Mermaids & Realism: The Sandbox That Doesn’t Segregate

[Muffin]

@Minthyuyu

I hope you still know I am not trying to call you out on anything. But maybe this would also help the devs to see, what could be a DLC and what should be part of the base game. So they can see what people like to see and are willing to buy as a content pack.

Oh, don’t worry about that at all! I take absolutely no offense to pushback on my ideas. When people offer me valid criticism or disagree with me, I welcome it because that is exactly how good ideas are made. Developers, artists, writers, and creatives all sit together in a room, toss out concepts, and challenge them, some make it and some don’t. The more different perspectives you have, the better a final idea can form. For us as players, these forums are our collective idea room to consider different concepts before suggesting them to the development team.

I only sigh like Kif Kroker does to Zapp Brannigan from Futurama when people attack my person instead of offering constructive or discussable criticism on an idea. When someone just says, “That is a stupid idea, you’re stupid,” there really isn’t a floor to have a real discussion. I don’t get to try to understand their point of view, and I can’t even reflect on anything they said, you know?

That is why I have genuinely appreciated this back-and-forth with you. You challenged my concepts with actual design logic, which forced me to dig deeper and really refine the DLC boundary definitions.

@Minthyuyu

I understand your preferred model, but the boundary still feels subjective: mermaiding is classified by its smallest basic form, while LARP is classified by its largest possible implementation.

I completely agree with you though, we could essentially strip any concept down and expand upon it later in a DLC. It was something I considered too, and I did have to ask myself: why is the Medieval concept fundamentally different from mermaids?

It boils down to one question: “What is the core emotional payoff for the concept?”

In other words: when a player asks for a feature, what is the absolute baseline of what they need to experience to feel satisfied?

For mermaid players, the core emotional payoff is the visual joy of swimming freely and elegantly through open water with a stylized tail. The game is already open world, an ocean exists, and the developers are already building a diving system. I didn’t strip mermaids of their essence; I only changed what mermaids are in inZOI so that they relied mostly on features that already exist in the game, with a few new ones added to flesh them out better (namely how kids and teens react to them). The idea satisfies the core emotional payoff, and it just so happens that any future environmental update or deep body of water naturally expands their gameplay.

On the flip side, what is the core emotional payoff for a Medieval concept? When a player asks for medieval to be added, what are they actually asking for? It isn’t the clothes or the ability to spar with a dummy. For a medieval system, the core emotional payoff is how the surrounding world actively reacts; it’s the historical social norms. Stripping it of that immersive layer means a base-game medieval outfit is just an empty shell waiting for a DLC to actually fulfill its purpose.

The Sims 4 registers exactly why that scaled-down approach falls apart. They sprinkled castle building blocks, medieval costumes, rustic lifestyles across various packs, and tossed a royalty system on top of the base game AI. But it amounted to nothing more than a shallow display that never scratched the itch of what a historical setting actually means. Playing dress-up in a medieval gown on a modern city street is simply too shallow to satisfy the core emotional payoff.

This is precisely why I suggested the Medieval DLC as an immersive, standalone Renaissance Fair world. It is the only way to seamlessly connect that theme into a realistic world while preserving the very essence and soul that makes the concept fun. It gives the theme the controlled geography and AI social reactions it needs to thrive.

In simple terms, when looking at concepts like medieval, occults, and other alternative lifestyles, the definitive question to ask is: If the devs never introduced a DLC code for it, would the core emotional payoff of the concept be fulfilled?

[Minthyuyu]

I’m glad that you see it that way. Some already take a constructive exchange as something offensive, eventhough it is completely neutral. And exactly, as long as the criticism is respectful and qithin reasoning, it’s more than okay​. Back to the topic:

I understand your “core emotional payoff” criterion, but I still think it remains subjective.

The minimum experience needed to satisfy a concept depends on which player you ask. Some mermaid players may be satisfied by a wearable tail and elegant swimming, while others may consider transformation, mythology, underwater society or special abilities essential. Similarly, some Medieval players may want a complete historical world, while LARP players may be satisfied with costumes, weekly markets and foam-sword sparring in existing parks or the dummy (basically the minimum, that could be in the basegame within reason).

This still seems to define mermaiding through its smallest satisfying implementation while defining Medieval gameplay through its largest and most immersive implementation.

It also does not fully answer my concern about other lifestyles. Idol culture, equestrianism, surfing, scuba diving, van life, historical reenactment and many other interests can all be reduced to a modest base-game foundation that uses systems already present and expands naturally through future updates.

Who determines which community’s “core emotional payoff” deserves base-game development? That still seems to depend largely on personal preference rather than an objective boundary.

I understand why mermaiding is important to you, and I am not opposed to the basic idea. I simply do not yet see a consistent rule that would place it above other equally meaningful but specialised lifestyles.