June 2020
Hi all, this is a design decision and I have more info from SimGuruPaul to share on why:
Thanks for playing Eco Lifestyle, Simmers. We want to address your feedback on the balcony of Pinecrest Apartment #404. Some of you might have seen some early videos in which Game Changers were building on balconies. They were playing on an Alpha build that had the issues described below. When we initially designed and built that apartment, we planned for the balcony to be buildable space to make up for the real-life limitation of not having a yard. We ran into some challenges along the way and we’d like to share with you what happened.
We learned during production that the tech for swapping the apartment exteriors with gameplay could not accommodate this due to complications with the apartment exterior dynamically changing with the neighborhood. The balcony also had a bug in which neighbors looking for the front door would walk through the apartment uninvited to get to the balcony and then knock on the sliding glass door. How rude! We tried a fix that enabled items to be placed on the balcony, but this resulted in more bugs:
We explored and attempted multiple fixes, but when they didn’t pan out, we decided the best option was to return to a static balcony and adjust the logic for determining the front door. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused and we hope this at least gives some insight into what went into the decision.
SimGuruPaul
June 2020
We are looking into a fix for that.
June 2020
Thank you! ❤️
June 2020
Does it means we’ll never be able to build it ?
June 2020
It kinda sounds that way. But there is always the tool mod 😂
June 2020
Damn this really sucks I feel like I would prefer a balcony with glitchy wall paint and random guests than a completely unusable space. The apartments were a big selling point for me and a lot of other simmers here. It just doesn’t make sense to have access to something unusable. Kind of breaks my heart a little, but thanks @SimGuruFrost for giving us an explanation.
June 2020
Same here!! I thought I was slow - clearly it's the game
June 2020
June 2020 - last edited June 2020
With that being the case, you all should have let people know this in advance. You showed that balcony in your stream and game-changers built on it, so releasing the game with them non-buildable after the fact without disclosing this issue is false-advertisement. It shouldn't have been something you wrote as the 51st comment in a bug thread days after release.