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Anyone lost hope for future eps?
Wulfsimmer
Posts: 4,381 Member
No matter how many times you try to twist it, you can't deny it...The Sims 4 expansion packs up until now have been very underwhelming. Yes they introduced something new each ep but The Sims 3 eps introduced at least 2x the amount. I really want the next one to meet standards but it will probably be more excuses. Each time I remember that they couldn't animate an elevator even though the asking price was $40, I cringe. 
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Good for you I guess
WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY?
ditto! in a decade, everyone will be gazing upon ts4 with wonder and awe and I shall be there to say "I implied this outcome would come into fruition," which is what matters the most.
you guys are really into that doom and gloom stuff and I'm just over here like whatever
(◡‿◡✿)
Here's my opinion, twisted around to make it look like a universal fact. What a good point to start a discussion on.
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Fun must be always -- Tomas Hertl (San Jose Sharks hockey player)
I played it around 2 months and noting 'wierd' or 'unpredictible' happened like they were telling us in those commercials in 2014. Every day is almost the same, you just care about their needs, meet few friends, get marry and get kids, but nothing really matters in that game. Even when you achieve their life goal, nothing really happen except you choose a new one. That was not a case in the Sims 2 if i remember well. Also, when i go to some community lot, I'm just thinking why am I losing time for this loading screen, cause almost everything i want to do there, I can do it at my home too. And friendships in the Sims 4 are so boring, there is no games like 'rock paper scissors','waterballoon fight' and many more. It's kinda empty choosing between the same options with different name.
I am so disappointed cause i expected it to be deeper experience and everything with those emotions doesn't make any sense cause they don't really effect Sim's life like they should do and like traits effected life in the Sims 3. Emotions are just changing and changing but everything is the same. I'm sure it's gonna be fun when Seasons and Pets come out, but the reality is that the Sims 4 will never be fun like we expected from the game in 2017. And i'm not even talk about all lags, glitches and delayed actions we experience since it came out.
Sorry for my bad english
That said, I'm disappointed with the amount of EPs. GPs and SPs are awesome and all, but they simply lack the meat of an EP. I'm personally becoming starved for space in a lot of my saves. I need a few more Windenburg sized neighborhoods, and I doubt that we will get a 'hood of that size outside of an EP. And if they stick to the pattern of 1 EP a year, were still going to be cramped on space by the end of TS4's run.
Of course, I'm also missing the content of EPs. The big gamechanging stuff like pets and seasons are still in limbo, and with extensive as that style content is, I really don't think they could be downgraded to GP status without the quality suffering.
Anyways, I still have hope. Toddlers renewed my faith by a lot, so I'm hopeful that the sims team is paying attention to us still and working on great things that we've been asking for.
Saying "not to be rude", then blatently being rude does not excuse rude behavior.
& the devs are busy to port this game successfully to any available device, that's their priority now not a fully fleshed out sims game
i just sit & watch where this franchise is heading nowadays, i don't have any expectations but i didn't have any with the previous game either with the exception that previous games exceeded in what was delivered while this game rather doesn't with few exceptions & that's why the word "underwhelming" surpassed the word "potential" meantime
Yes I've lost hope because to me, it seems very much obvious that the Sims team is underfunded and undersupported. The EP rate is slower, patches and updates seem slow lately, the EP quality is lower (compare Ambitions to GTW, or compare Late Night to City Living or Get Together) and everything in general just seems slower and lower in quality. I fully expect Pets to bomb out, because we're already gonna be getting just Cats and Dogs. When we go back from Cats, Dogs and Horses to just Cats and Dogs, they NEED to make vast improvements to those two or people are gonna wonder why on earth they're expected to pay $40 for a new version of Pets with less content. I have no hope those improvements will actually happen and I fully expect disappointment again, so speaking personally I currently I have no plans to buy the EP.
As for the "No"...?
The one exception is that even with a lower budget, it's possible to circumvent that and find ways to add loads of content while not demanding much in ways of cost or funding. Vampires for example really only demanded their new powers UI be coded in, and then they just have to individually code all the effects of the powers. The animations were there, but only a couple and nothing TOO intense. Vampires also seemed content-heavy for once instead of content-lacking. Even from a perspective of CAS and Buy mode items, many people wanted to buy it because it offered plenty and in a unique style. I suspect this is because the powers system itself was very gameplay intensive but did NOT demand much time or effort to produce, so it left more time and funding to flesh out other things, such as CAS, Buy Mode and the mini-neighborhood we got.
Get Together is somewhat the same. It's system didn't really prove to have as much replay value as Vampires, in my experience, (Clubs feel better suited to help flesh out your town and add immersion, but they don't actually feel too gameplay intensive since your Sims are still doing the same old stuff) but the concept behind clubs is actually rather simple and easy to do, so I imagine they were able to make Clubs for us and likewise had plenty of time and funding left to make things such as Windenburg.
My point is that with some clever thought put into it, I think it's possible to salvage the EPs (and GPs) just by trying to think of gameplay concepts that are easy to produce and yet have significant gameplay returns for the player. I highly, highly support a Witch GP because the foundation they'd need is already there via Vampires, so hopefully they could produce another content-heavy GP for us regardless of budget. We saw that system worked for Vampires, and with a Witches GP it could work again, plus hopefully do more since half the work has already been done for them.
As for EPs though...?
The problem that EPs find themselves in is that EP development is soooooooooo slow that we have to "make cuts" just to get what we want. People seem to have long given up on the idea of getting a vacation EP or a celebrity/showtime EP, and instead Pets and Seasons have been named as the essentials. The issue with these is that there's not really any clever tricks they can introduce to circumvent a low budget. No, Pets are animation-intensive as well as coding intensive, so they're bound to blow much of their budget on just the basics and have nothing left over to really flesh them out with. Seasons likewise demands a new weather system and seasonal time system be introduced, and I imagine this too eats into their budget.
When we find ourselves in a situation where Sims 4 must produce content that Sims 2 and Sims 3 had, then yes, we WILL compare them and yes, we WILL notice if Sims 4 has a lower budget than the other two had. On these fronts, I only expect disappointment because Sims 4 has done nothing but disappoint thusfar. That's not a fault of the team, the implementation or anything like that. That's just the simple truth that if Sims 2 and Sims 3 were given $20,000 to buy a new car and Sims 4 got only $5,000, we're going to notice a dip in quality with what car Sims 4 comes back with, and there was basically nothing Sims 4 could do about it.
....Except of course to refuse to use that money to buy a car like Sims 2 and Sims 3 did and instead come back with something entirely different yet nonetheless of use and interest to us. In this scenario, I'd actively encourage Sims 4 to "jump the shark" a little bit and come up with some unique gameplay and EP ideas in order to distance itself from Sims 2 and Sims 3. Don't just copy-paste old concepts, think up exciting new ones where we can't compare Sims 2 and 3 to Sims 4 because the former games simply didn't have those concepts at all. If the budget of Sims 4 is smaller as I suspect, Sims 4 is never ever ever gonna be able to beat those two at their own game and people will continue to make comparisons highlighting this while stating their disappointment in Sims 4. What Sims 4 needs to do is dream up entirely new concepts that are different, but fun regardless. They once had a Superheroes EP idea for example that I suspect has been trashed by now; seems like they reworked the underlying gameplay concept to apply to Vampires. I was highly supportive of the concept of Superheros, because while it's definitely new and not too requested, it also has the potential to neccesitize Sims 4. If you one day desired to play a Sims game and play as a Superhero rather than a Vampire...? Well, the other titles don't really support such a concept, so obviously Sims 4 would be your go-to. Another concept they pitched was that they were going to do City Management, where basically the Mayor/President political job would've been fleshed out to allow you to highly customize a neighborhood and even create legal policies. Yes, they should've done that. This doesn't really exist in former Sims games, so once again it would allow them to distance Sims 4 from the others and say "sure Sims 2 and 3 were fantastic, but neither of them lets you play Mayor as extensively as Sims 4 does," and just like that you've given people motivation to load the game up.
Sadly, I do not expect any clever tricks from the EP team. The GP team seems eager to experiment and try to find clever ways to provide meaningful content, but the EP team....? It's more or less confirmed we get Pets this year, and next year is in all likelihood Seasons, and by this point we're actually questioning if Sims 4 is coming to an end soon. They're so focused on delivering popular old content that there simply isn't any breathing room to try and come up with new stuff.
I'm pretty annoyed that modders have given so much more over the years than the actual sim team. >.< sure we get some really cool things, but WE'RE IN TS4 NOW!! and we still don't have weather in base game, and we're still stuck in the forever summer once again.. we still don't have babies that are something more than an object, we have gone from open worlds to closed worlds, cars to no cars.. basically every new cool thing they added they seem to take it away.
Open worlds were amazing, it was the new big thing, the promise of stepping into your world for the first time like you've never seen it. Now we're back to day 1. Still to this day there is so much basic stuff that should be in the game but isn't. They really need to hire the modders because they are doing a bloody good job, and if it wasn't for the modders I wouldn't be playing TS4 at all.
⌠ Team Holy Hêll ⌡ [Currently playing TS4]
That comment was highly unneccessary
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