1. No challenge
2. No reactions from the sims
3. No toddlers
4. No familiar aspects to the game at all. The sims all feel like friends in their households rather than actual families.
5. The sims are wayyyy too goofy and never serious.
6. Every pack they release is poorly done.
7. The game lacks depth whatsoever.
8. Loading screens. (I love TS2 and I can look past the loading screens in that game because the game was actually good)
9. The game is too goal-oriented.
10. My sims simply don't listen to me
11. My sims feel like robots just trying to grab random tasks, they don't focus on one thing
12. The game tries too hard to follow the latest trends
13. Tiny worlds
14. It's simply not a sims game
All of this.
To expand on number 12:
This especially bothers me. Not only is the game far too modernized with built in cell phones and the like, but it also feels like it has more of a political affiliation than it's predecessors which can cause some conflict.
Um, what now? What political affiliation? The LGBT existing or being included? (You do know us LGBT peeps can have families and have family values and some of us can be somewhat conservative in other areas, too?)
EA and Sims games have always prided on being inclusive. Being inclusive is NOT political-it's human decency.
It's a life simulator, some simmers keep arguing right? Well, life has all sorts of people, and sims has always embraced diversity.
ETA: It's 2017. The Sims series SHOULD keep up with the times and should be modern, anyway. EA has always been LGBT-friendly if their past sims games and other non-Sims games (Bioware games) are anything to go by.
EA (and Maxis) has always been progressive, or at the very least, felt inclusive in some of my favorite games of theirs...
Sims 4 has some serious flaws (many of which I do agree with), but being progressive and inclusive is not.
1. No challenge
2. No reactions from the sims
3. No toddlers
4. No familiar aspects to the game at all. The sims all feel like friends in their households rather than actual families.
5. The sims are wayyyy too goofy and never serious.
6. Every pack they release is poorly done.
7. The game lacks depth whatsoever.
8. Loading screens. (I love TS2 and I can look past the loading screens in that game because the game was actually good)
9. The game is too goal-oriented.
10. My sims simply don't listen to me
11. My sims feel like robots just trying to grab random tasks, they don't focus on one thing
12. The game tries too hard to follow the latest trends
13. Tiny worlds
14. It's simply not a sims game
For me, Sims 4 just doesn't have the depth, details, a life stage, and proper AI from the past sims games. Those are some of the biggest major flaws for me.
I feel like the previous iterations were designed to be good video games first while still managing to be inclusive and accessible to everyone.
This one went all out on the accessibility while forgetting the actual good video game part.
I like the look of the sims 4 and how it plays and so many improvements, but what they did well, doesn't make up for the fact that the sims 4 feels like a bare bones version of previous instalments for me, the life stages are basic, babies are pretty much pointless, child is too short and teens/young adults/adults might as well be the same life stage, there is little difference, at least not enough to make any of them that unique in my opinion
There should be baby>toddler>child>teen>young adult>adult>elder and each being unique or different from the previous and given what came in previous instalments, this shouldn't really have been an issue
Where are the vehicles? i was waiting for the car to pick up my workers and the school bus for my kid to appear and was disappointed that they weren't in the game at all, travelling is just a load screen now, instead of being able to watch your sims moving (okay that's just a little thing, but little things make a big difference when added up)
No private school options for kids
The worlds are quite small and restrictive
The amount of careers available seem very limited
No sleep over options for kids any more
No create a world
There are so many other things as well and honestly, when i saw the sims 4 on sale, i couldn't resist, even though it's been a long time since i last played a sims game and i was really excited to see what they did this time and how it must be even more immersive and bigger than the previous sim games and yet within 16 hours of play total (which included a lot of time wasting) i honestly feel like i was cheated out of £16 for the game and at the same time relieved that i didn't buy all the expansions at the same time and tested out the base game first
So yeah, i was really excited to see a bigger better and new sims, yet compared to previous versions, it pretty much feels like they gutted the game and just gave us the bare minimum that they could
Although i do like the new graphics and they have made improvements to the game, just with all the missing features, those improvements for me personally don't count for much, not enough to want to play the game
I was hoping that maybe there was a chance for the things that i mentioned above being added to the game, but considering the game was released 2014 and it's now 2017 and if rumours are true, the sims 5 will be out in 2019, than i really can't see them adding anything substantial, which is a real shame, because for a game as good as the sims and having the foundations in place from the previous instalments, the sims 4 should have been amazing and not only improving on previous instalments, but bringing something new to the table on top of those
The Sims 4 has grown on me more with time and I've been able to appreciate some of the more inventive things about the game. I think the Sims 4 suffers from the fact that each sequel was a rapid departure from the last, making it more immersive, while Sims 4 is actually more about streamlining and I have mixed feelings about whether that was good or bad. Some of the streamlining is smart and then some of it just makes the game feel shallow.
What blows me away is that I can play The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on my laptop with a maximum of 5 seconds long loading screens (skyrim has STUNNING graphics, I will point out), no lag at all, the game runs perfectly. The sims 4 on the other hand is apparently a much more complicated game, even though the sims look like cartoons and there is no open world. Loading screens for me are about a minute long, there are tons of bugs, and after playing through two sim generations the game is laggy and barely playable at all.
I will not argue with how complicated the coding is in the sims 4, cause I haven't looked into that, but I have to say I feel like they are doing a lot wrong, and much more complicated than it has to be. I can play any rpg perfectly on my laptop, but not the sims 4. If I can get a game like Skyrim to play, which has stunning graphics, a gigantic open world, countless of interactions, and a slight butterfly effect, then I don't quite understand why the sims 4 is more lag than it is gameplay.
1. No challenge
2. No reactions from the sims
3. No toddlers
4. No familiar aspects to the game at all. The sims all feel like friends in their households rather than actual families.
5. The sims are wayyyy too goofy and never serious.
6. Every pack they release is poorly done.
7. The game lacks depth whatsoever.
8. Loading screens. (I love TS2 and I can look past the loading screens in that game because the game was actually good)
9. The game is too goal-oriented.
10. My sims simply don't listen to me
11. My sims feel like robots just trying to grab random tasks, they don't focus on one thing
12. The game tries too hard to follow the latest trends
13. Tiny worlds
14. It's simply not a sims game
All of this.
To expand on number 12:
This especially bothers me. Not only is the game far too modernized with built in cell phones and the like, but it also feels like it has more of a political affiliation than it's predecessors which can cause some conflict.
Um, what now? What political affiliation? The LGBT existing or being included? (You do know us LGBT peeps can have families and have family values and some of us can be somewhat conservative in other areas, too?)
EA and Sims games have always prided on being inclusive. Being inclusive is NOT political-it's human decency.
It's a life simulator, some simmers keep arguing right? Well, life has all sorts of people, and sims has always embraced diversity.
ETA: It's 2017. The Sims series SHOULD keep up with the times and should be modern, anyway. EA has always been LGBT-friendly if their past sims games and other non-Sims games (Bioware games) are anything to go by.
EA (and Maxis) has always been progressive, or at the very least, felt inclusive in some of my favorite games of theirs...
Sims 4 has some serious flaws (many of which I do agree with), but being progressive and inclusive is not.
It's called "virtue signaling." It's when an act is done not so much out of principle, but because you want everyone to notice what a good person you are and praise you for it. In this case, it's EA including those updates not on principle, but for free press and publicity, as well as free sales to individuals that like those kinds of political statements.
I'd agree with him on that. I have a very difficult time believing the transgender patch and cultural aspects of City Living are little more than a sales gimmick. The transgender patch in particular, in their own words, took 6 months of development time and isn't even that good (many "unisex" outfits look horrendously awkward or poorly made). The time it took to make it could've instead been used on getting toddlers done faster or releasing EPs faster, but instead we got an update no one requested (I'm sure someone did, but it was not a huge request that a huge chunk of the community was pushing for) that conveniently drummed up a lot of news articles praising the Sims for being progressive. It's not about approval or disapproval of transgenderism here, it's about questioning EA's motivations and questioning if such a patch is truly the best way to provide quality. I think if Sims 4's base game featured transgender Sims, none of us would complain. In that case it's be very simple to do since they could make all clothing unisex from the get-go, without creating a bunch of work where they have to backtrack and change everything. But here...? Yeah, I'm pretty sure they did it as a publicity stunt.
Another reason I have my doubts they did it out of the goodness of their hearts....? In Sims 3, a user posted requesting disabled sims in wheelchairs be included, because he himself was disabled and wanted to play as himself. The community reacted...abysmally. They all made statements like "why on earth would I ever want a disabled sim" or "I play to escape the terrible parts of reality, I don't want disabled people in my game" or "you should be happy EA gives you a chance to be able-bodied" or "oh yeah, sounds real fun if my sim needs 2 hours just to sit on a toilet." Fight broke out because of some of those off-color comments, and actually it was the people that defended the disabled guy (myself included) that got hit with bans from the forums. I suppose the mod team just figured it easier to get rid of the tiny minority group (like four of us) instead of lecture the vast majority of the forum on their behavior.
On top of that, the reason disabled sims would never be included is animation costs. I'm actually disabled myself and while I can understand that, prosthetics would at least be easily achievable just by providing skin replacements for limbs, similar to the coding used for tattoos. Realistic or meaningful for gameplay? Nah, no one wears their prosthetic while swimming or in the shower, but it's sort of a nice gesture that would at least help people with prosthetics or missing limbs feel a little more acknowledged by the game. Dwarves, midgets and other such height-challenged individuals could also be included by utilizing a child's template and giving them adult animations and interactions, I'd imagine. It'd be cheap and realistic budget-wise/development time-wise too. We don't have those though. What's more....? Transgender rights is currently a mainstream, hot-button topic....disabled rights aren't. See where I'm going with this? If EA is so progressive, why are they skipping out on the representation of another group? Why have they forgotten another group?
Because only one of those groups is a hot topic in the mainstream media that generates free press. Because only one of those groups can be catered to in a way that generates visible profit.
It was never about the message, it was always about profit, and that's why I actually loathe seeing anything politically progressive in Sims 4. To me it says their focus isn't on gameplay, but rather it's on earning progressive points so that politically like-minded individuals will purchase their game in the belief that by doing so, they're supporting a cause. I just want to play my game, not hear a political speech.
And I wanna be clear, I'm not bitter cause "my" minority group was spurned. If tomorrow they said they were doing a patch for disabled sims, I'd roll my eyes all the same, cause once again it'd likely be more about a political statement rather than gameplay. I only mention the disabled bit because to me, it showcases how the purpose isn't in representing everyone, but rather the purpose is in representing groups that will increase their sales.
In short? Spare me your speeches about how inclusive EA and the Sims team are and how this doesn't damage the quality of the game. Every moment spent working on such features is a moment not spent working on gameplay or more universal features, and when they conveniently only seem to represent groups hotly discussed in popular media, then yeah, there's very good reason to suspect it's all about the profit.
I do fear that the 'transgender patch' was added to perhaps not just 'appease' the transgender community but to pick up on recent trends and say 'hey, guys, look our Sims can be transgender too!'
I see nothing wrong with transgender or disabled Sims in the game as long as it is not 'forced' on players who may simply not want them. The same could even go for supernaturals, not everyone wants Vampires or zombies running around, is that really discrimination? I mean lets say there where actually zombies IRL and some people wanted them because 'it is real' while others despised them because 'they are different' any such statements would be discrimination towards to 'zombie community' if it ever existed.
My concern with TS4 is that it seems to be an all or nothing approach, you either get it when you don't want it or you want something but you are not getting it because 'it is too hard and expensive'
I mean look at how long it took to get toddlers, they should have been there from the get go but then so should a lot of things. A focus on feature than not many players asked for was doing very little at the time to win a lot of players over and back to TS4. Sure some player where happy with the transgender patch but a lot of players seem to be unhappy with bugs resulting in men with female voices. That patch was even forced on players as well was it not? So even those who did not want that patch or where perhaps just indifferent towards it now have bugs they can't work around from a patch they never asked for. Sadly for the transgender community they will now once again be snubbed in the community with feelings of 'thanks to you we got a patch we didn't want with new bugs'
Personally I think that everyone should be equal and everyone should be represented in The Sims but due to TS4's history I do not think that TS4 is anywhere near a multicultural, tolerant and open minded utopia that some players would like to see.
@DeservedCriticism In fact, the patch is much more about cross-dressed sims and int.ers.ex sims too, because looking more into details, gender dysphoria, which is what defines being transgender, doesn't exist in game. And gender dysphoria is something very dark. There are similar issues with disabilities. Adding wheelchairs is a thing but there isn't anything about limitations, inadaptation and chronic physical and mental pain that define disability. Without all of these elements, the developers would be missing something. This is missing in what is incorrectly called the transgender patch too. It can cause more anger with misrepresented categories of people than actual inclusion.
Would it mean more profit, I'm not even sure of that. Maybe a bit more profit with people who think that more diverse categories are represented. But with actual members of these categories, I don't think so.
What's really strange to me is that allegedly, .3% of the population is transgender. Even that sounds high, cause it implies 3 out of every 1,000 people are transgender, and that certainly doesn't match my experiences in life. Can also comment my specific condition that led me to having one leg is supposedly 1 in 10,000, yet once again I don't see that many people born with one leg. I live in a town of 160,000 and to my knowledge there's four of us born with one leg; my orthopedist pretty much asserts the same. I think really small minority groups actually tend to be oversampled, for one reason or another.
But even if we take those stats at face value, then a tiny tiny tiny percent of EA's consumers are directly and personally affected by such a patch. If they had 5 million customers for example, then the transgender patch only directly appeases about 1,500 customers. So why would on earth would they do it? Some might argue that's proof they did do it out of the goodness of their hearts, but I have my doubts. I really have faith that they wouldn't do something that doesn't provide them with a profit (especially not a 6 month endeavor that would've been easier at release), so the implication is there's a bunch of non-transgender people excited to play as transgender sims...? Maybe it's just me, but that REALLY rubs me the wrong way, and quite frankly, weirds me out. I mean if tomorrow they released a disabled patch and all of you were like "OMG I can't wait to make a sim with one leg," yeah, I'd be pretty weirded out too. It's....wearing a group of people like a fashion/political statement.
But I digress, I'm getting a little politically preachy, I feel. What matters in the end is that we all play this game to have fun. We want gameplay, we want things to do, we want things to get us involved and excited to load up the game. Just providing skins or different types of Sims with no meaningful gameplay changes doesn't exactly accomplish that, so many of these little progressive movements ultimately just distract from the game. If they can find a way to include such groups in the BASE game without it detracting from development time or the like, akin to how we can have gay and lesbian sims no problem, then by all means go for it. When it comes to going out of their way with a 6 month project to include such a group though...? I think we'd all survive without it. :P
That patch wouldn't provide any relief to transgendered people anyway. If a trans man wants to make his simself, he'll create a man. If a trans woman wants to make her simself, she'll create a woman. I feel like this patch is more aimed at people who like cross-dressing and int.ers.ex conditions.
Concerning anything transgender, statistics show only people who have decided to transition, a very large majority of them keep their identity to themselves. But a patch like this won't solve all problems anyway. Just like a disabled patch wouldn't solve much either. As a disabled person myself, it actually would only make me feel uncomfortable. In no way it could reflect the reality of things. So I'm fine if these patches weren't there.
@DeservedCriticism
.3% is still more than the percentage of babies, toddlers, aliens or vampires playing the game I doubt there's a direct correlation between reparitition in the population and how much interest there is for something in the game, and I'd say the Unisex CAS goes far further in term of possibilities than just allowing transgender people to roleplay themselves. The marketing may have advertised it that way, but the gameplay goes far beyond, basically almost doubling the number of CAS assets available, allowing you to decide whether your Sims can have children or not, and giving you a broader range of body shape and voices. There were lots of CCs that were male/female conversions because it was a way to expand the catalog and give more choices.
@DeservedCriticism
.3% is still more than the percentage of babies, toddlers, aliens or vampires playing the game I doubt there's a direct correlation between reparitition in the population and how much interest there is for something in the game, and I'd say the Unisex CAS goes far further in term of possibilities than just allowing transgender people to roleplay themselves. The marketing may have advertised it that way, but the gameplay goes far beyond, basically almost doubling the number of CAS assets available, allowing you to decide whether your Sims can have children or not, and giving you a broader range of body shape and voices. There were lots of CCs that were male/female conversions because it was a way to expand the catalog and give more choices.
This...really doesn't seem like that great of an argument. You focus on the fact "we got new stuff" but you overlook that time is money, or in this case, time is content. By your logic you'll be happy with anything produced, because all content is more content. I'm saying the content we got was REALLY low quality, and it's sad to see that something low quality ate into 6 months of dev time, especially for such a mismanaged reason and motivation. You seriously can't think of a better use of their time than creating lazy retextures of existing shirts...?
Development time is development time. They could've instead just established a rule that all clothing from then on would only make unisex clothing for future packs, then spend the 6 months on something else. Or heck, spend 6 months producing new unisex clothing. The path they chose is typical for Sims 4: half-baked. I think a lot of people would prefer NOT getting the half-baked apartments of City Living so that the team could instead focus attention towards a more doable goal, but instead we got half-baked apartments. Same thing here: they say they made unisex clothing, but the unisex clothing is so low quality I honestly can't name a single piece of unisex clothing I use. There's even a hairstyle or two that I think looks ridiculous on the other gender (women now have a ponytail mullet thing) and sure enough, the townie pool uses those hairstyles to make some weird looking sims.
And the voices...? Dude, load up your game right now. Grab one of the women's voices and make them as deep as possible, or grab one of the male voices and make them as high pitched as possible. They sound RIDICULOUS. The men inhaled helium, the women sound like they're in the process of melting. That unified voice bar is actually my #1 criticism of the transgender patch, because it's annoying to be making a sim and you find yourself only utilizing half of a UI bar at any given time, constantly second-guessing if the specific point you've chosen is on the "sounds normal" parts of the bar or teetering a bit close to the ridiculous parts. There's rather large portions of the high-pitched side of the bar that I do not use PERIOD for either gender. What's more....I mean wth have they ever met a transgender individual...? I don't think describing a transgender person's voice is as simple as "ok they have a woman's voice now," nor is it just a really high-pitched male voice. If you asked me to make a transgender person's voice for a sim, I don't think the expanded options help in the slightest. I would've had equal success with the old system, pretty sure. For the life of me, I cannot imagine a transgender person ever getting use out of this expanded voice UI, because the expanded parts all sound RIDICULOUS. It's just very sloppy that they expanded the vocal range to points that sound like nothing human; it's hardly useful and just results in bad UI.
The pregnancy feature is largely ruined by another often criticized feature of theirs: alien abductions. Regardless of your gender, you can get pregnant in this game. Mark your sim as being incapable of being pregnant, and aliens can still impregnate them. Soooooo....what's the point? We're just gonna leave it like that? Yeah, there's other options, but it's kinda sad, but one of their own features ruins parts of this one, especially since reproduction is like the only feature on the list with meaningful gameplay implications.
Again, your argument comes down to "but it's more content, so that's nice." Yeah, and it might be the lowest quality content they've produced for the entire game. Why praise them for a half-baked job that nobody asked for to begin with? It's made infinitely worse by the fact their motivations for making it were probably to garner free advertising, not to appease fans.THAT'S the problem right there: we do not want a dev team that's being guided by a political agenda instead of what makes sense for making a game more appealing for the collective audience. They made that patch because they were guided by such a political agenda, and lo and behold it's often criticized as one of the lowest quality updates we've gotten. The moral of that story is to focus on gameplay and improving the game, not on making political statements, but yes we're going to miss that point entirely if the only response we provide is "yay, it's content."
@DeservedCriticism
.3% is still more than the percentage of babies, toddlers, aliens or vampires playing the game I doubt there's a direct correlation between reparitition in the population and how much interest there is for something in the game, and I'd say the Unisex CAS goes far further in term of possibilities than just allowing transgender people to roleplay themselves. The marketing may have advertised it that way, but the gameplay goes far beyond, basically almost doubling the number of CAS assets available, allowing you to decide whether your Sims can have children or not, and giving you a broader range of body shape and voices. There were lots of CCs that were male/female conversions because it was a way to expand the catalog and give more choices.
This...really doesn't seem like that great of an argument. You focus on the fact "we got new stuff" but you overlook that time is money, or in this case, time is content. By your logic you'll be happy with anything produced, because all content is more content. I'm saying the content we got was REALLY low quality, and it's sad to see that something low quality ate into 6 months of dev time, especially for such a mismanaged reason and motivation. You seriously can't think of a better use of their time than creating lazy retextures of existing shirts...?
Development time is development time. They could've instead just established a rule that all clothing from then on would only make unisex clothing for future packs, then spend the 6 months on something else. Or heck, spend 6 months producing new unisex clothing. The path they chose is typical for Sims 4: half-baked. I think a lot of people would prefer NOT getting the half-baked apartments of City Living so that the team could instead focus attention towards a more doable goal, but instead we got half-baked apartments. Same thing here: they say they made unisex clothing, but the unisex clothing is so low quality I honestly can't name a single piece of unisex clothing I use. There's even a hairstyle or two that I think looks ridiculous on the other gender (women now have a ponytail mullet thing) and sure enough, the townie pool uses those hairstyles to make some weird looking sims.
And the voices...? Dude, load up your game right now. Grab one of the women's voices and make them as deep as possible, or grab one of the male voices and make them as high pitched as possible. They sound RIDICULOUS. The men inhaled helium, the women sound like they're in the process of melting. That unified voice bar is actually my #1 criticism of the transgender patch, because it's annoying to be making a sim and you find yourself only utilizing half of a UI bar at any given time, constantly second-guessing if the specific point you've chosen is on the "sounds normal" parts of the bar or teetering a bit close to the ridiculous parts. There's rather large portions of the high-pitched side of the bar that I do not use PERIOD for either gender. What's more....I mean wth have they ever met a transgender individual...? I don't think describing a transgender person's voice is as simple as "ok they have a woman's voice now," nor is it just a really high-pitched male voice. If you asked me to make a transgender person's voice for a sim, I don't think the expanded options help in the slightest. I would've had equal success with the old system, pretty sure. For the life of me, I cannot imagine a transgender person ever getting use out of this expanded voice UI, because the expanded parts all sound RIDICULOUS. It's just very sloppy that they expanded the vocal range to points that sound like nothing human; it's hardly useful and just results in bad UI.
The pregnancy feature is largely ruined by another often criticized feature of theirs: alien abductions. Regardless of your gender, you can get pregnant in this game. Mark your sim as being incapable of being pregnant, and aliens can still impregnate them. Soooooo....what's the point? We're just gonna leave it like that? Yeah, there's other options, but it's kinda sad, but one of their own features ruins parts of this one, especially since reproduction is like the only feature on the list with meaningful gameplay implications.
Again, your argument comes down to "but it's more content, so that's nice." Yeah, and it might be the lowest quality content they've produced for the entire game. Why praise them for a half-baked job that nobody asked for to begin with? It's made infinitely worse by the fact their motivations for making it were probably to garner free advertising, not to appease fans.THAT'S the problem right there: we do not want a dev team that's being guided by a political agenda instead of what makes sense for making a game more appealing for the collective audience. They made that patch because they were guided by such a political agenda, and lo and behold it's often criticized as one of the lowest quality updates we've gotten. The moral of that story is to focus on gameplay and improving the game, not on making political statements, but yes we're going to miss that point entirely if the only response we provide is "yay, it's content."
This is one of the "criticized" features that I take issue with the criticism. Sims marked as not being able to get pregnant should be able to still be to foster an alien child. Sci-fi fans know that aliens follow their own reality and rules and one of those is implanting alien babies wherever they want.
"People really love to explore 'failure states. In fact, the failure states are really much more interesting than the success states." ~ Will Wright
@DeservedCriticism
I'm not focusing on "we got more stuff", I'm just saying that Unisex CAS isn't just "Transgendered people can make themselves in the Sims". Cisgendered people can now make transgendered Sims too, which already make your .3% completely irrelevant. And you can also use the assets without making your Sims transgendered anyway, which make your .3% even more irrelevant. So there's no reason to assume this content is something that only appeals to .3% of the simmers. It's not just "more stuff", it's also "more people may be interested in it".
And I've seen assets being requested for females/males a lot, there's also a lot of CC that does it, so it was in fact something that people were asking for. You may not enjoy the end result, I do, I've been suprised actually at the number of assets I'm using for the opposite gender, because it wasn't something I was personally asking for, and I wasn't planning on using. In fact, I'd say unisex CAS turned out better than I expected, and if they garnered free advertising in the process, I think that's good for them.
This is what it comes down to in your post, but here's the thing:
Opinions are opinions, but at the end of the day the goal of the Sims team is to appease their fans. This means that numbers do matter, and trying to appease as many fans as possible should be the goal. Someone is always gonna hate an update and someone is always gonna love an update no matter what it is, that much can't be helped. What CAN be helped is trying to ensure that as high of a % as possible appreciates an update or add-on. Makes sense, no? You can't please everyone, but you CAN please a large percent of your fans, so best to focus your attention towards what would make the MOST people happy, right?
Catering an entire 6-month's effort towards a small group that makes up >0.3% of the population is not a recipe for a "successful" update. It's a recipe for generating free press, given the circumstances. The focus was on sales, not on customer satisfaction, and that's the problem. We need to be focused on appeasing as many fans as possible, so while you can easily sit there and say you love that update or even that you think it's the greatest thing to ever grace this Earth, that doesn't change the fact that not very many people have much good to say about it, but many have critiques. I mean just look at the evidence before us: how often do we see a regular user just randomly burst out and say "BOY I SURE AM LOVING THIS TRANSGENDER PATCH, EVEN TODAY," vs how often do we see a regular user lament just how much time was spent on such a low-quality update? It's not exactly the pinnacle of the series in terms of updates, and I think you'd have a very difficult time arguing that the patch is popular and widely appreciated, given the fact that 🐸🐸🐸🐸, the vast majority of people don't seem to be using it. Can you find a currently-running Let's Play that uses transgender features...?
It wasn't a good update, if we look at it's popularity (or lack thereof). I don't see any reason to believe it's a super appreciated aspect of the Sims beyond the initial free press it got. One person liking it does not change that it feels like 6 months down the drain for another 10 people. And as I've said, it's a PERFECT testament to the problems that arise when a company prioritizes sales over product quality and customer satisfaction. The lesson remains: focus on providing an enjoyable game, not on making political statements. Poorly made unisex clothing does not justify the 6 months worth of time spent on it.
@DeservedCriticism
You don't know it appeals only to .3% of the population, that's precisely the point I'm making.
That's not my point. My point is even if it appealed to 10x or even 100x that .3% of the population, that's STILL unacceptably small of a percent of customers appeased. They set their sights low from the get-go. The goal should be to find a topic that appeals to 99% of the fans, so that even when 20% are disappointed, you've appeased a sizeable majority still. Instead they aimed at .3%, and even though it's inevitable they'll appeal to more than just .3%, it's still not going to be anywhere close to 80% of the fanbase.
It's just bad priorities dictating what they work on, simple as that.
Comments
Um, what now? What political affiliation? The LGBT existing or being included? (You do know us LGBT peeps can have families and have family values and some of us can be somewhat conservative in other areas, too?)
EA and Sims games have always prided on being inclusive. Being inclusive is NOT political-it's human decency.
It's a life simulator, some simmers keep arguing right? Well, life has all sorts of people, and sims has always embraced diversity.
ETA: It's 2017. The Sims series SHOULD keep up with the times and should be modern, anyway. EA has always been LGBT-friendly if their past sims games and other non-Sims games (Bioware games) are anything to go by.
EA (and Maxis) has always been progressive, or at the very least, felt inclusive in some of my favorite games of theirs...
Sims 4 has some serious flaws (many of which I do agree with), but being progressive and inclusive is not.
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OMG it's so accurate it's scary.
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Same! I want to be able to take babies and toddlers to the park in a stroller. I also want a daycare career.
This one went all out on the accessibility while forgetting the actual good video game part.
Yeah, I miss daycare career a lot. I would love to that career again. (I myself have worked in daycare for some years past in real life.)
I also miss the taking babies and toddlers out into the world as well...
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There should be baby>toddler>child>teen>young adult>adult>elder and each being unique or different from the previous and given what came in previous instalments, this shouldn't really have been an issue
Where are the vehicles? i was waiting for the car to pick up my workers and the school bus for my kid to appear and was disappointed that they weren't in the game at all, travelling is just a load screen now, instead of being able to watch your sims moving (okay that's just a little thing, but little things make a big difference when added up)
No private school options for kids
The worlds are quite small and restrictive
The amount of careers available seem very limited
No sleep over options for kids any more
No create a world
There are so many other things as well and honestly, when i saw the sims 4 on sale, i couldn't resist, even though it's been a long time since i last played a sims game and i was really excited to see what they did this time and how it must be even more immersive and bigger than the previous sim games and yet within 16 hours of play total (which included a lot of time wasting) i honestly feel like i was cheated out of £16 for the game and at the same time relieved that i didn't buy all the expansions at the same time and tested out the base game first
So yeah, i was really excited to see a bigger better and new sims, yet compared to previous versions, it pretty much feels like they gutted the game and just gave us the bare minimum that they could
Although i do like the new graphics and they have made improvements to the game, just with all the missing features, those improvements for me personally don't count for much, not enough to want to play the game
I was hoping that maybe there was a chance for the things that i mentioned above being added to the game, but considering the game was released 2014 and it's now 2017 and if rumours are true, the sims 5 will be out in 2019, than i really can't see them adding anything substantial, which is a real shame, because for a game as good as the sims and having the foundations in place from the previous instalments, the sims 4 should have been amazing and not only improving on previous instalments, but bringing something new to the table on top of those
My Sims 4 Random Legacy- When a goddess of chaos decides to meddle with a family. Check it out!
May I ask why?
https://therealsunsetvalley.blogspot.com/
I will not argue with how complicated the coding is in the sims 4, cause I haven't looked into that, but I have to say I feel like they are doing a lot wrong, and much more complicated than it has to be. I can play any rpg perfectly on my laptop, but not the sims 4. If I can get a game like Skyrim to play, which has stunning graphics, a gigantic open world, countless of interactions, and a slight butterfly effect, then I don't quite understand why the sims 4 is more lag than it is gameplay.
It's called "virtue signaling." It's when an act is done not so much out of principle, but because you want everyone to notice what a good person you are and praise you for it. In this case, it's EA including those updates not on principle, but for free press and publicity, as well as free sales to individuals that like those kinds of political statements.
I'd agree with him on that. I have a very difficult time believing the transgender patch and cultural aspects of City Living are little more than a sales gimmick. The transgender patch in particular, in their own words, took 6 months of development time and isn't even that good (many "unisex" outfits look horrendously awkward or poorly made). The time it took to make it could've instead been used on getting toddlers done faster or releasing EPs faster, but instead we got an update no one requested (I'm sure someone did, but it was not a huge request that a huge chunk of the community was pushing for) that conveniently drummed up a lot of news articles praising the Sims for being progressive. It's not about approval or disapproval of transgenderism here, it's about questioning EA's motivations and questioning if such a patch is truly the best way to provide quality. I think if Sims 4's base game featured transgender Sims, none of us would complain. In that case it's be very simple to do since they could make all clothing unisex from the get-go, without creating a bunch of work where they have to backtrack and change everything. But here...? Yeah, I'm pretty sure they did it as a publicity stunt.
Another reason I have my doubts they did it out of the goodness of their hearts....? In Sims 3, a user posted requesting disabled sims in wheelchairs be included, because he himself was disabled and wanted to play as himself. The community reacted...abysmally. They all made statements like "why on earth would I ever want a disabled sim" or "I play to escape the terrible parts of reality, I don't want disabled people in my game" or "you should be happy EA gives you a chance to be able-bodied" or "oh yeah, sounds real fun if my sim needs 2 hours just to sit on a toilet." Fight broke out because of some of those off-color comments, and actually it was the people that defended the disabled guy (myself included) that got hit with bans from the forums. I suppose the mod team just figured it easier to get rid of the tiny minority group (like four of us) instead of lecture the vast majority of the forum on their behavior.
On top of that, the reason disabled sims would never be included is animation costs. I'm actually disabled myself and while I can understand that, prosthetics would at least be easily achievable just by providing skin replacements for limbs, similar to the coding used for tattoos. Realistic or meaningful for gameplay? Nah, no one wears their prosthetic while swimming or in the shower, but it's sort of a nice gesture that would at least help people with prosthetics or missing limbs feel a little more acknowledged by the game. Dwarves, midgets and other such height-challenged individuals could also be included by utilizing a child's template and giving them adult animations and interactions, I'd imagine. It'd be cheap and realistic budget-wise/development time-wise too. We don't have those though. What's more....? Transgender rights is currently a mainstream, hot-button topic....disabled rights aren't. See where I'm going with this? If EA is so progressive, why are they skipping out on the representation of another group? Why have they forgotten another group?
Because only one of those groups is a hot topic in the mainstream media that generates free press. Because only one of those groups can be catered to in a way that generates visible profit.
It was never about the message, it was always about profit, and that's why I actually loathe seeing anything politically progressive in Sims 4. To me it says their focus isn't on gameplay, but rather it's on earning progressive points so that politically like-minded individuals will purchase their game in the belief that by doing so, they're supporting a cause. I just want to play my game, not hear a political speech.
And I wanna be clear, I'm not bitter cause "my" minority group was spurned. If tomorrow they said they were doing a patch for disabled sims, I'd roll my eyes all the same, cause once again it'd likely be more about a political statement rather than gameplay. I only mention the disabled bit because to me, it showcases how the purpose isn't in representing everyone, but rather the purpose is in representing groups that will increase their sales.
In short? Spare me your speeches about how inclusive EA and the Sims team are and how this doesn't damage the quality of the game. Every moment spent working on such features is a moment not spent working on gameplay or more universal features, and when they conveniently only seem to represent groups hotly discussed in popular media, then yeah, there's very good reason to suspect it's all about the profit.
*bows down*
I do fear that the 'transgender patch' was added to perhaps not just 'appease' the transgender community but to pick up on recent trends and say 'hey, guys, look our Sims can be transgender too!'
I see nothing wrong with transgender or disabled Sims in the game as long as it is not 'forced' on players who may simply not want them. The same could even go for supernaturals, not everyone wants Vampires or zombies running around, is that really discrimination? I mean lets say there where actually zombies IRL and some people wanted them because 'it is real' while others despised them because 'they are different' any such statements would be discrimination towards to 'zombie community' if it ever existed.
My concern with TS4 is that it seems to be an all or nothing approach, you either get it when you don't want it or you want something but you are not getting it because 'it is too hard and expensive'
I mean look at how long it took to get toddlers, they should have been there from the get go but then so should a lot of things. A focus on feature than not many players asked for was doing very little at the time to win a lot of players over and back to TS4. Sure some player where happy with the transgender patch but a lot of players seem to be unhappy with bugs resulting in men with female voices. That patch was even forced on players as well was it not? So even those who did not want that patch or where perhaps just indifferent towards it now have bugs they can't work around from a patch they never asked for. Sadly for the transgender community they will now once again be snubbed in the community with feelings of 'thanks to you we got a patch we didn't want with new bugs'
Personally I think that everyone should be equal and everyone should be represented in The Sims but due to TS4's history I do not think that TS4 is anywhere near a multicultural, tolerant and open minded utopia that some players would like to see.
Would it mean more profit, I'm not even sure of that. Maybe a bit more profit with people who think that more diverse categories are represented. But with actual members of these categories, I don't think so.
My Sims 3 blog, Back to the Sims 3
But even if we take those stats at face value, then a tiny tiny tiny percent of EA's consumers are directly and personally affected by such a patch. If they had 5 million customers for example, then the transgender patch only directly appeases about 1,500 customers. So why would on earth would they do it? Some might argue that's proof they did do it out of the goodness of their hearts, but I have my doubts. I really have faith that they wouldn't do something that doesn't provide them with a profit (especially not a 6 month endeavor that would've been easier at release), so the implication is there's a bunch of non-transgender people excited to play as transgender sims...? Maybe it's just me, but that REALLY rubs me the wrong way, and quite frankly, weirds me out. I mean if tomorrow they released a disabled patch and all of you were like "OMG I can't wait to make a sim with one leg," yeah, I'd be pretty weirded out too. It's....wearing a group of people like a fashion/political statement.
But I digress, I'm getting a little politically preachy, I feel. What matters in the end is that we all play this game to have fun. We want gameplay, we want things to do, we want things to get us involved and excited to load up the game. Just providing skins or different types of Sims with no meaningful gameplay changes doesn't exactly accomplish that, so many of these little progressive movements ultimately just distract from the game. If they can find a way to include such groups in the BASE game without it detracting from development time or the like, akin to how we can have gay and lesbian sims no problem, then by all means go for it. When it comes to going out of their way with a 6 month project to include such a group though...? I think we'd all survive without it. :P
Concerning anything transgender, statistics show only people who have decided to transition, a very large majority of them keep their identity to themselves. But a patch like this won't solve all problems anyway. Just like a disabled patch wouldn't solve much either. As a disabled person myself, it actually would only make me feel uncomfortable. In no way it could reflect the reality of things. So I'm fine if these patches weren't there.
My Sims 3 blog, Back to the Sims 3
.3% is still more than the percentage of babies, toddlers, aliens or vampires playing the game
This...really doesn't seem like that great of an argument. You focus on the fact "we got new stuff" but you overlook that time is money, or in this case, time is content. By your logic you'll be happy with anything produced, because all content is more content. I'm saying the content we got was REALLY low quality, and it's sad to see that something low quality ate into 6 months of dev time, especially for such a mismanaged reason and motivation. You seriously can't think of a better use of their time than creating lazy retextures of existing shirts...?
Development time is development time. They could've instead just established a rule that all clothing from then on would only make unisex clothing for future packs, then spend the 6 months on something else. Or heck, spend 6 months producing new unisex clothing. The path they chose is typical for Sims 4: half-baked. I think a lot of people would prefer NOT getting the half-baked apartments of City Living so that the team could instead focus attention towards a more doable goal, but instead we got half-baked apartments. Same thing here: they say they made unisex clothing, but the unisex clothing is so low quality I honestly can't name a single piece of unisex clothing I use. There's even a hairstyle or two that I think looks ridiculous on the other gender (women now have a ponytail mullet thing) and sure enough, the townie pool uses those hairstyles to make some weird looking sims.
And the voices...? Dude, load up your game right now. Grab one of the women's voices and make them as deep as possible, or grab one of the male voices and make them as high pitched as possible. They sound RIDICULOUS. The men inhaled helium, the women sound like they're in the process of melting. That unified voice bar is actually my #1 criticism of the transgender patch, because it's annoying to be making a sim and you find yourself only utilizing half of a UI bar at any given time, constantly second-guessing if the specific point you've chosen is on the "sounds normal" parts of the bar or teetering a bit close to the ridiculous parts. There's rather large portions of the high-pitched side of the bar that I do not use PERIOD for either gender. What's more....I mean wth have they ever met a transgender individual...? I don't think describing a transgender person's voice is as simple as "ok they have a woman's voice now," nor is it just a really high-pitched male voice. If you asked me to make a transgender person's voice for a sim, I don't think the expanded options help in the slightest. I would've had equal success with the old system, pretty sure. For the life of me, I cannot imagine a transgender person ever getting use out of this expanded voice UI, because the expanded parts all sound RIDICULOUS. It's just very sloppy that they expanded the vocal range to points that sound like nothing human; it's hardly useful and just results in bad UI.
The pregnancy feature is largely ruined by another often criticized feature of theirs: alien abductions. Regardless of your gender, you can get pregnant in this game. Mark your sim as being incapable of being pregnant, and aliens can still impregnate them. Soooooo....what's the point? We're just gonna leave it like that? Yeah, there's other options, but it's kinda sad, but one of their own features ruins parts of this one, especially since reproduction is like the only feature on the list with meaningful gameplay implications.
Again, your argument comes down to "but it's more content, so that's nice." Yeah, and it might be the lowest quality content they've produced for the entire game. Why praise them for a half-baked job that nobody asked for to begin with? It's made infinitely worse by the fact their motivations for making it were probably to garner free advertising, not to appease fans. THAT'S the problem right there: we do not want a dev team that's being guided by a political agenda instead of what makes sense for making a game more appealing for the collective audience. They made that patch because they were guided by such a political agenda, and lo and behold it's often criticized as one of the lowest quality updates we've gotten. The moral of that story is to focus on gameplay and improving the game, not on making political statements, but yes we're going to miss that point entirely if the only response we provide is "yay, it's content."
This is one of the "criticized" features that I take issue with the criticism. Sims marked as not being able to get pregnant should be able to still be to foster an alien child. Sci-fi fans know that aliens follow their own reality and rules and one of those is implanting alien babies wherever they want.
I'm not focusing on "we got more stuff", I'm just saying that Unisex CAS isn't just "Transgendered people can make themselves in the Sims". Cisgendered people can now make transgendered Sims too, which already make your .3% completely irrelevant. And you can also use the assets without making your Sims transgendered anyway, which make your .3% even more irrelevant. So there's no reason to assume this content is something that only appeals to .3% of the simmers. It's not just "more stuff", it's also "more people may be interested in it".
And I've seen assets being requested for females/males a lot, there's also a lot of CC that does it, so it was in fact something that people were asking for. You may not enjoy the end result, I do, I've been suprised actually at the number of assets I'm using for the opposite gender, because it wasn't something I was personally asking for, and I wasn't planning on using. In fact, I'd say unisex CAS turned out better than I expected, and if they garnered free advertising in the process, I think that's good for them.
This is what it comes down to in your post, but here's the thing:
Opinions are opinions, but at the end of the day the goal of the Sims team is to appease their fans. This means that numbers do matter, and trying to appease as many fans as possible should be the goal. Someone is always gonna hate an update and someone is always gonna love an update no matter what it is, that much can't be helped. What CAN be helped is trying to ensure that as high of a % as possible appreciates an update or add-on. Makes sense, no? You can't please everyone, but you CAN please a large percent of your fans, so best to focus your attention towards what would make the MOST people happy, right?
Catering an entire 6-month's effort towards a small group that makes up >0.3% of the population is not a recipe for a "successful" update. It's a recipe for generating free press, given the circumstances. The focus was on sales, not on customer satisfaction, and that's the problem. We need to be focused on appeasing as many fans as possible, so while you can easily sit there and say you love that update or even that you think it's the greatest thing to ever grace this Earth, that doesn't change the fact that not very many people have much good to say about it, but many have critiques. I mean just look at the evidence before us: how often do we see a regular user just randomly burst out and say "BOY I SURE AM LOVING THIS TRANSGENDER PATCH, EVEN TODAY," vs how often do we see a regular user lament just how much time was spent on such a low-quality update? It's not exactly the pinnacle of the series in terms of updates, and I think you'd have a very difficult time arguing that the patch is popular and widely appreciated, given the fact that 🐸🐸🐸🐸, the vast majority of people don't seem to be using it. Can you find a currently-running Let's Play that uses transgender features...?
It wasn't a good update, if we look at it's popularity (or lack thereof). I don't see any reason to believe it's a super appreciated aspect of the Sims beyond the initial free press it got. One person liking it does not change that it feels like 6 months down the drain for another 10 people. And as I've said, it's a PERFECT testament to the problems that arise when a company prioritizes sales over product quality and customer satisfaction. The lesson remains: focus on providing an enjoyable game, not on making political statements. Poorly made unisex clothing does not justify the 6 months worth of time spent on it.
You don't know it appeals only to .3% of the population, that's precisely the point I'm making.
That's not my point. My point is even if it appealed to 10x or even 100x that .3% of the population, that's STILL unacceptably small of a percent of customers appeased. They set their sights low from the get-go. The goal should be to find a topic that appeals to 99% of the fans, so that even when 20% are disappointed, you've appeased a sizeable majority still. Instead they aimed at .3%, and even though it's inevitable they'll appeal to more than just .3%, it's still not going to be anywhere close to 80% of the fanbase.
It's just bad priorities dictating what they work on, simple as that.