U can just see that Sims 2 was made with love and the people actually cared about the game

So much love and attention was put into this game. Now everything seems like a quick cash-grab.

It's shame how in TS2 days the had more ambitions and ideas but tehnical limitations were stopping them. With TS4 it's the opposite... less limitations but also less ambition...

Imagine if after all those years of asking for improved babies in the sims 4, they'd release an update where babies would finally look like... that one unholy texture. 👁👄👁

interesting how weather only got cut bcs of technical difficulties but now it’s forever a paid feature

Amazing that the sum of the Sims 2's cut content is more than what Sims 4 had at launch..

Unreleased content always seems so mysterious and sometimes even lore-adding to me, or showing what developers intended to include in the game but for some reasons decided otherwise... Spicy!

There's just something really interesting about Sims betas

i think the family need probably evolved into the family aspiration, because lets be real, some people just hate their family, and it kinda makes sense to get rid of that as a basic essential need. although it would definitely be interesting to see an alternate universe where that is a need in the sims 2

I find it ironic how, when Will Wright first pitched the idea of The Sims, Maxis was actually pretty averse to the idea while EA was pretty much receptive to it and even encouraged him to go through with the project. And yet, it was Maxis who did the franchise more justice than EA ever did and ever will do.

Oh if they could do the sims 2 remake... i would buy it rather than sims 5

As a single woman from a rough upbringing, the idea of a "family" need would ruin the game for me. It's too similar to social, but social at least allows pets and friends to satisfy it. There's simply no reason to rely on relatives or spouses to make you happy, especially if you create a single Sim from scratch. I'm glad that was scrapped. Maybe it could have worked for the various aspirations to have a specific need (so a family aspiration would have a family need and a knowledge Sim would have a knowledge need filled by reading or playing chess?) but I think it's fine as is. As for the memory system, I think Sims 3 kind of did that with moodlets, actually (since they were often tied to events). But Sims 4 could really use this complex system, it's boring.

I'm glad they didnt keep the family need bar to be honest. In my opinion the social bar is enough, and you can take it in any direction you like: some Sims would rather spend quality time with their relatives, wile others are not very family-oriented but want to go out and meet their friends, or live in a community... not everyone has to be close to their family. I like it as is

It makes me feel like a kid again watching stuff like this - beacuse I never realised how complex this game was until I was a full blown adult

I think the "Family" need was maybe scrapped because of how similar it would work with the family aspiration where you have to fulfill wants based on these family interactions. They probably thought there was no reason for the need and the aspiration especially since they also created aspirations like romantic that were the opposite of family and these two would have collided.

holy SHIT the memory system plans sound amazing. jaw literally dropped when it got to the part where you could vent to help you get over a bad memory... and even having to choose the right person to talk to... the level of detail warms my heart

that original baby texture is HAUNTING 😆

It says something that sims 2 (and sims 1 to a lesser extent) still have a dedicated fanbase 15-20 years later

You can tell the amount of love and passion and details that the team put into TS2. I wonder what happened. I wonder what caused them to lose their spark and uniqueness? Was it EA? A new team? Both? I guess we will never really know.

I think the power aspiration symbol is a sim holding a lightning bolt, like Zeus!

maybe the neighbourhood aspirations could of worked like this, If you assign a family aspiration there would be a menu in the neighbourhood screen where it gives 3 or 4 wants and fears, one of the wants could be have 3 babies born in the neighbourhood, for every want completed it some sort of bar could rise up. the more its rises it could have positive effects on the sims living there, like higher wages at jobs, no getting fired, no robbers, fast skill gain, and also if too many fears get completed it could have the opposite affect. Think that would of been a great way for players to work on a big goal for the whole neighbourhood and not just focus on a particular family

the sims 2 is just so outstanding... kinda wish we'd have a team that focus more on gameplay than on looks today

2:28 that eye texture on the floor is very unsettling lol

I'm guessing they got rid of the family need to make it easier for people that just wanted to play with 1 sim. I'm trying to imagine how the need would work if you just created 1 sim, and didn't intend to give them a family for a while? It might have ended up forcing you to give your sim a family.

That moment it sounds like the cut content is more interesting than sims 4 base game What a year to be alive

Sim 2: Lots of love and care, content, little details, extra things that weren’t even added to the game Sim 4: star-wars 💃🏼

Maybe the grandchild scenario would've been for when you're playing as elder sims, and you try to convince your adult child and their partner to have a baby? "We want grandkids already!" and that whole thing. Success would encourage the adult and partner to try for baby or, for same-sex relationships, adopt one? That's the only guess I have!

your sims 2 videos save my life

Sims 2 beta > online sims 5

The neighbourhood aspirations made me think of the ambitions in Sims Medieval. Not that they would necessarily be similar, they just reminded me of them - having a goal or set of goals you wanted to work towards within a certain time frame (or before using up your quests points in SM). Maybe like having 20 births in the neighbourhood before 20 deaths to achieve the Family one in bronze (and having 50 births to make it in platinum, if you're an overachiever); or having 10 different sims meet someone new and reach the level of family friend while in community lots for Popularity. Who knows though, it's cool to imagine what it could have been...

Im so glad youve decided to cover this! So many people don't know about this stuff.

That baby texture will haunt me for the rest of my days.

something fun i noticed: the 'grr... argh...' level in the power outage scenario is a reference to joss whedon's production company, mutant enemy productions! the company's end-of-credits logo was a little vampire that would go across the screen and say 'grr... argh..'! there must have been some buffy and/or firefly fans on the sims 2 team! 😂

i think they scrapped the "Family" motive bc lots of players only play 1 Sim per household maybe

? ? This girl's voice sounds like a teacher's. I don't know there's just something about it that's so put together, like she knows exactly what she's talking about and what she wants to do.

I'm glad the engagement scenario was scrapped, I get nervous enough prepping for the headmaster to arrive! 🙃

You can really tell how much love went into making this game! Some of these sounds like they realized that more mechanics don't equal more fun (The engagement one by example, or the memories! It feels like too much work to work on those memories while I have to focus on keeping them alive so I can keep my storyline going) For cars, I feel EA could've stepped in and say "No. Charge them for cars" or something. I read somewhere EA pressed the team a lot for them to finish the game. The neighborhood aspiration sounds fun though. I wish we had more aspirations or a way to code more into the game :c

The big boss scenario is like the 'steamed hams' scenario.

I feel like the neighborhood aspirations would have been related to the townie generation. Like do you want a lot of romance townies? Or do you want your townies to be super focused on fortune or popularity? I think that would have been so cool!

Imagine if Don Lothario was in red aspiration and rolled the want to "Watch Play-In?" That would be hilarious! Too bad someone hasn't made a mod to add that as an interaction because I would love that for more quirky realism!

I'm guessing the Neighborhood Aspirations would be kinda like the Lot Traits in Sims 4. Like maybe Family gave you a higher chance to have twins, Fortune made it easier to make money, Popularity made it easier to make friends, etc., not gonna lie I'm sad it didn't become a thing, since it sounds interesting enough.

This was really interesting, I never thought about ts2 beta/early game development… the neighborhood aspiration sounds like a great idea! It’s kinda like how in real life most towns have certain things they specialize in, it could be like that. For instance the family aspiration, it might be have a goal of have a certain amount of child and teen sims and give benefits like better fertility chances, better schools, etc. If the aspiration was fortune than than it might favor sims who are rich, have cheaper (or more expensive!) bills, have a certain amount of sims at the top level of their careers, and make leveling up in careers easier, anything related to money that might be more universal or involve multiple sims. This could have been really cool and definitely something they should look into for the sims 5! Anyways keep up the great work Cindy! You’re one of the few sims channels I watch nowadays! Can you do a video like this on TS3? I’d love to hear about the development of it since I stated playing short after it came out but didn’t really follow sims news until around ts4 was announced. I know PLENTY about that game 😅

Sims 2 beta is so amazing to me and I wish we could play a beta build one day! Btw I hope your doing ok Cindy I’m sending positivity 💙

I can't believe a game that was really decent for it's time had even more ambitions we didn't know anything about until recent years. Just proves how passionate they were about the game, and makes me appreciate it more for what it was.

It comes as no surprise that pure love and care was put into the Sims 2, everyday I feel blessed that it exists

If you ever do make a part 2 of this (please do!!), I'd love to see you covering the lots of unused hairstyles, clothing, animations and more stuff that didn't make the final cut. Some of them were even found in game/recreated/enabled, and seeing you talk about them would make my dreams come true 🥺

All I play is sims 2 and 3... I can't go back to sims 4 anymore. Its just too boring 😴

I wish they would’ve added in the power going out during like a bad snow storm or lightning storm. And getting a windmill for doing good during it would’ve been cool lol

Sims beta fascinate me. Idk what it is about them. They just seem so, intriguing. I can just imagine what TS2 Beta would look like if it was released to the public.

“Watch play-in”, omg 😂😂😂 Just goes to show how much steamier and more adult-ish Sims 2 is compared to Sims 4. In Sims 4 you gotta play with Wicked Whims to have sims watch porn, but in Sims 2 they were actually considering it for the base game! 😂

Not gonna lie, when you were saying "icons" and the floor was just tiled eye textures (around 2:37), I kept seeing it as "eye-cons" when I visualized the word. For, um, obvious reasons.

The memory thing sounds INCREDIBLE. Such an amazing idea. I always kind of calculated how good/bad/easy/hard my sims lives had been based on how many good or bad memories they had.

They should make a Sims 2 reboot, add back in most of the cut stuff and give it updated looks and mechanics. Semi-open neighborhoods and color wheels then boom we have the ultimate Sims game.

The Power Aspiration doesn't leave a sim with no aspiration. Rather, The Power Aspiration has no icon in-game. (Oh you already said that) IIRC, the aspiration benefits are the same as for popularity. It is possible to give a sim no aspiration, if you use testing cheats or the Sim Modder to try and give them the same main aspiration as their secondary aspiration. When a sim has no aspiration, the aspiration benefits are a copy of the work benefits. Sedona is available as a neighborhood template when creating a neighborhood. You probably know that already, but you didn't mention it, so there. You don't have to use mods to stop the game from copying the Pleasantview townies. You just have to remove the Pleasantview neighborhood from the UserData/Neighborhoods folder in the game folder (Not the one in your documents folder, mind you, but the proper game folder.) Technically still modding, but you know I also find it funny when she shames the Sims 2 for the "Watch Play-in" part, when all the creators I watch have Wicked Whims installed xD Something not mentioned in the video is that there are text references to object weight and structural integrity or something along those lines in the column objects. I highly doubt this was reasonably possible in 2004, and imagine those plans were scrapped early. Besides, we wouldn't have been able to make treehouses or underwater houses or flying houses if it had been implemented xD

I always liked that when you were an unfaithful lover, and someone near to your actual partner catched you, they would ran to tell your partner what happened. I couldn't see that reaction in the actual game :c

Neighborhood aspirations sounds like what they tried to do with Eco living and the comunnity board, but not being a sims 4 thing it would probably have worked really nice

RiverSide was such a beautiful neighborhood, I don't really get why they didn't add it in the game

They scrapped so many things unnecessarily in my opinion.. ugh let's hope the Sims 5 uses some of these features.. Who the hell am I kidding... lol

I really wish they had included the power outage feature. It sounds amazing and somewhat challenging. Plus the big boss feature sounds pretty cool too.

My guess for the grandchild scenario it would of been like babysitting for them. And the grandparents would be scored at the end of the night with increased relations with maybe your child and grandchildren or if you fail your children not asking you to babysit again.

Great video, I always was fascinated with the BETA version of The Sims 2. One interesting thing with the power outage scenario is that you can still access it in the final game, if you place the unused base game rain on a lot there is a chance that the pop-up for this scenario will appear. What's interesting is that it actually works, when the scenario is active, you won't be able to use any electronic devices on the lot (except for the phone) and you'll have to wait until the timer finishes to have the power back on, so it wasn't completly cut.

The memories and family aspects would’ve been soooo great!

After all these years, this is still the best and most realistic version, this just proves good mechanics and story writing can make a good game, the high end graphics not necessary.

I will NEVER love a game more than the sims 2. I play and tolerate Sims 4 only because I was able to download on xbox. Sims 2 is just untouchable when it comes to game concept and actual gameplay. So much thought and love was put into this game!

I find it interesting that they didn't clean up the files in the shipped out game tbh. Ahh, early 2000s development 😂😂

I've never plsyed te sims 2, just 3 and 4, to play ts4 i had to delete ts3, I regretted every moment until last month I managed to uninstall ts4 to go back to ts3

I think that the neighborhood aspiration was something like the feel of the city, kinda like the sims 3 and 4 hoods looks like have a theme (that follows the packs themes).

It's interesting to think how The Sims Medieval's Kingdom Ambitions can hearken back to the Sims 2!

Its so funny how ambitious Sims 2 developers were that they had to cut off content meanwhile Sims 4 barely has content at all lmfao Also, I remember a Sims 2 promocional trailer of aspirations and instead of popularity there was one called “Fame” so I guess they might were interested on adding something like Sims 1 Superstar to the base game

We can clearly see they wanted this game to be the best! They had so many ideas they couldn’t put everything in the base game

10:48 Cars lined up on a lookout point, so cute! 12:31 Another Sims2 logo, something in between the demo and final one.

I wish cars, weather, and laundry would just be a base game feature ngl lmaooo like hopefully Sims 5 has cars, weather, and laundry automatically.

The old sims 2 logo looks more modern in a way? Like it's from a recent time.

wow. this is so crazy. I mean, just think about how big this game still is even after all this years. thanks a lot for sharing that with us!

For some reason I just love listening about these Beta materials, like, it's intriguing how much can be found in the game or Sim files, for example these Brigit the maid's portraits or bookcases thumbnails 2:28 a very early test build of the game; a placeholder version of the Goth family, you can see that "Bella"'s name and zodiac matches with Bella's from The Sims and house's interior matches with the original house; I love how they planned to include Alexander at this point in time; also, that fridge made it to the final game, probably wasn't even changed a bit, it looks finalized 4:15 they dropped this idea because Sims created in CAS couldn't fill this need if they were the only Sims or if a pre-made family didn't have any relatives, for example the Loner family 8:37 I think it was because of the hidden families, y'kno, Default (dead and unique NPCs), that one with no name (service NPCs) and others; or just they thought it wasn't needed since it'd be difficult to even get to 100 Sims in 2004, another issue would probably be with the deceased Sims, like, the game wouldn't really know how to count dead Sims since they'd be mixed up with NPCs in the Default family; also, these buttons are based on The Sims' buttons, like, families, lots and exit + added options button for ease of access 10:09 there were a few neighborhoods with "z_" at the beginning (to probably show them at the end of the neighborhood list or something), Automation was used for automatic checks for the game (at least according to logs from Life Stories), z_Sedona was probably a one-time neighborhood (there were rumors about it, something like the Tutorial, probably an early version or something), z_Playground (or something) for various tests if the devs were bored and a few others, but I don't remember their names 10:49 look at the hill, there are a few cars and the "car park" neighborhood decoration that is still in the game, but inaccessible (you'd have to make it accessible by copying the asset from the game files and placing in the downloads, then changing something and it'd "work") but there's no texture nor a model anymore for it, so it'd be just an empty deco 12:06 if you look closely, you'll spot a few lots from the lots bin from the final game, like that victorian mansion in the bottom left corner or that mansion with the swimming pool on the upper left side, but it's just a placeholder, it wasn't meant to be shipped like this, there were too many lots and even though they were there, they were there just to be a background decoration, there are even 3 lots that look like the Pleasantview shopping lot, but they're a placeholder too 12:26 a small thing, but the learn to play was at the bottom, now there's just the exit button, there was also that neighborhood button, probably neighborhood options or something; probably it's not a neighborhoods screen, but just the neighborhood, you know, "Now Playing!" refers to the fact that Waterside is currently being played, with the expansion packs there would be probably sub-hoods displayed there, the neighborhoods button would take the player to the neighborhoods menu from the final game

Great video! Some time ago I was looking for the Sims 2 beta content and I was enjoyed about it. In that pdf file was mentioned that the developers don't know how many content was enough for the game so they planned so many things for the game. This showing how passionate the developers was about the Sims 2.

I lived in Sedona, Arizona for a couple years as a teenager so it's pretty interesting to see they were gonna make a whole neighborhood out of it 🤔

Do we know why Sims 2 had never been matched ? I mean we're there divergence in the production team members? Less ppl working on the game? I don't know... I feel like there was so much details and passion in the Sims 2 that I never felt for the rest of the series... Great video 💕

Damn, this feels so surreal, having sims 2 beta being closer to a life simulation than sims 2, 3 and 4 were going to be.

The neighborhood aspirations sound a bit like what they did with seasons (spring for romance, summer for friendship, fall for knowledge, winter for family it was, I think?) I think they would have increased the effect of actions related to the trait.

im in love with ur ts2 vids

Maybe neighborhood aspiration would work like eco lifestyles naps

Even without those features it is still an amazing game I could play forever. That being said, I am aching for that memory system lol.

The memory/mood thing is super interesting, wow! Very cool concept of memories degrading over time and the ability to strengthen the memories by talking about them or dwelling on them or whatever.

A few of the examples you listed are very similar things to the Playstation 2 Sim games. Like Urbz, busting out and Sims 2 on DS. Which did have those mini games and scenarios for socializing. All the games were very alike yet diverse. Also the story lines stayed intact like the families throughout the series. Went hand in hand, atleast from what I remember. They were really dedicated and that's what I loved. Some of these ideas were definitely ahead of their time.

Will Wright had so much love for this concept. What a guy

Probably the population counter and the aspiration of the neighborhood was to make elements of simcity little by little until one day they would merge in some way, I think that merging simcity and the sims would be a very good idea since the sagas are closely related and that It is the most that could innovate in the saga now.

The memories having an effect on the mood give me big Sims 4 sentiments vibes. If they could work out the kinks, maybe we can get robust memories in 4

those features make it clear how much the people making the sims 2 cared about what they were creating and wanted to deliver the best game possible. it's possible that most things, like the memory system, were only scratched because they couldn't implement it with the 2005 technology.

9:45 I think it would've worked like the second aspiration system, where people living in that town would have specific wants related to the town, like maybe Strangetown's aspiration would be Knowledge, and all sims living there would have wants related to the strange things that happen in the town. I think this would've given us the opportunity for even bigger stories, kind of accommodating clichés like "All the people in this town only care about money (And they have the Fortune aspiration)" or "This is a very humble, small town with not a lot of resources, but the people are warm and nice (They have Family aspiration)" or even a "Welcome to the town of lovvvve (And they have a Romance aspiration)", making the sims living in the town lowkey act a certain way, whilst still having individual aspirations to make unique sims with a social identity as well. I think that would've been really cool!

I would've liked a little engagement scenario, I normally send my sims off for a date and do the surprise engagement at dinner anyway. Also its is a little unrealistic how engagements pretty much always get accepted, well I've never had a sim get rejected before.

Love comeback of Sims 2 videos!

I loved this video, there are more videos of the sims 2 beta. I would love a second part.

The early UI reminds me of a combination of the sims 1 and 2 which I weridly love like I'd like to think in a parallel universe it exists 😂

The power aspirations and such like it is so interesting.

I can see why they scrapped the Family need-how would that have worked for sims who don't have or don't like their families?

Hey Cindy, what about videos with you telling mysteries about The Sims and your theories?

that memory strength thing may explain why negative memories have 0x0004 number instead of just 0x0001

I request a modder to create a power outage mod so we can put it in game. Thank you.

Would be really cool if they were able to release Sims 2 uncut instead of Sims 5