The latest attempt to dethrone The Sims from its lofty perch as the unquestioned monarch of life sim games is Paralives, an indie game looking to provide much more depth of personality than we see from The Sims or InZoi. Things seem to be going well so far, with the Early Access title selling hundreds of thousands of copies and earning Very Positive reviews on Steam since it launched on May 25. But there’s one thing pretty much everyone playing so far dislikes about it: that jerky and inconsistent camera. Fortunately, there’s a solution to this problem, thanks to a well-known Sims modder hopping to the new game with a camera mod.
For most folks, the hinky Paralives camera won’t break their games, but it’s an annoyance that they’ll have to regularly wrestle with while they play. The way the camera works now, it’s hard to precisely control your perspective, and it loves to shift down to a lower floor while you’re trying to do stuff on an upper floor. When both of those issues rear their ugly heads at the same time, it can feel nearly impossible to click on the thing you want to click on, and those who are prone to motion sickness might even feel dizzy or ill as a result of the jerkiness.
Depending on what you’re doing in the game, it can goof up so frequently that it feels like the point of Paralives is to figure out how to use the camera controls effectively. Since Paralives is in Early Access and apparently doing very well, judging by those sales numbers, we should expect the devs will eventually smooth out the issues with the camera. But in the meantime, while you wait for that, there’s a mod that will help.
Courtesy of long-time popular Sims 4 modder TwistedMexi, the Sensible Camera Control mod makes camera movements more smooth, and removes some of its ability to make automatic adjustments, since it was those auto movements that caused the “falling through the floor” effect that’s been driving players nuts. You can grab the Sensible Camera Control mod from the Steam Workshop here.
It’s not a perfect solution, of course, since the mod has some quirks of its own. But the many comments on the mod’s Workshop page agree it’s a big improvement over Paralives’ vanilla camera. And the fact that TwistedMexi was able to create this mod so quickly could be a great sign for the future of modding in Paralives.