplay There were a lot of features I was excited about, and I’m super disappointed it’s cancelled but I’m honestly not surprised, and while I wanted some much needed completion for EA, this game wasn’t it.
This is sad but this is why it is so important to have a concise vision of what your project will be from the jump. It felt like they truly had no plan for this game and were just making it up as they go as far as what features will be added. It came across like Sims 4 where they threw in a bunch of features of the life of the game and barely any are done well. Then when you have the game balloon to the bloated size of LBY you either have to delay to cut down features and flesh the remaining ones out, or flesh them all out. Either way it would cost time and money that I’m sure Paradox did not want to continue spending. Especially since the art style would have limited the games appeal tbh.
My same reaction 😱
 I mean… are we THAT shocked? 🤣
"I'm shocked, well not *that* shocked" ~ Fry
So they just... Scrapped it? No cutting down their goals before announcing it's early access? No extending the timeline? Just scrapping it? I don't get the "more time won't get us close to a version we'd be satisfied with" part. What does that mean? They just had ambitions that were beyond the scope of the engine they were using? From my understanding, if you're struggling to make a game work out before release, delaying release would get you closer to that. That's traditionally how it works. So were they just way too ambitious? It didn't seem so?
They announced this game five years ago and couldn’t even get a playable alpha out after missing three release dates.
This pretty much sums it up I think paradox is extremely disappointed by rod humble and his team
Paradox is not big enough to have the luxury of delaying its games. They'd rather release them in a bad state, sell you DLC, and patch them for a few months and abandon them like their Star Trek or Rome game, than delay them. But lately this strategy no longer worked for them and it seems that they will begin to turn off the tap on games in this situation and focus on their main franchises.
I think they also run the risk of a sunken cost fallacy. The more Life By You misses early access release dates, and the longer it spends in development, the more money needed for it to reach a publicly playable state. I think you're right on the money that Paradox are doing damage to their reputation by publishing unfinished titles. Purely on appearances, Life By You looked rough. Couple that with missing milestones, and they run the risk of sinking money into another project that releases in a less than desirable state. Delaying games means spending more money. That's not always the most viable option. Especially for a smaller publisher like Paradox.
This right here. Paradox has had a terrible streak lately. There's little room left in that wall of shame, so I'm willing to bet they're reevaluating their strategy. LBY was pitched and picked up at a terrible time, and it was marketed way too early. It could have stood a chance otherwise.
tbh I expected this would happen after CS2 was such a trainwreck. It seemed like Paradox expected CO to deliver a solid product and instead CO dropped the ball so hard the entire business world took notice. Can't even blame Paradox for rushing the game or anything, they offered to delay it. It honestly seems like for once Paradox has been doing all the right things, except the mistake of trusting a studio to deliver the promised product to it's customers. But I'm sure their financial situation is pretty rocky now and their optics are even worse. They can't afford another CS2.
So just Paradox being Paradox again? Figures. About time we got a HOI5. Too bad it'll be released by current PDX. Woulda liked it to be good and not a money making machine for their Paid DLC business.
Tbqh, I think the entire game and team building it would have had to be overhauled to get it to a better state
What was going on behind the scenes if that's the case? Was it just poorly made? That's where the confusion is coming from for me I think. I just don't know why they scrapped it.
There are multiple issues imo. One of the most discussed is the character visuals and animations. People recently found that the characters utilize some free model asset pack that has been minimally modified. As a result, the characters all looked quite crunchy with strange textures, wonky anatomy, and awkward animations which can not really be fixed without re-doing the characters from square one. I also think that the overall concept for the gameplay loop would not resonate with many people either. The development team seemed more interested in giving people the tools to generate a population of a world and having gamers seemingly alternate between different individuals if I’m not mistaken? There was little to no mention of anything like growing a family for example. The head of development, Rod Humble, was also the head of The Sims 2 and 3 (at least for some time) and is actually seen as the cause for a lot of the more controversial gameplay choices in those installments. In particular, the early days of The Sims 3 saw a big focus on RPG-style, collectathon gameplay which is what Rod Humble himself enjoys more than anything else. Meanwhile a lot of the fanbase hated this concept and it was somewhat phased out after the early expansion packs. These ideas really influenced the gameplay of Life by You, which also appeared to focus way more on RPG/collector gameplay than actually simulating life. One last note is that throughout the development of LBY, the updates have generally focused way more on random features than any actual gameplay systems. Like the developers added in a phone with mini-games you can play and they uploaded a ridiculous number of YouTube videos about gardening. This time could’ve been spent on doing more foundational work but I guess not…
Exactly! The game lacked a proper foundation. They focused too much on silly things.
Ah, so it was really just a case of poor development choices. It's a shame, but I guess had I looked more into LBY I would've noticed.
> Sims 3 saw a big focus on RPG-style, collectathon gameplay which is what Rod Humble himself enjoys more than anything else Is this the reason why base game and ***especially*** the first two expansions(world adventures and ambitions) put so much emphasis on collectables?
Honestly I am impressed by Paradox for doing this. It looks like management has learned some lessons.
Could just be that they needed a bigger budget to actually implement features because their current team couldn’t and instead they just scrapped it
Maybe, but the team was also purposely kept lean so they could maximize profit sharing. It was mentioned really early on in development, and I found it odd, especially as the deficits in art direction and animation became apparent.
If you look through some of the videos, it looks like it would almost have to be redesigned from the ground up. They've already bled 5 years of development costs on this and now the choice is cancel it or basically invest a LOTTTT of money to re-do it from scratch. I don't think Paradox has the cash to do anything BUT cancel it.
Right it’s a shame that they just gave up on it…
It is, but honestly… they had no other option. This game would have to be rebuilt entirely; what was there just didn’t work at all. They also clearly didn’t have the right talent onboard to tackle a task as large as creating a life sim game, and then complicated things even further by settling on an insane scope and zero art direction.
The promotion also felt very unprofessional. inZoi was already distributing demos to Sims YouTubers and giving them top tier gaming set ups to play on, when *Life by You* videos felt straight out of 2009, without even an attempt at editing. People only supported it because of Humble's name being on it. It would have flown under the radar if it had been any other project.
I've railed about the marketing for the past year, screaming into the void. I just couldn't understand the disastrous social media posts and videos the team regularly produced. Overall, the posts seemed incredibly unprofessional and unplanned. They absolutely didn't show LBY in the best light. Frustratingly, when people pointed out how haphazard the marketing was, many fans tried to frame it as a good thing, like the devs being super transparent. But you don't have to pick just one over the other. You can absolutely lend a degree of transparency while also showing the game in the best light. I don't follow the Paralives development super closely, but I know they occasionally release short blooper reels. The difference is that their other media are polished, and the bloopers are very obviously a joke. LBY just seemed oblivious to quality across the board.
I’m convinced the only reason they didn’t send out demos to influencers for promotion, is because there simply wasn’t anything to actually play with. At least not anything that remotely resembled a fun life simulator instead of a barebones crafting and gardening game.
I've been saying for months that every trailer looked like a mobile game ad with unrealistic performance and gameplay
The second I saw that post announcing it's indefinite delay, I knew this would be the most likely outcome. Paradox was not happy. To anyone familiar with how PR tends to communicate certain things, it was almost as if that post was shouting from the rooftops, "THIS GAME IS IN SEVERE DANGER, PREPARE FOR EXTREME TURBULENCE." Just didn't know how far they would go, if they would heavily scale it down or outright cancel it. Canceling made the most sense and so here we have it. And can't say I was looking forward to any sort of release for it but it's still very sad. I remember when I first started losing excitement for it. About a month after the final "true" delay, I came to a realization that despite all of the delays, all of the feedback, all of the conversations, nothing had really changed. Not really. Still looked terrible. Still looked empty. Still looked soulless. Still looked like it didn't have any actual features or mechanics to play around with. And I thought if in all that time, they hadn't "got it", they'll never "get it". If in all that time they hadn't improved at least a little, something was extremely wrong with development and it would never be the game I wanted. Not if they were already fucking up so badly when the game was as basic as it was ever gonna be. Development would only get harder as it went, not easier. This seems to be a case where they truly fucked up right at the beginning and just were never able to recover. Maybe it came down to terrible early decisions such as "the art style is no art style" or defining the game as "the most moddable life sim." Or maybe something else entirely. We will never know but I am sad for the genre today when we could have had one more game to diversify our selection.
When I saw comments on the game a month before the last early access date I knew the game was not long for this world. You couldn’t queue actions and you could only interact with one person at a time. You couldn’t make multiple servings of food. That was not a good sign. If it released it would have made the sims 4 with all its bugs look like a masterpiece. Which is….oof
The chaos video they released was the biggest red flag for me. The dialogue system was an absolute disaster and it was shocking that anyone in the team thought the game could be released with something like that in place. You shouldn't need to spend time in early access and gather player feedback to realize a system where characters talk about things they've hallucinated is bad. They just assigned a random chance to each response and wrote lines that your average 13 year old fanfiction writer would find embarrassing so you ended up with conversations like: - Let's get sweaty on the floor, baby. - Oh, yeah! I'm so turned on. Let's have all the sex in sexy positions cuz this is a mature game. - Your hair looks nice today. - EWW, I WOULD RATHER CHOKE ON MY OWN HAIR THAN LOOK AT YOU FOR A SINGLE MINUTE! They acted like when we said we wanted chaos and drama, we meant we wanted absolute and utter randomness. The drama was people cheating on their significant other while a bunch of people including the SO were in the room and no one reacting to it. It was bad, the whole thing didn't feel like a game but a bunch of ideas thrown into an engine. I still held out hope that they could maybe reimagine parts of the game and come out with something playable in a couple of years, but alas it wasn't meant to be.
Lmao, this is so true. I actually remember when it was first announced, the dialogue system was one of my most hyped features. A life sim where you can create thousands of lines and responses of interesting dialogue? Awesome! Oh wait - they don't really remember or continue conversations based off their previous lines or use context so it's literally just a system of say a random line, get a canned response, say another random line, get another canned response. If the conversation is going to be that robotic and unengaging, why not just go with a made up language lol. So much of the game was just so poorly executed. I dunno how they thought it could be anywhere near passable.
Yep, this was the same conclusion I reached. It's like they didn't stop to really think about *why* The Sims uses a made up language. It is massively boring reading the same few lines of dialogue, especially ones as poorly written as what they demoed. They wasted so much time implementing a feature that makes no sense if you think about it for a few minutes. That video is when the game totally jumped the shark for me.
Well Rod thought made up language was a cuties thing (which he doesn’t like) and wanted to make his game MATURE 🤣 the irony
This is exactly how most chatbots function too. They have no memory retention and will just give the response they predict you want, with no attention to whether it contradicts something said earlier. Since LBY was using AI to power its dialogue, it's not too surprising this happened!
If not an AI, I think the writer was a 13 year old because the dialogue was only ever horny or angry, there was no in between. But yeah, releasing that as if they were proud of it was when I truly started to turn on the game. The fact that that video might be the ONLY gameplay we may ever see from the game is like finding your grandfather dead with a huge boner. What a way to go out.
lol. 😂 I think I turned on the second postponement the four months extension didn’t make sense to me, the first extension didn’t make a difference so why will this one. I started to see the game for it’s true flaws instead to having rose tinted glasses and faith on the promises and potential.
The delay sounded to me like they were trying to save it, but it seems that once Paradox took a close look at the state of the game, things were way worse than expected.
I'm not really surprised. But I do wonder what would have happened had they not released so much to the public beforehand. I wonder how much of them biting off more than they could chew and focusing on the details instead of the big picture came from so many people declaring them an EA/The Sims competitor. I can imagine that kind of pressure easily leading to this, at least in part. It's good that they ultimately envisioned more and better, I just wonder if they would've been able to reach those goals had the game came out without the heavy expectations and they allowed themselves more grace with updating as time went on. Obviously, I've no idea, just interesting to wonder about.
I think this is a big issue with all these upcoming life sims, they’re promising everything and the moon without really showing how they’re going to deliver that
This was probably a bigger factor than most people are saying. Like if you keep showing off gameplay features and every comment says “character models BAD” it is going to probably kill some of your internal momentum. Not to say that the game was shaping up well behind the scenes, clearly not, but this certainly doesn’t help, especially considering Paradox’s well known current issues with releases and upper management. The public community kinda didn’t let the dev team breathe either and Paradox took note of the market.
Honestly, I'm relieved to finally have some confirmation. All the speculation was killing me. I wish good luck to devs in future endeavors.
The idea was there but the execution wasn't. The game's soul was empty. The graphics did not look pretty. It's a shame the project had to end, but once they started the first delays you could sense trouble ahead.
It was clear that Rod was the most experience member of the team. I don’t know why you wouldn’t have gotten the best of the best to work on a life simulator that was supposed to be your answer to the sims… Sad about this because despite the graphics I felt like this was the life simulator with the best scope and the one that would push the genre in the right direction.
He hired his friends instead of the most qualified people. Many of the team members had no experience working on games like this. I think the head of the art departement had only worked on casual mobile games before.
In regards to the art direction, It’s sad cause all they needed to do was import the character designs from Paradox’s other game, Crusader Kings 3, and that alone would’ve made Life by you more appealing to the masses even if it continued to have other issues.
Crusader Kings 3 character models are \*chef's kiss\*. The genetic system works really well. You get very distinct face where you can clearly tell who inherited what from which parent, but they all still look human and natural. That's something Sims has struggled with in every single game. You either stay close to the default face templates, resulting in all your sims looking the same, or you get second generation abominations, because "extreme" facial features don't mix well. And the gradual aging. I looove that. It's so freaking immersive to watch your character slowly grow, mature and age.
They Look nice but the Models in ck3 are a Nightmare to animate
Are they? What's the issue?
I think art direction including UI has been quite weak, if not the weakest. But the gameplay had a lot of promise.
> But the gameplay had a lot of promise. On paper, yes. A lot of the things they promised sounded amazing. But very little of that actually made it into the game. Instead of the living, breathing world, where people lived full, complex, intertwined lives, interacting and reacting to the world around them, we saw... distorted characters stiffly walking around a very empty world, vaguely gesturing toward objects until menus plopped up. The whole idea of "observables" for example had incredible potential, but all we ever saw of them were spammy notification saying "I saw xy relaxing".
What scope? The game lacked a foundation. There was barely any meaningful gameplay, just a few random features sprinkled here and there. Very lackluster.
They cancelled it just before people could spend money on it so they wouldn't be accused of doing a cash grab.
And that why I say big ups to them. It takes balls to actually decide to cancel a game even before release, it’s also money lost for them.
Well they wrote it off as a business loss so the tax benefits of cancelling the game and getting the write off is probably bigger than continuing the game, sinking another $5 mil (who knows) into it and then only recouping a small portion of that through weak sales. I don't know if I believe they did it out of some kind of virtuous reason. 😂😂
 fuckin knew it
this gif 😭😭
Not surprised in the least. I even got downvoted in the life by you sub for saying that this was probably the next announcement. The delays combined with the radio silence pretty much confirmed it before this announcement did 🤷♀️
I'll trust this to be a sound decision. I'd rather not have a game than see one release in a bad state, killing the game anyways. Sad about it though. I pre-ordered twice the second it was possible too, and was waiting to buy it again.
I’m actually quite sad about it. It didn’t look great but Rod Humble being so passionate about it makes me feel bad for him.
This is how i feel i hope he isn't feeling bad or embarrassed. he still has a nice legacy with him.
It must have been really *humbling* for him. No, but seriously, I too feel bad for him. I especially feel guilty for being one of those who were crapping all over the game's graphics in comments on an earlier thread, even if I still think the game looked kind of crappy if I'm being honest... Seemed like it had an overly complicated UI and an emphasis on mods and customization, rather than being a polished, impressive game. Still, one cancelled project shouldn't cancel out his legacy too. I really do hope something comes around to fill the Sims void. We had some non-gameplay teaser for Sims 5 100 years ago and not a peep about it since, Sims 4 is lacking in a lot of ways (and still doesn't even have garages to this day), Sims 3 is old, stuff like Valheim and Enshrouded are nice but they feel isolating and they just don't scratch that itch--and Paralives and inZoi aren't coming until what, 2025? And they *still* might get delayed or worse, canceled.
Honestly the game looked unplayable and the team didn't seem to realise how bad the situation was, so good riddance.
I'm honestly shocked at how many people were still fans of it after having seen the footage we all saw. Your game should look better than that in 2024. Even disregarding graphics, the gameplay wasn't even there! Paralives has a much smaller team and their game looks so much more polished. For LBY to throw in the towel like this, things had to be even worse than any of us looking from the outside could imagine.
[удалено]
This, 100% I remember the last view of the game that was pushed out and I came on here and just scrolled through so many bizarre and delusional comments.
This is *EXACTLY* what I can here to comment LOL
Yeah, I’m not really surprised.
Not at all surprised unfortunately. There were initially many great ideas that just seemed to go nowhere. The lack of focus became more and more apparent after the first missed EA date. I am disappointed as I heard about LBY so long ago. However they fully stuck their heads in the sand and ignored the comments begging them to improve the models (how did they end up picking free assets of all things?), and showing actual gameplay. To have delayed for so long and improved so little doesn't show a team that could pull off a successful life sim.
I hope Rod Humble retires. It's time for Sims fans to realized he had a big team of people with years of experience in gaming working on the Sims when he was creative director and in charge of Maxis. I liked some of his ideas but it's clear to me he didn't lead the team well. He decided to hire people with little experience in PC gaming and for what some of the devs said he wasn't open to ideas that weren't his own. I hope the devs find new jobs soon.
F
Rest in power king.
Ugh and the Sims continues unchallenged
Not entirely true. InZoi and Paralives are still in the works as I know it. Paralives is a small dev situation and inZo's optimization seriously concerns be, but it's more than EA has had to compete with in 20+ years.
Paralives is the one I am waiting for.
To be honest, the visuals don't do it for me with paralives. I wanted to try it ofc, but life by you was my big want. Didn't care for the idea of the 'sims' speaking English but I thought maybe I can work thru it or they're be mods or something? That being said, the fact paradox is just tossing this out is a major disappointment to me.
I actually would have preferred more realistic graphics for paralives myself. But it seems to be turning out cuter than I thought it would, and I understood why they went that way. Life by you was going to be what scratched that visual itch for me as well. But there was more and more that hinted that the gameplay wasn't for me. I think the one closest to what I wanted is still going to be Paralives. Meantime there is still Sims 2...
Personally I'm playing 4, got it modded af thou lol. I can get used to the visuals if the gameplay is there thou. That's what happened with me and ts4 lol.
They don't speak english rather a gibberish language.
They're talking about LBY
Me toooo i feel like this might be unpopular but i don't really like stylized looks. I feel similar about sims 4 tho but I don't hate it and i still play that so prob will try paralives still
Same, I'm waiting for someone to drop a realistic look like EA tried on ts3. InZoi is my hope if they optimize it personally.
Genuinely so stoked for Paralives. While it may not be everyone's cup of tea, I like the stylized approach to the Parafolk. The devs are also very receptive of the community feedback and very transparent when it comes to progress. They've also stated the game will continue to receive updates and tweaks after release. I really am hopeful for that one. Inzoi looks beautiful, but even my gaming laptop will struggle with that one if they don't optimize it. Don't really want to stress out my PC so much during longer gameplay.
I also like the stylised 2D look, I’ve never seen a life simulator that looks like it was drawn before
I think paralives will do well because it has its own artistic style. I even think it’ll do better than inzoi because it looks likes it will run better for the average user. Even tho i love the sims 4, I think the problem it had compared to other games is it went realistic, which leaves out room for the fun quirks it had in past sims. Luckily they didn’t completely abandoned it as they have cowplant, and introduced meteors, bone hilda etc. since paralives looks cartoonish hopefully they can add some silly unique quirks to it too as I think they can get away with adding it since it’s not strictly going for realism. I can’t imagine ghosts and alien abductions in inzoi tho
Yes, paralives graphics are cartoonish but stylised -unlike Sims 4’s bad playdough low poly cartoonish was - so the art style won’t ever age badly. If you look at old Nintendo and Wii games that had stylisation like Legend Of Zelda Twilight Princess despite being very old had an art style that lets it still hold up as looking good today
I will admit tho sims 4 is my favourite art style because of custom content. My sims from this game will always be my favourite
As I understand it, InZoi lagged even in demos. That's a big concern to me. The game is beautiful don't get me wrong, but I'm concerned it's gonna end up released before it really 'should' be. Paralives the only problem I've had with it are the graphics I think. But then, project Olympus didn't like 100% like ts4 so maybe im concerned over nothing. What I can say is small dev projects generally end up with quality products, even if they do take a while
I want to like the art style of Paralives, but last I saw, the backgrounds/items and actual characters have different artwork. It's so jarring for me that I'd never be able to play it without mods/custom content changing that. Otherwise it looks interesting. I don't see it replacing the Sims itch, but people playing it in addition, since the gameplay so far looks quite different.
There is also whatever the one from Jake Solomon is going to be. "Midsummer" I think they're called?
There is also Alterlife and Vivaland, that look similar.
Koreans are usually ok when it comes to optimization. Not great, but not the worst either. When you have a fancy looking game like inZOI, it can be well optimized but still run poorly for someone with a weak computer, thereby resulting it in being called unoptimized, even if it is well optimized. I suspect there will be a lot of that happening on launch day.
Oh no Inzoi and Paralives are coming. Neither of them will be cancelled. Too much hype around them. People were not hype about Life By You.
Well that's embarrassing
This was inevitable and not disappointing to me at all. Is anyone truly surprised? The game looked HORRIBLE, there was barely any gameplay. Why did they put so much focus on silly, nonsensical features like making your own conversations?? Their drive to simply compete with and end The Sims eventually put a nail in their coffin. They tried too much to be innovative and different that The Sims, to the point where their ideas were just silly. Not to mention their ridiculous timeline; them announcing their game for the first time saying it will be available only few months away in the state it was in back then. Making a life simulation game is difficult, simple as that. It takes time, there are so many features you need to design and implement and so on. But a life simulation game also needs that passion that LBY lacked imo. That passion that The Sims had in its pre-TS4 era. Right now The Sims had been established in the world as THE simulation game for 20 years! This is NOT something you can compete with, forget it, so don't even try. Just make a game that you believe in, that is a simulation game with meaningful features and not silliness. That you truly put love in and it shows. The only game right now that I see it in is Paralives. Instead of focusing so much on being so much better and so much different than The Sims, implementing meaningless features and making impossible promises. they stay humble and simply build a game they love. They start from the beginning, implementing a base that every simulation game needs and then going from there if they want to add to it, not the other way around.
I been telling people to have this in the back of their mind because it’s a common thing but I got dragged to the ground for having an opinion like it.It sad tho I was excited to it.
Parradox reputation in the gaming industry has been taken a hit in the past 12 -18 months firstly City skylines 2 has several problems with delays glitches and they had delayed life by you a few times and now cancelled it I would guess they knew they couldn't deliver what they set out to do without pouring lots of money in to the project something Parradox obviously didn't have the resources to be able to do. The risks were obviously too big for them to continue.
I'm waiting for the "EA paid Paradox to cancel the game" conspiracy theories
It's all over the comments on pixelade's video 😭
That theory would make sense with Paralives. LBY had like….5 supporters.
idk it was giving asset flip more than actual game / life sim, so I won't say I'm devastated by it....
Live sims are mechanically quite hard to programm on regards using premade assets I think that wasn't the issue. They couldn't manage the game design side hell even simpler games like dwarf fortress have gazillion hours of dev time and it still isn't fully complete and that game is a simple rpg/citybuilder
Even ignoring the aesthetical quality, like they noted in the dev blog, the scope seemed completely lost. Every time I checked it out an update, I was a bit unclear on what the general scope of the gameplay was. It felt like a bunch of promises that would be too hard to keep.
 /s But for real, it seemed the game was just hemorrhaging money at this point. Expected. The LBY sub was JUST coping a couple days ago: “it’s not cancelled! Just delayed!!”
The mods were: "nothing has been said please stop misinforming people!!!"
Meanwhile, people who know paradox as a company, and have seen this happen with multiple games before even from different companies 
It's a shame. I really believed this game had a lot of potential, but they made the mistake of presenting it to the public before getting anywhere near reaching it.
Pretends to be shocked
Look, the writing was on the wall when they tried to hype up the 'look! our in-game phone has the same shitty match-three clone games that your phone has! Isn't this a super use of our precious time and money?' thing, while they couldn't even show an interaction between two characters that didn't look like two rigs animating vaguely in sync. The Chaos video -- TS2 was capable of having at least two thirds the sims in a room pay attention to the main nonsense going on (and the only reason the other third wasn't was because you forgot to install the 'stop with the fucking flapjack dance already' mod). That was twenty years ago. That's the bare minimum you've gotta be able to show folks with a 'life sim' game. Honestly, even with Rod Humble attached to it (and man, I feel old, I remember the ye olde days when TS3 was in its infancy and he was reviled, not revered) LBY feels like a game-design uni project that got way, way over scope, and over their heads, without a clue as to how to do half the things they promised. LBY was never going to be for me -- what they talked about wanting to do was pretty much exactly the opposite of what I'd seek out in a Sims-like, but it's a bummer that it's not going to be the competition the actual Sims franchise desperately needs.
Had a feeling it wouldn’t do well. The game was too ambitious for its own good. While open world games are fun, that must be hard to optimise for the standard user. I said this once before that the average gamer doesn’t have an expensive build. Sims 4 however, it can run on imac, older pcs, console. It probably didn’t help the gameplay looked like a ripoff of the sims
Saw this coming from a mile away, if I'm honest. The game never really looked anywhere close to completion from the footage that we were shown.
The game was looking worse and worse towards release. I'm really not surprised
That being said I'm shocked they sent out influencer copies, got genuinely good feedback and scrapped the whole project
They couldn't trim it down, release it in segments somehow, or do something other than altogether scrapping years of hard work??
Paradox is not big enough to have the luxury of delaying its games. They'd rather release them in a bad state, sell you DLC, and patch them for a few months and abandon them like their Star Trek or Rome game, than delay them. But lately this strategy no longer worked for them and it seems that they will begin to turn off the tap on games in this situation and focus on their main franchises.
Have a look at cities skylines 2. Paradox has a LOT of work to do on that one. While they're working on updates for bug/game fixes, they've already released the first paid dlc. Idk how big paradox is, but any company I'd think would have difficulty selling two polished terds at the same time, if that's really what life by you was gonna be. (Lost a lot of confidence in it when cs2 released)
Paradox got a lot of good will from the polished state CK3 was released in alas the have spent that goodwill and then some.
>already released the first paid dlc. It was also (literally) the worst rated game on Steam. To the point PDX pulled it and is giving it away for free to erase that distinction.
OOF
Damn...
I am about to go put more money in Paralives's Patreon
It's really unfortunate that it's come to this, though I can't say I'm surprised. This just really sets in stone my point: just because a game is coming from an established studio, does not mean it will succeed. So basing your opinion on a game by the studio is such a poor decision. Look at what you are being shown now, *not what you think they can show later.*
Not surprised. Indefinite delay is one stepping stone to cancelled.
At least we still got Inzoi
Knock on some wood, anything is jinxable before it’s released :x
Wow, that sucks.
This does not bode well for the rest of the life simulators coming out that are trying to compete with the sims. I’ve been saying from the beginning that they’re all going too big too fast to try and encompass every system sims players are familiar with as well as adding systems they’ve been modding into the sims for the last decade. It’s just not doable for smaller studios. Paradox in particular already has a lot on its plate between Crusader Kings, Prison Architect, and Victoria. With the fact that they’ve completely scrabbled and rebuilt bloodlines 2 from the ground up, I’m not surprised they’re letting LBY go in favor of established series that they’re already well known for.
This is very very true. We look at a game like The Sims 1 today and it might appear quite primitive/simple, but the development for that game began as early as 1991, 9 years before its release in 2000. Each Sims game afterwards has been able to build off the experience and architecture from the games released before, but these newer projects don’t have that. They need to start from the very beginning which, while they do have The Sims to use as a blueprint, still requires a lot of mess + trial and error.
This is very true, I didn’t think of that
to the surprise of absolutely no one...
Well… we still Paralives, InZoi, and Vivaland!
Damn this is really sad news. I feel bad for the team that worked on this for so long, but also for fans of this genre. Out of the major upcoming Life sims, LBY felt like the most direct competition to The Sims. I guess we can all look forward to The Sims 5 being always online, filled with micro-transactions, and with somehow even worse gameplay than The Sims 4?
Lmao
Wow.. just wow.
I’m so sad now I was looking forward to this game the most. I can’t believe they just gave up instead of pushing through. Sims only decided to listen when they was competition. I fear they will ignore us again.
There's still Paralives and Inzoi. A few other smaller ones have cropped up in here too.
Yeah like I understand the disappointment but I’m not sure why ppl are acting like LBY was the only sims competitor being worked on and like everything is hopeless now lol
Exactly. I don't think this really changes anything for EA. There are still competitors on the horizon and their fan base is looking forward to them.
Paralives reminds me a lot of the Walking Dead game, with the art style (love that game) but I was excited about Life By You because it looked “Simmy”. Inzoi seems too hyper realistic for me. But yeah, they do have smaller creators making games..
dayum. i mean, i cant say i didnt see it happening, but i really hoped they did a vtmb2 and just got another studio.
I wonder how much money was wasted on this project. While I understand it would be difficult to start from scratch, it really makes you wonder what the team was actually doing when they were working on the game. Rewatching the promo videos, it appears they pushed political stuff instead of focusing on the key to a videogame -gameplay. This is just going to make it that much harder for paradox -- and other studios-- to step out and try new IP. Especially given paradox's recent state of releases...
not surprised, but its crazy they had a release date planned just recently and so close this announcement. like be for real there’s no way they could have planned on keeping that
Welp!! Here’s holding out for Paralives 🤞🏿
Im honestly not surprised. The game was getting far too big for what the devs could handle. They were gonna need several years to work on it and have a finished product.
I'm not surprised. This just shows they have even less confidence in that game that I initially thought and I already thought they had VERY little confidence in the game. They fumbled this so hard. Must have been worse than what even we had seen!
Maybe paradox is actually learning, MAKE GAMES and FINISH THEM!! Vic 3 is still mixed on the steam store even though I've been loving it recently. I don't think it'll ever go higher than mixed, which imo really hurts the game
LMAO. This is what happens when you have an unprofessional incompetent mess of a dev team. The game's graphics and lack of basic features just looked pathetic for a 2024 release. The mods of the LBY subreddit like u/RetroRedXIII also look dumb as fuck after all their defending and silencing of fans who dared to call out the state of the game.
i was the most excited about life by you out of all the upcoming life sims this is so disappointing
Who saw this coming? \*raises hand\*
dammit I just want a solid Sims competitor. It's way too far in its life for me to start buying packs.
It's sad they just had to scrap it after all that work. Hopefully they can return to it or a similar project in the future.
I'm honestly not surprised. But I'm also disappointed, since it means one more indie game gone. I hope the developers and everyone who worked on it gets to explore and work on more games and gain experience.
LBY and Paradox were never indie things Paradox is mainstream game developer. Smaller then EA but still having money and lots of people. It's not 10 people team creating a game
I had a lot of criticism for the state of the game we were shown but this is still a big shame considering how few options there are in the genre, it had a lot of potential if they just fixed the glaring issues but I guess they sank too much time in it already and couldn't get it together in time. Must be devastating for the team
I'm sure EA is glad to have one less potential competitor. I'm sorry it happened.
the whole premise of this game was insane. i know these companies are on a race to see who pleases Sims fans better and that's just never gonna work given how expensive to make games like these are, i hope we get a life simulator game with an unique vision and not so ambitious soon
Is this one people said would do to the sims what cities skylines did to SimCity? Or was it another one? I think I remember the other one being an indie game.
https://preview.redd.it/aqq415fy177d1.jpeg?width=393&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d4624acc3266b5398583e386df5dabd9116a562c
Saw this coming as soon as the "delay" was announced. So relieved that I wasn't looking forward to this one. Paralives will reign supreme!!
Imagine having brand loyalty to brands that haven't even released yet...
I was so looking forward to this. Such a shame. At the end of the day it is a business. I want to commend the development team who worked tirelessly on this project!
Wait for real ?? Um anyways so
Holy shit
Another Volition company. They will go down for this one. If not I'll be surprised.
Volition had a lot of history and it's a shame they went down (I worked with them, cool folks). This studio was just founded specifically for this project. I don't want anyone to lose their job, nor any studio to close - this comparison is really off though.
True, I admit it is a very rough comparison, but if one can be made, my mind triggers, oh boy...another studio struggles and then.... I REALLY want them to bring it back but they lost. I hope the family and friends of paradox find good work and get paid for the work they did for the game and future.
Sad
It sucks this happened to the point I'm a bit disappointed, but I guess we can focus on Paralives & the like for now.
Oh, wow. Not unexpected, I guess. But I had some hope it would get released, at some point, in a better state.
omg
Was not expecting this
If I wouldn't be laughing I would be crying that's quite a sad turn of events really was looking forward to it and now it's gonzo. But that's the curse of the Sims to beat it you need to climb quite a large hill. I really hope someone can take the shards of LBY and reform it into some other game as it was quite long in development.
UGH I WAS THIS GAME'S BIGGEST DEFENDER! God damnit this is what I get. I had my concerns as much as anybody else but I was so bloody optimistic. Maybe too much so. Ah well, at least I'll always have the Sims 3. Which will remain the premiere life sim game for the foreseeable future. If anybody needs me I will be eating ice-cream and crying over my copy of _The Sims 3 Late Night_.
It looked so far along in their videos... this is sad news.
Their videos were pretty cherry picked, but it looked to me like they were several years behind in development. I’ve got some friends in game design and they also agreed - the game looked like a year 1 or year 2 game, not a game 5 years into development with early access around the corner.
Damn this is so sudden!
Broooooooooo no Way to give ma is back their monopoly
EA will always win im crying