S4 would have been perfect in my eyes if they hadn't reverted to putting us back into boxes. You can't do something like S3 did and give us open worlds and then just do away with it. I love S4. It's the first time I adored the artistic style. I absolutely love emotions and multi-tasking and how it creates sims who don't feel like robots. However, when you give a player tools like Create-a-Style and terrain editing found in 3 and then leave it out for the sequel, that doesn't feel intuitive.
For these reasons, I'm really hesitant when it comes to how long I want S4 to last. I like it, but it has major faults that I'd want to see corrected in S5 sooner rather than later, but if they do a half baked job and strip out emotions and multi-tasking, then I'd rather just keep playing S4 and hope it goes on for many more years.
I never liked the open world. I just felt there was more to look at rather than do. Only really thing you could do was collect stuff, most of the lots were rabbit holes and just for show.
San Myshuno and Bridleton Bay have both been adding unique things like festivals, food stands, merchants, lighthouses, musicians, performers etc and that's the kind of thing I hope becomes standard for the worlds. I actually really like that.
San Myshuno is literally the definition of “more to look at than do.
I hope they ditch the whole ‘built in’ world specific gameplay thing they’ve been doing. Players can’t manipulate any of it. They’d be better off focusing their gameplay on lots, and not in the space around the world that can’t be edited.
I disagree.. Like I said, there are food stands, festivals, performers, musicians, firework shows, protests etc.
San Myshuno feels the closest to an actual world than any other sims game for me.
Just because it has a lot of back drops and places you can't go doesn't mean anything, and that's not what I'm talking about.
I disliked sims 3, because there were vasts open worlds, but lots of empty spaces in those worlds. And the things you could do were all repetitive, the same old bar with a juicer where you made your own drinks, the same old rabbit hold restauraunts movie theater etcs.
I like the closed world approach of sims 4, opening up the lots in a single district would be nice, but impossible for this iteration.
Completely disagree with the focus on lots. The area around the world is what makes the world unique, they NEED to be unique. It was annoying in sims 3 because you couldn't travel from world to world. Dive lots were only in Isla Paradiso unless you did a very complicated and barely working work around, or lived in a custom built world. Lots of things were world specific, which was bad because you couldn't just travel.
Sims 4 worlds are different. I am not missing out on anything if one world has something the other doesn't, because I can visit that world in a matter of seconds. The worlds need their own flare.
And I am loving what they've done with San Myshuno and Bridleton bay. I dislike the base game worlds. Windenburg is absolutely stunning, but it's just always empty for me, which was my complaint with sims 3 worlds.
Don't know if you've played any Zelda games but here's a comparison. Twilight Princess had a pretty decent sized overworld, but there was nothing to do in the overworld. Then came breath of the wild and they added literally so much inside that world to explore that I often get side tracked. Worlds need their own unique flavors.
I do love the open world the best though - with the ability to add what ever I want in the world I am playing in. I have never had a need to go to other worlds from the one I was playing - until I was ready to play in that world. There was never anything missing in my sims 3 worlds because I put every thing in the world I was playing if it fit that style. I like huge worlds though. So for me that is an issue not to have in Sims 4. I also do not think we should have loading screen between my sim and the building they are about to enter. To me that is crazy wrong.
"Games Are Not The Place To Tell Stories, Games Are Meant To Let People Tell Their Own Stories"...Will Wright.
In dreams - I LIVE!
In REALITY, I simply exist.....
S4 would have been perfect in my eyes if they hadn't reverted to putting us back into boxes. You can't do something like S3 did and give us open worlds and then just do away with it. I love S4. It's the first time I adored the artistic style. I absolutely love emotions and multi-tasking and how it creates sims who don't feel like robots. However, when you give a player tools like Create-a-Style and terrain editing found in 3 and then leave it out for the sequel, that doesn't feel intuitive.
For these reasons, I'm really hesitant when it comes to how long I want S4 to last. I like it, but it has major faults that I'd want to see corrected in S5 sooner rather than later, but if they do a half baked job and strip out emotions and multi-tasking, then I'd rather just keep playing S4 and hope it goes on for many more years.
I never liked the open world. I just felt there was more to look at rather than do. Only really thing you could do was collect stuff, most of the lots were rabbit holes and just for show.
San Myshuno and Bridleton Bay have both been adding unique things like festivals, food stands, merchants, lighthouses, musicians, performers etc and that's the kind of thing I hope becomes standard for the worlds. I actually really like that.
San Myshuno is literally the definition of “more to look at than do.
I hope they ditch the whole ‘built in’ world specific gameplay thing they’ve been doing. Players can’t manipulate any of it. They’d be better off focusing their gameplay on lots, and not in the space around the world that can’t be edited.
I disagree.. Like I said, there are food stands, festivals, performers, musicians, firework shows, protests etc.
San Myshuno feels the closest to an actual world than any other sims game for me.
Just because it has a lot of back drops and places you can't go doesn't mean anything, and that's not what I'm talking about.
I disliked sims 3, because there were vasts open worlds, but lots of empty spaces in those worlds. And the things you could do were all repetitive, the same old bar with a juicer where you made your own drinks, the same old rabbit hold restauraunts movie theater etcs.
I like the closed world approach of sims 4, opening up the lots in a single district would be nice, but impossible for this iteration.
Completely disagree with the focus on lots. The area around the world is what makes the world unique, they NEED to be unique. It was annoying in sims 3 because you couldn't travel from world to world. Dive lots were only in Isla Paradiso unless you did a very complicated and barely working work around, or lived in a custom built world. Lots of things were world specific, which was bad because you couldn't just travel.
Sims 4 worlds are different. I am not missing out on anything if one world has something the other doesn't, because I can visit that world in a matter of seconds. The worlds need their own flare.
And I am loving what they've done with San Myshuno and Bridleton bay. I dislike the base game worlds. Windenburg is absolutely stunning, but it's just always empty for me, which was my complaint with sims 3 worlds.
The worlds are unique by the nature of their decoration. The city is totally different (visually) from any other world, Willow Creek is different (visually) from Oasis Springs, Windenburg, Forgotten Hollow, etc. They are already unique. If it takes locking gameplay, content, and game features to any specific world to make it ‘unique’ then they have no reason to spend so much time on the decoration.
The difference with Sims 3 is that you could utilize the map. You could place your own lots, and put whatever you wanted on those lots. I didn’t need Maxis locking penthouses to Bridgeport to make it ‘unique’ - it was unique on it’s own, even if I cut out every high rise. Still totally unique from Sunset Valley, or any other world. Had way less static decoration too. Still unique. Maybe open your mind a little bit to the idea that forcing players to play a game a specific way is counter to the fundamental principals of The Sims. Even Sims 4 used to say ‘You Rule!’ - even though that has became a fallacy with regards to what they are producing.
So you enjoy the world due to the aesthetic is what I gather from your post. There’s more to look at in SM than there is to do; don’t just list off what’s in the world because that only proves my point. Food stands, at a maximum you click on it and it pops up a UI box. No different than buying books from the bookshelf. Festivals, well those are primarily assembled using content that was released with the base game, or other DLC. They repurposed things that were already there and stuck it in the middle of the world. How exciting. Performers and musicians, are there for you to look at. The gold people are especially pointless, as are the weirdly dressed people. Firework shows, again just there for you to look at. Your sims will watch it, but it’s nothing more than a visual effect. Sims 2, and 3 both had fireworks. Protesting is exactly just something to look at. What does protesting do? Doesn’t get rid of the horrid weirdly dressed wrestler people walking around. Doesn’t actually do anything, it’s just there.
So no, none of those world exclusive things are game changing by any means. They either use things that the game already had, or they are there to look interesting for the player. Like the world for what it is, but there’s nothing about worlds in Sims 4 that makes them any different than before. Forcing restrictions and stifling creativity in the name of being ‘unique’ is flat out sad, and again counter to what made The Sims as popular as it is.
S4 would have been perfect in my eyes if they hadn't reverted to putting us back into boxes. You can't do something like S3 did and give us open worlds and then just do away with it. I love S4. It's the first time I adored the artistic style. I absolutely love emotions and multi-tasking and how it creates sims who don't feel like robots. However, when you give a player tools like Create-a-Style and terrain editing found in 3 and then leave it out for the sequel, that doesn't feel intuitive.
For these reasons, I'm really hesitant when it comes to how long I want S4 to last. I like it, but it has major faults that I'd want to see corrected in S5 sooner rather than later, but if they do a half baked job and strip out emotions and multi-tasking, then I'd rather just keep playing S4 and hope it goes on for many more years.
I never liked the open world. I just felt there was more to look at rather than do. Only really thing you could do was collect stuff, most of the lots were rabbit holes and just for show.
San Myshuno and Bridleton Bay have both been adding unique things like festivals, food stands, merchants, lighthouses, musicians, performers etc and that's the kind of thing I hope becomes standard for the worlds. I actually really like that.
San Myshuno is literally the definition of “more to look at than do.
I hope they ditch the whole ‘built in’ world specific gameplay thing they’ve been doing. Players can’t manipulate any of it. They’d be better off focusing their gameplay on lots, and not in the space around the world that can’t be edited.
I disagree.. Like I said, there are food stands, festivals, performers, musicians, firework shows, protests etc.
San Myshuno feels the closest to an actual world than any other sims game for me.
Just because it has a lot of back drops and places you can't go doesn't mean anything, and that's not what I'm talking about.
I disliked sims 3, because there were vasts open worlds, but lots of empty spaces in those worlds. And the things you could do were all repetitive, the same old bar with a juicer where you made your own drinks, the same old rabbit hold restauraunts movie theater etcs.
I like the closed world approach of sims 4, opening up the lots in a single district would be nice, but impossible for this iteration.
Completely disagree with the focus on lots. The area around the world is what makes the world unique, they NEED to be unique. It was annoying in sims 3 because you couldn't travel from world to world. Dive lots were only in Isla Paradiso unless you did a very complicated and barely working work around, or lived in a custom built world. Lots of things were world specific, which was bad because you couldn't just travel.
Sims 4 worlds are different. I am not missing out on anything if one world has something the other doesn't, because I can visit that world in a matter of seconds. The worlds need their own flare.
And I am loving what they've done with San Myshuno and Bridleton bay. I dislike the base game worlds. Windenburg is absolutely stunning, but it's just always empty for me, which was my complaint with sims 3 worlds.
The worlds are unique by the nature of their decoration. The city is totally different (visually) from any other world, Willow Creek is different (visually) from Oasis Springs, Windenburg, Forgotten Hollow, etc. They are already unique. If it takes locking gameplay, content, and game features to any specific world to make it ‘unique’ then they have no reason to spend so much time on the decoration.
The difference with Sims 3 is that you could utilize the map. You could place your own lots, and put whatever you wanted on those lots. I didn’t need Maxis locking penthouses to Bridgeport to make it ‘unique’ - it was unique on it’s own, even if I cut out every high rise. Still totally unique from Sunset Valley, or any other world. Had way less static decoration too. Still unique. Maybe open your mind a little bit to the idea that forcing players to play a game a specific way is counter to the fundamental principals of The Sims. Even Sims 4 used to say ‘You Rule!’ - even though that has became a fallacy with regards to what they are producing.
So you enjoy the world due to the aesthetic is what I gather from your post. There’s more to look at in SM than there is to do; don’t just list off what’s in the world because that only proves my point. Food stands, at a maximum you click on it and it pops up a UI box. No different than buying books from the bookshelf. Festivals, well those are primarily assembled using content that was released with the base game, or other DLC. They repurposed things that were already there and stuck it in the middle of the world. How exciting. Performers and musicians, are there for you to look at. The gold people are especially pointless, as are the weirdly dressed people. Firework shows, again just there for you to look at. Your sims will watch it, but it’s nothing more than a visual effect. Sims 2, and 3 both had fireworks. Protesting is exactly just something to look at. What does protesting do? Doesn’t get rid of the horrid weirdly dressed wrestler people walking around. Doesn’t actually do anything, it’s just there.
So no, none of those world exclusive things are game changing by any means. They either use things that the game already had, or they are there to look interesting for the player. Like the world for what it is, but there’s nothing about worlds in Sims 4 that makes them any different than before. Forcing restrictions and stifling creativity in the name of being ‘unique’ is flat out sad, and again counter to what made The Sims as popular as it is.
I love how people say “City Living added nothing” while Late Night added much less.
City Living got incredible reviews.
We have 6 new semi-active career branches that add gameplay around the world.
We got festivals. We got the ability to sell items on the street. We got heaps of new gameplay items. Apartment gameplay is twice as extensive than 3.
What did Late Night add? It took base game venues and added a bartender and a bouncer, that’s it. We got a butler that’s buggier than TS4 one. It added 2 semi-active career branches instead of 6. And a celebrity system that provides almost no gameplay. And Vampires that were so pointless EA had to revisit them later and had to offer them for a second time, because the
Bands however, were a great addition.
Bridgeport should have been a Store World, and everything else should have been added into Showtime. Showtime was also a small EP, that didn’t really make sense to be on its own.
I also think Generations and Seasons should have been combined too.
It’s so weird though, because we have Packs like WA, INF, University, Supernatural etc that add SO MUCH and then packs like Generations, Seasons, Late Night, Showtime that felt so small.
Idk. To me, City Living is the biggest EP so far in terms of “things to do” however I do feel that “City Life” is way to broad and it shows.
Late Night though, just feels like a store world turned EP. And no one has ever been able to easily explain how Late Night is bigger than CL.
They just say “we can place Apartments in other worlds” like that counterpoints anything.
Or that “San Myshuno is fake” while Bridgeport is 90% fake city too. Same with Roaring Heights.
@jackjack_k New careers in CL actually just pertained to using a pc (again) are not my idea of new careers. Yes, I like Sims can work from home, but c'mon all the careers require a pc. TS3 part time jobs and or self employed careers do not require a pc. Everything in TS4 requires a pc. Yes, that is an exaggeration but at this point it really is overkill. Granted the flea market table (which I placed around worlds in the open spaces) were a great object, one of the best objects ever added to any game in my opinion. I wish I had it in TS2 and TS3, but that is about all CL brought to my gameplay since obsession with basketball became too annoying, and obsessive, and once you got to the festivals (especially the romance festival) no need to ever go back. Seen it, done it.
Late Night did something for TS3 it didn't have and that was giving it community lots (open ) that it was sorely lacking and from then on we were able to build 'open lots' and hangouts with any object for Sims to use, and until then they didn't have any bars or clubs to visit, so you can't say it didn't add anything. It also added TS3's attraction system which most don't actually understand like we can TS2's attraction system. TS4 still needs one three year's later. But this game is so politically correct I doubt you would ever see a Sim attracted to another based upon eye color or hair etc. That is probably too taboo for TS4 to judge other Sims own physical attributes. ETA: Apartment buildings (you never had to use shells) are a big deal to those of us who like playing and building apartment buildings, duplexes, condos etc.
I give it another six months.
"Games Are Not The Place To Tell Stories, Games Are Meant To Let People Tell Their Own Stories"...Will Wright.
Well they better do something to spruce it up because it isn't as good as Sims 3 no matter what problems it had it wasn't boing and each week or so we all looked forward to what the store was going to bring.
I had a thread going about what people would like in Sims5 and they removed it. Why are they so afraid of ideas? I would think that NOW is the time to see what the people want instead of starting it, and finding out the people hate the idea like Sims4 was supposed to be online. No, they don't want our ideas. Just think how much more successful Sims4 could have been had they listened to the players. I agree with candy8, Sims3 was better even with the problems.
I had a thread going about what people would like in Sims5 and they removed it. Why are they so afraid of ideas? I would think that NOW is the time to see what the people want instead of starting it, and finding out the people hate the idea like Sims4 was supposed to be online. No, they don't want our ideas. Just think how much more successful Sims4 could have been had they listened to the players. I agree with candy8, Sims3 was better even with the problems.
They don’t want us to discuss the Sims 5 because the Sims 4 is the current game. Besides that EA isn’t interested in our ideas for the Sims 5 because people here just want it to be an improved version of one of the earlier games while EA instead wants it to be a new and different Sims game based on some completely new idea.
So let us return to the subject of this thread which is to guess about how many years the Sims 4 has yet before EA stops making expansions for it. People seem to just throw out random numbers. So they can say 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, 5 years, 8 years without giving any reasons at all. But why is this random guessing interesting? I don’t see it.
So let us instead use knowledge about how EA and other game companies decide such things because they don’t just throw a dice to decide how many years each of their games will live. They use reasoning instead!
How has EA’s reasoning worked until now? For the Sims 1 EA got into technical problems because TS1 hadn’t been planned to have many expansions and it was hard for EA to make them such that they were easy to install. EA never really solved that problem and we had to install all the expansions in the correct order or there were no chance that it would work. Therefore EA only let the Sims 1 live in 4 years.
But the Sims 2 and the Sims 3 didn’t have this problem. So EA let them both live in almost exactly 5 years.
But some simmers think that the Sims 4 will live longer because online MMO games like the Sims Freeplay, the SimCity BuildIt and similar games do. Again they ignore the reasoning behind this and EA’s reasons for not letting the earlier big Sims games live longer than at most 5 years. So why not? And why do the game companies let their free-to-play MMO games live longer?
We have to consider the main differences between big offline games and free-to-play MMO games to understand this:
1. The big Sims games get a lot of expansions each year and after 5 years they have so many expansions that sales numbers for new expansions usually went down. The main reason for this is that a lot of new simmers prefer to buy earlier discounted expansions instead of the new full price expansions. But another reason is that more and more simmers stop buying the expansions and maybe also stop playing the game. EA’s only way to avoid this (at least partially) would be not to discount old expansions - but then old expansions wouldn’t really sell at all. So until now EA has always decided to release a new and different basegame with a different focus after (at most) 5 years.
2. Sims Freeplay is now 6 years old and EA releases more and more expensive stuff for the game. All this stuff is sold as ingame purchases and usually only available for a couple of weeks. Then EA offers something else instead. Besides that EA earns money by showing adds from other companies in the game. This game doesn’t have big expansions like the PC game has. So it won’t ever get the same problems. New simmers only see the most recent stuff for the game anyway and if EA stopped supporting the game then the simmers would become very angry because they couldn’t play the game anymore if EA took the server down and they would lose both their ingame friends and all the stuff they had bought. Therefore they likely would switch to the next version of the game anyway. (I also play big free-to-play MMO games from other companies and in one of them the game company just a couple of months ago changed all the graphics in the game and replaced many of the objects with nicer looking objects with the mostly the same way of working. So this is the way to renew such games instead of attempting to force the fans to switch to a new game.)
Therefore I believe that EA will support the Sims Freeplay in several (and maybe many) more years unless people stop playing it and it at some point doesn’t attract new simmers anymore. The same thing will be true for the Sims Mobile and SimCity BuildIt until one of the games fail. But not for the Sims 4 because it still has all those expansions (where half of the EPs compared to the earlier games have been replaced by GPs and more SPs than for any earlier Sims game). That is why I still don’t guess blindly but just expect to EA to release a new basegame after almost exactly 5 years and announce it about 15 months before its release - just like EA now has done for both Sims 2, Sims 3 and Sims 4!
Seeing that publishers milking franchises (Loot Boxes, Creation Club, Live Service), how the Sims 4 is chopped up into small sections that can be added on, and how long it takes to create an EP, The Sims 4 could live twice the life of a normal Sims run.
2024?
2018: Seasons?
2019: University?
2020: Farming?
2021:Vacation? We could get it chopped up in game packs. So... new theme?
2022:Supernatural? We could get it chopped up in game packs too. So... new theme?
2023: Future Technology?
2024: Superstar?
It could go on for a while.
I doubt there will be any supernatural packs coming. I think they did their tribute to the supernatural already and given how long they take to release packs, they would probably never get around to it again in this century. I am not banking on farming either. Once again there have been no hints whatsoever in this direction. The only hints I have seen and I do place reliance on hints as they have played out previously, are those related to seasons and vacations. There have been no indications of interest in a University pack by the devs either.
As to Future Technology and Superstar, were there any surveys related to these areas?
The only thing we can be sure of in 2018 is that we will be doing laundry ad infinitum. Do you prefer Tide or Arm & Hammer?
I had a thread going about what people would like in Sims5 and they removed it. Why are they so afraid of ideas? I would think that NOW is the time to see what the people want instead of starting it, and finding out the people hate the idea like Sims4 was supposed to be online. No, they don't want our ideas. Just think how much more successful Sims4 could have been had they listened to the players. I agree with candy8, Sims3 was better even with the problems.
They didn't remove it @catitude5. It's buried in Off Topic chat as I said it would be, just like all other Sims 5 threads do. It's basically what Erpe said - they want people focused on the current game.
I give TS4 another 2-3 years. They want to stretch the game out longer, and 7 years of Sims 4 would be the longest out of the bunch. However, The Sims 4 is a very bland and boring game that gets less *new* stuff per pack, and fewer big game features than any other Sims game. That’s a pretty unfortunate reality.
> @king_of_simcity7 said: > Hopfully just next year and then time to finally call it quits
no way. there's way too much unfinished business and potential for new packs for ts4 for them to stop working on it next year...... that wouldn't make much sense
@jackjack_k New careers in CL actually just pertained to using a pc (again) are not my idea of new careers. Yes, I like Sims can work from home, but c'mon all the careers require a pc. TS3 part time jobs and or self employed careers do not require a pc. Everything in TS4 requires a pc. Yes, that is an exaggeration but at this point it really is overkill. Granted the flea market table (which I placed around worlds in the open spaces) were a great object, one of the best objects ever added to any game in my opinion. I wish I had it in TS2 and TS3, but that is about all CL brought to my gameplay since obsession with basketball became too annoying, and obsessive, and once you got to the festivals (especially the romance festival) no need to ever go back. Seen it, done it.
Late Night did something for TS3 it didn't have and that was giving it community lots (open ) that it was sorely lacking and from then on we were able to build 'open lots' and hangouts with any object for Sims to use, and until then they didn't have any bars or clubs to visit, so you can't say it didn't add anything. It also added TS3's attraction system which most don't actually understand like we can TS2's attraction system. TS4 still needs one three year's later. But this game is so politically correct I doubt you would ever see a Sim attracted to another based upon eye color or hair etc. That is probably too taboo for TS4 to judge other Sims own physical attributes. ETA: Apartment buildings (you never had to use shells) are a big deal to those of us who like playing and building apartment buildings, duplexes, condos etc.
I give it another six months.
Do you not use a computer when you work from home? Serious question.
Also, tell me what uses a PC in The Sims 3 that was done differently in 2 or 3. I’m thinking you’re creating a problem that doesn’t exist, honestly.
Hangouts were added with the Ambitions patch, not with Late Night.
Late Night just added NPC staff to venues we already had, that should have been in the base game.
There’s a difference between Apartment buildings that The Sims 2 had, vs the Skyscrapers The Sims 4 has.
It’s already confirmed that Sims 2 style Apartments may come later. Same way that they sort of arrived later with S3 University.
They just launched the game on PS4/Xbox and they are launching The Sims mobile in around 6 months that will use content from The Sims 4.
I’d say you’d be closer to 6 years than 6 months. EA are still exceeding sales and player stats.
This has a chance to be like Elder Scrolls where the game just doesn’t slow down, so there’s no need for a sequel.
However, The Sims 4 is a very bland and boring game that gets less *new* stuff per pack, and fewer big game features than any other Sims game. That’s a pretty unfortunate reality.
Your first statement is beyond incorrect. The Sims 4 adds the most stuff per pack so far.
The second statement is subjective. The Sims 2 EP’s feel like Game Pack level to me, minus Bon Voyage. Yet, people claim they are those EP’s provide the most gameplay.
Bon Voyage is the only EP that feels like a Sims 3/4 level EP. The rest just add 6 or so new gameplay items, a new venue and some extra gameplay tidbits.
@jackjack_k New careers in CL actually just pertained to using a pc (again) are not my idea of new careers. Yes, I like Sims can work from home, but c'mon all the careers require a pc. TS3 part time jobs and or self employed careers do not require a pc. Everything in TS4 requires a pc. Yes, that is an exaggeration but at this point it really is overkill. Granted the flea market table (which I placed around worlds in the open spaces) were a great object, one of the best objects ever added to any game in my opinion. I wish I had it in TS2 and TS3, but that is about all CL brought to my gameplay since obsession with basketball became too annoying, and obsessive, and once you got to the festivals (especially the romance festival) no need to ever go back. Seen it, done it.
Late Night did something for TS3 it didn't have and that was giving it community lots (open ) that it was sorely lacking and from then on we were able to build 'open lots' and hangouts with any object for Sims to use, and until then they didn't have any bars or clubs to visit, so you can't say it didn't add anything. It also added TS3's attraction system which most don't actually understand like we can TS2's attraction system. TS4 still needs one three year's later. But this game is so politically correct I doubt you would ever see a Sim attracted to another based upon eye color or hair etc. That is probably too taboo for TS4 to judge other Sims own physical attributes. ETA: Apartment buildings (you never had to use shells) are a big deal to those of us who like playing and building apartment buildings, duplexes, condos etc.
I give it another six months.
Do you not use a computer when you work from home? Serious question.
Also, tell me what uses a PC in The Sims 3 that was done differently in 2 or 3. I’m thinking you’re creating a problem that doesn’t exist, honestly.
Hangouts were added with the Ambitions patch, not with Late Night.
Late Night just added NPC staff to venues we already had, that should have been in the base game.
There’s a difference between Apartment buildings that The Sims 2 had, vs the Skyscrapers The Sims 4 has.
It’s already confirmed that Sims 2 style Apartments may come later. Same way that they sort of arrived later with S3 University.
They just launched the game on PS4/Xbox and they are launching The Sims mobile in around 6 months that will use content from The Sims 4.
I’d say you’d be closer to 6 years than 6 months. EA are still exceeding sales and player stats.
This has a chance to be like Elder Scrolls where the game just doesn’t slow down, so there’s no need for a sequel.
How can you compare TS4 with a game like Elder Scrolls which already has 5 generations but only very few expansions for each generation?
Elder Scolls is a game that just sells in several years before it becomes so outdated that Bethesda wants to release a new game. But the Sims games are mainly made for EA to be able to sell a huge number of expansions year after year until the game has so many expansions already that sales numbers for the new expansions go down and become a little unsatisfying for EA. Then EA releases a new basegame (which until now usually has happened every 5 years).
The console version of TS4 is mainly made by another company who has developed a technic to port PC games to consoles quite easily. But the Sims Freeplay and soon the Sims Mobile too are very different games that will live as free games almost forever but let EA earn a lot of money from adds and from offering stuff that mostly only will be available for a short time. So those games live their own lives and haven’t really anything to do with the PC game.
However, The Sims 4 is a very bland and boring game that gets less *new* stuff per pack, and fewer big game features than any other Sims game. That’s a pretty unfortunate reality.
Your first statement is beyond incorrect. The Sims 4 adds the most stuff per pack so far.
The second statement is subjective. The Sims 2 EP’s feel like Game Pack level to me, minus Bon Voyage. Yet, people claim they are those EP’s provide the most gameplay.
Bon Voyage is the only EP that feels like a Sims 3/4 level EP. The rest just add 6 or so new gameplay items, a new venue and some extra gameplay tidbits.
Oh shush up. I have heard a lot of ridiculous things from you but do not even begin to create such a lie.
The Sims 4 doesn’t get that much *new* stuff per pack. Ya you conveniently skipped over the word new and completely missed the point. Additionally you clearly don’t understand what a ‘big game feature’ is or you wouldn’t be playing the subjective card - which BTW is only played when you want to disagree with something but have no actual argument to disagree. Your argument is weak, and frankly makes no sense. The Sims 4 doesn’t get very many big game features. Refute that without obnoxiously changing the topic, or don’t mention it at all.
The Sims 4 gets tiny packs, most of them are stuff packs. Expansions add LESS than before, game packs add LESS than expansions, and stuff packs don’t add any big game features at all, and usually a total of 2 *new* things at most. Seriously if you have nothing but nonsense to type back to me then skip it because it’s old, and annoying.
@jackjack_k New careers in CL actually just pertained to using a pc (again) are not my idea of new careers. Yes, I like Sims can work from home, but c'mon all the careers require a pc. TS3 part time jobs and or self employed careers do not require a pc. Everything in TS4 requires a pc. Yes, that is an exaggeration but at this point it really is overkill. Granted the flea market table (which I placed around worlds in the open spaces) were a great object, one of the best objects ever added to any game in my opinion. I wish I had it in TS2 and TS3, but that is about all CL brought to my gameplay since obsession with basketball became too annoying, and obsessive, and once you got to the festivals (especially the romance festival) no need to ever go back. Seen it, done it.
Late Night did something for TS3 it didn't have and that was giving it community lots (open ) that it was sorely lacking and from then on we were able to build 'open lots' and hangouts with any object for Sims to use, and until then they didn't have any bars or clubs to visit, so you can't say it didn't add anything. It also added TS3's attraction system which most don't actually understand like we can TS2's attraction system. TS4 still needs one three year's later. But this game is so politically correct I doubt you would ever see a Sim attracted to another based upon eye color or hair etc. That is probably too taboo for TS4 to judge other Sims own physical attributes. ETA: Apartment buildings (you never had to use shells) are a big deal to those of us who like playing and building apartment buildings, duplexes, condos etc.
I give it another six months.
Do you not use a computer when you work from home? Serious question.
Also, tell me what uses a PC in The Sims 3 that was done differently in 2 or 3. I’m thinking you’re creating a problem that doesn’t exist, honestly.
Hangouts were added with the Ambitions patch, not with Late Night.
Late Night just added NPC staff to venues we already had, that should have been in the base game.
There’s a difference between Apartment buildings that The Sims 2 had, vs the Skyscrapers The Sims 4 has.
It’s already confirmed that Sims 2 style Apartments may come later. Same way that they sort of arrived later with S3 University.
They just launched the game on PS4/Xbox and they are launching The Sims mobile in around 6 months that will use content from The Sims 4.
I’d say you’d be closer to 6 years than 6 months. EA are still exceeding sales and player stats.
This has a chance to be like Elder Scrolls where the game just doesn’t slow down, so there’s no need for a sequel.
Jack , I complained about the over use of the pc in TS4 (for every thing) to SimGuruLyndsay (before she replaced Rachel) a long time ago. It is a problem to many of us who want to see part time jobs not revolve around the pc. In TS3 you dress Sims and give them remakes without ever toughing a pc. You can dig in the junk yard and create and build things to sell without ever touching a pc. You can run a daycare and never touch a pc. There are all sorts of things self employed carers in TS3 you go to City Hall and register as self employed. As a matter of fact the Detective career never touches a pc. Or the ghost hunting one. Military or some other jobs that aren't active never touch the pc. There are so many jobs in TS3 I can't even remember or list them all, and most never have to touch a pc. I'm sure others who are currently playing can tell me and you how many never touch a pc. Whether they are standard or hands on and it makes TS4 look like it can't think of anything outside of using a pc.
On the other point I want to go over, where is the confirmation TS2 style apartments are coming later? Who said that (official) and where? I still think TS4 ends sometime in 2018. ETA: The Sims Mobile is available now for the United States and to best of my memory that is what some were waiting on in that section. Check your emails.
Post edited by Cinebar on
"Games Are Not The Place To Tell Stories, Games Are Meant To Let People Tell Their Own Stories"...Will Wright.
S4 would have been perfect in my eyes if they hadn't reverted to putting us back into boxes. You can't do something like S3 did and give us open worlds and then just do away with it. I love S4. It's the first time I adored the artistic style. I absolutely love emotions and multi-tasking and how it creates sims who don't feel like robots. However, when you give a player tools like Create-a-Style and terrain editing found in 3 and then leave it out for the sequel, that doesn't feel intuitive.
For these reasons, I'm really hesitant when it comes to how long I want S4 to last. I like it, but it has major faults that I'd want to see corrected in S5 sooner rather than later, but if they do a half baked job and strip out emotions and multi-tasking, then I'd rather just keep playing S4 and hope it goes on for many more years.
I never liked the open world. I just felt there was more to look at rather than do. Only really thing you could do was collect stuff, most of the lots were rabbit holes and just for show.
San Myshuno and Bridleton Bay have both been adding unique things like festivals, food stands, merchants, lighthouses, musicians, performers etc and that's the kind of thing I hope becomes standard for the worlds. I actually really like that.
San Myshuno is literally the definition of “more to look at than do.
I hope they ditch the whole ‘built in’ world specific gameplay thing they’ve been doing. Players can’t manipulate any of it. They’d be better off focusing their gameplay on lots, and not in the space around the world that can’t be edited.
I disagree.. Like I said, there are food stands, festivals, performers, musicians, firework shows, protests etc.
San Myshuno feels the closest to an actual world than any other sims game for me.
Just because it has a lot of back drops and places you can't go doesn't mean anything, and that's not what I'm talking about.
I disliked sims 3, because there were vasts open worlds, but lots of empty spaces in those worlds. And the things you could do were all repetitive, the same old bar with a juicer where you made your own drinks, the same old rabbit hold restauraunts movie theater etcs.
I like the closed world approach of sims 4, opening up the lots in a single district would be nice, but impossible for this iteration.
Completely disagree with the focus on lots. The area around the world is what makes the world unique, they NEED to be unique. It was annoying in sims 3 because you couldn't travel from world to world. Dive lots were only in Isla Paradiso unless you did a very complicated and barely working work around, or lived in a custom built world. Lots of things were world specific, which was bad because you couldn't just travel.
Sims 4 worlds are different. I am not missing out on anything if one world has something the other doesn't, because I can visit that world in a matter of seconds. The worlds need their own flare.
And I am loving what they've done with San Myshuno and Bridleton bay. I dislike the base game worlds. Windenburg is absolutely stunning, but it's just always empty for me, which was my complaint with sims 3 worlds.
The worlds are unique by the nature of their decoration. The city is totally different (visually) from any other world, Willow Creek is different (visually) from Oasis Springs, Windenburg, Forgotten Hollow, etc. They are already unique. If it takes locking gameplay, content, and game features to any specific world to make it ‘unique’ then they have no reason to spend so much time on the decoration.
The difference with Sims 3 is that you could utilize the map. You could place your own lots, and put whatever you wanted on those lots. I didn’t need Maxis locking penthouses to Bridgeport to make it ‘unique’ - it was unique on it’s own, even if I cut out every high rise. Still totally unique from Sunset Valley, or any other world. Had way less static decoration too. Still unique. Maybe open your mind a little bit to the idea that forcing players to play a game a specific way is counter to the fundamental principals of The Sims. Even Sims 4 used to say ‘You Rule!’ - even though that has became a fallacy with regards to what they are producing.
So you enjoy the world due to the aesthetic is what I gather from your post. There’s more to look at in SM than there is to do; don’t just list off what’s in the world because that only proves my point. Food stands, at a maximum you click on it and it pops up a UI box. No different than buying books from the bookshelf. Festivals, well those are primarily assembled using content that was released with the base game, or other DLC. They repurposed things that were already there and stuck it in the middle of the world. How exciting. Performers and musicians, are there for you to look at. The gold people are especially pointless, as are the weirdly dressed people. Firework shows, again just there for you to look at. Your sims will watch it, but it’s nothing more than a visual effect. Sims 2, and 3 both had fireworks. Protesting is exactly just something to look at. What does protesting do? Doesn’t get rid of the horrid weirdly dressed wrestler people walking around. Doesn’t actually do anything, it’s just there.
So no, none of those world exclusive things are game changing by any means. They either use things that the game already had, or they are there to look interesting for the player. Like the world for what it is, but there’s nothing about worlds in Sims 4 that makes them any different than before. Forcing restrictions and stifling creativity in the name of being ‘unique’ is flat out sad, and again counter to what made The Sims as popular as it is.
I love how people say “City Living added nothing” while Late Night added much less.
City Living got incredible reviews.
We have 6 new semi-active career branches that add gameplay around the world.
We got festivals. We got the ability to sell items on the street. We got heaps of new gameplay items. Apartment gameplay is twice as extensive than 3.
What did Late Night add? It took base game venues and added a bartender and a bouncer, that’s it. We got a butler that’s buggier than TS4 one. It added 2 semi-active career branches instead of 6. And a celebrity system that provides almost no gameplay. And Vampires that were so pointless EA had to revisit them later and had to offer them for a second time, because the
Bands however, were a great addition.
Bridgeport should have been a Store World, and everything else should have been added into Showtime. Showtime was also a small EP, that didn’t really make sense to be on its own.
I also think Generations and Seasons should have been combined too.
It’s so weird though, because we have Packs like WA, INF, University, Supernatural etc that add SO MUCH and then packs like Generations, Seasons, Late Night, Showtime that felt so small.
Idk. To me, City Living is the biggest EP so far in terms of “things to do” however I do feel that “City Life” is way to broad and it shows.
Late Night though, just feels like a store world turned EP. And no one has ever been able to easily explain how Late Night is bigger than CL.
They just say “we can place Apartments in other worlds” like that counterpoints anything.
Or that “San Myshuno is fake” while Bridgeport is 90% fake city too. Same with Roaring Heights.
The Urbz is the closest we have to a real city
To me your post proves the importance of open world and the value of being free as a player to do what you want to do. I played a homeless sim in Bridgeport, hardly doing any other stuff than what came with LN (though the seasons were important as well). I played this sim for months and months (real months, not Sims months) and it was an amazing experience. Do you see yourself playing in CL for months and months in a row, doing nothing else?
P.s., sorry, the question: I think Sims 4 will at least run another four, five years. It’s so easy for them to just keep adding small things to this game and people will buy anyway. Why bother by putting money and effort in developing an entirely new game. I just don’t see it happening any time soon.
S4 would have been perfect in my eyes if they hadn't reverted to putting us back into boxes. You can't do something like S3 did and give us open worlds and then just do away with it. I love S4. It's the first time I adored the artistic style. I absolutely love emotions and multi-tasking and how it creates sims who don't feel like robots. However, when you give a player tools like Create-a-Style and terrain editing found in 3 and then leave it out for the sequel, that doesn't feel intuitive.
For these reasons, I'm really hesitant when it comes to how long I want S4 to last. I like it, but it has major faults that I'd want to see corrected in S5 sooner rather than later, but if they do a half baked job and strip out emotions and multi-tasking, then I'd rather just keep playing S4 and hope it goes on for many more years.
I never liked the open world. I just felt there was more to look at rather than do. Only really thing you could do was collect stuff, most of the lots were rabbit holes and just for show.
San Myshuno and Bridleton Bay have both been adding unique things like festivals, food stands, merchants, lighthouses, musicians, performers etc and that's the kind of thing I hope becomes standard for the worlds. I actually really like that.
San Myshuno is literally the definition of “more to look at than do.
I hope they ditch the whole ‘built in’ world specific gameplay thing they’ve been doing. Players can’t manipulate any of it. They’d be better off focusing their gameplay on lots, and not in the space around the world that can’t be edited.
I disagree.. Like I said, there are food stands, festivals, performers, musicians, firework shows, protests etc.
San Myshuno feels the closest to an actual world than any other sims game for me.
Just because it has a lot of back drops and places you can't go doesn't mean anything, and that's not what I'm talking about.
I disliked sims 3, because there were vasts open worlds, but lots of empty spaces in those worlds. And the things you could do were all repetitive, the same old bar with a juicer where you made your own drinks, the same old rabbit hold restauraunts movie theater etcs.
I like the closed world approach of sims 4, opening up the lots in a single district would be nice, but impossible for this iteration.
Completely disagree with the focus on lots. The area around the world is what makes the world unique, they NEED to be unique. It was annoying in sims 3 because you couldn't travel from world to world. Dive lots were only in Isla Paradiso unless you did a very complicated and barely working work around, or lived in a custom built world. Lots of things were world specific, which was bad because you couldn't just travel.
Sims 4 worlds are different. I am not missing out on anything if one world has something the other doesn't, because I can visit that world in a matter of seconds. The worlds need their own flare.
And I am loving what they've done with San Myshuno and Bridleton bay. I dislike the base game worlds. Windenburg is absolutely stunning, but it's just always empty for me, which was my complaint with sims 3 worlds.
The worlds are unique by the nature of their decoration. The city is totally different (visually) from any other world, Willow Creek is different (visually) from Oasis Springs, Windenburg, Forgotten Hollow, etc. They are already unique. If it takes locking gameplay, content, and game features to any specific world to make it ‘unique’ then they have no reason to spend so much time on the decoration.
The difference with Sims 3 is that you could utilize the map. You could place your own lots, and put whatever you wanted on those lots. I didn’t need Maxis locking penthouses to Bridgeport to make it ‘unique’ - it was unique on it’s own, even if I cut out every high rise. Still totally unique from Sunset Valley, or any other world. Had way less static decoration too. Still unique. Maybe open your mind a little bit to the idea that forcing players to play a game a specific way is counter to the fundamental principals of The Sims. Even Sims 4 used to say ‘You Rule!’ - even though that has became a fallacy with regards to what they are producing.
So you enjoy the world due to the aesthetic is what I gather from your post. There’s more to look at in SM than there is to do; don’t just list off what’s in the world because that only proves my point. Food stands, at a maximum you click on it and it pops up a UI box. No different than buying books from the bookshelf. Festivals, well those are primarily assembled using content that was released with the base game, or other DLC. They repurposed things that were already there and stuck it in the middle of the world. How exciting. Performers and musicians, are there for you to look at. The gold people are especially pointless, as are the weirdly dressed people. Firework shows, again just there for you to look at. Your sims will watch it, but it’s nothing more than a visual effect. Sims 2, and 3 both had fireworks. Protesting is exactly just something to look at. What does protesting do? Doesn’t get rid of the horrid weirdly dressed wrestler people walking around. Doesn’t actually do anything, it’s just there.
So no, none of those world exclusive things are game changing by any means. They either use things that the game already had, or they are there to look interesting for the player. Like the world for what it is, but there’s nothing about worlds in Sims 4 that makes them any different than before. Forcing restrictions and stifling creativity in the name of being ‘unique’ is flat out sad, and again counter to what made The Sims as popular as it is.
I love how people say “City Living added nothing” while Late Night added much less.
City Living got incredible reviews.
We have 6 new semi-active career branches that add gameplay around the world.
We got festivals. We got the ability to sell items on the street. We got heaps of new gameplay items. Apartment gameplay is twice as extensive than 3.
What did Late Night add? It took base game venues and added a bartender and a bouncer, that’s it. We got a butler that’s buggier than TS4 one. It added 2 semi-active career branches instead of 6. And a celebrity system that provides almost no gameplay. And Vampires that were so pointless EA had to revisit them later and had to offer them for a second time, because the
Bands however, were a great addition.
Bridgeport should have been a Store World, and everything else should have been added into Showtime. Showtime was also a small EP, that didn’t really make sense to be on its own.
I also think Generations and Seasons should have been combined too.
It’s so weird though, because we have Packs like WA, INF, University, Supernatural etc that add SO MUCH and then packs like Generations, Seasons, Late Night, Showtime that felt so small.
Idk. To me, City Living is the biggest EP so far in terms of “things to do” however I do feel that “City Life” is way to broad and it shows.
Late Night though, just feels like a store world turned EP. And no one has ever been able to easily explain how Late Night is bigger than CL.
They just say “we can place Apartments in other worlds” like that counterpoints anything.
Or that “San Myshuno is fake” while Bridgeport is 90% fake city too. Same with Roaring Heights.
The Urbz is the closest we have to a real city
To me your post proves the importance of open world and the value of being free as a player to do what you want to do. I played a homeless sim in Bridgeport, hardly doing any other stuff than what came with LN (though the seasons were important as well). I played this sim for months and months (real months, not Sims months) and it was an amazing experience. Do you see yourself playing in CL for months and months in a row, doing nothing else?
P.s., sorry, the question: I think Sims 4 will at least run another four, five years. It’s so easy for them to just keep adding small things to this game and people will buy anyway. Why bother by putting money and effort in developing an entirely new game. I just don’t see it happening any time soon.
You know that I disagree with that. But you completely ignore the question: Why has EA until now always released a new basegame after at most 5 years even though simmers always have hated it?
Why didn’t EA learn a lesson already after TS1 when the release of TS2 caused half of the simmers to just continue to play TS1 and never buy TS2? (The sales numbers for TS2 were only a little more than the half of the sales numbers for TS2.)
When the same thing happened once more when EA released TS3 (even though the lower sales numbers from TS2 just were repeated for TS3) why didn’t EA still learn the lesson but after only 5 years released TS4 anyway - and with less content than the previous game??
Is it because EA’s top have huge salaries of many million dollars each year because EA earn so very much money?? Or are EA’s top really considering things anyway and thus being worth all those millions of dollars??
I am still sure that EA’s headhunted top of top managers from other huge companies aren’t at all as incompetent as simmers in this forum always think that they are because then EA never would have become such a huge company and earned all that money! So why did those top managers always release a new basegame after at most 5 years even though they knew how much the simmers in the forums always hated it?!???
My own answer is that EA of course can’t accept only to sell the game to the fewer and fewer simmers who played all the previous games too! But if EA just went on and on and released hundreds of expansions for the same game in 10 to 15 years then new simmers would give up and never plan to buy both the basegame and all those expansions too! So only the few remaining veteran simmers would still buy the new expansions when they were released. Therefore sales numbers would just go down and down and EA would therefore have to stop making any more expansions a long time before EA wanted to stop.
So EA has investigated the market to find the best lifetime for each Sims game if EA wants a balance between the extra costs to release a new basegame and to avoid that sales numbers for the new expansions become too low. The result clearly has been until now that the best lifetime for a Sims basegame is 5 years. So why should EA suddenly now ignore all the earlier market investigations and considerations and let TS4 continue to get about 7 paid expansions (SPs + GPs + EPs) in many more years and accept that more and more simmers stop playing the game and less and less new simmers start playing it because they won’t let themselves feel that they have to buy that many earlier released expansions too to catch up with the current game?
@Erpe The Sims 3 had higher week 1 sales than Sims 2. Sims 3 sold 1.4 million in 7 days, whereas Sims 2 sold 1 million within 10 days.
I don’t see where the ‘lower sales numbers’ are coming from either - both games respectively broke records for fastest selling PC game at their time of release. That generally means that they sold *more* games at a faster rate than the predecessor. The only main title game to not break that record is The Sims 4 so your analysis is a little off.
@Erpe How can I completely ignore a question when nobody asked that question in the first place ? I have no idea about Sims 1 and 2, but I don’t see how they could have dragged on Sims 3 much longer. They added packs to that game like a machine gun at one point and it’s stuffed. Not much room for additions I’d say, if you don’t want your computer to explode. Besides, wasn’t Sims 3 built with an already old engine..? I can imagine that has been one reason for them to develop a new game. I think something similar went for developing Sims 3, the wish to create the game with an open world, which wasn’t possible with Sims 2.
I’m under the impression so far they’ve always wanted to expand the game, renew it, reinvent it. To me Sims 4 feels different. There is nothing actually totally new in there, it just seems to be more simple. And they are adding stuff to it much slower than they ever did before, which indicates they’re not in a hurry (like they clearly were with Sims 3). In fact they’ve stated that the development of Sims 4 is totally different compared to the predecessors, suggesting the game in fact would last much longer than those four/five years.
I think it’s much more effective for them now to really milk Sims 4. To be honest I even wonder if we’ll ever see a Sims 5.
That's the irony of people claiming the Sims 4 is not half-baked. When people want the game to bake twice as long, they prove that theory right of the Sims 4 being half-baked. Like don't claim the Sims 4 isn't half-baked if you want the game to be developed longer than previous Sims games. That just proves your point of it not being half-baked as null and void. Funny when the claim that Sims 4 packs are full of content when it will have the most number of packs of any Sims game, yet people still feel like it is lacking more packs. Yet people are claiming they can't run the Sims 4 on their computers, yet still beg for it to last longer. It is like uh, if you can't afford to play on a decent system now, then why are you asking for more packs that will further tax on your computer? I guess it is the whole irony of the microtransaction system. At what point will people move on to allow Gurus to develop other Sims games? I like the five year trend. It is a good milestone to see how much Sims content can be produced for an iteration within that time frame, allows for future musics, fashion, and technology to be used for the next Sims game, and allows for a whole new batch of backstories for premade Sims to be written. I know it is tough for Simmers to move on to a new iteration, but the reality is games only last so many years. Mario gets a new batch of games, Zelda gets a new batch of games, Tomb Raider gets a new batch of games, etc. and that is every few years. I think five years is more than average how long an iteration in a series last. I actually could see the console version being worked on longer while the PC version is being developed for the next iteration. Plus as shown by Gaiaonline's failure to update with technology, if you don't advance with progress with technology ever so often, you get left behind in the gaming industry. Why cell phones and computers go out of date every few years. Games get aged too.
I think what people are most scared of is because graphics are one the strongest point of the Sims 4, a newer Sims game will overshadow it because with technology usually comes better graphics. Plus I'm pretty sure it will have a better world system too. Story progression, well that is something Maxis still has to improve upon. I really would be interested to see height adjusters and gradual aging progressing with the series next. I also think there is potential for side game progression too. Like although I don't want to see VR for the PC series, I could see it working really well with a Sims Castaway sequel that will be more interactive with building things and survival. I guess I'm hopeful for the future of the Sims and its advancements. I do have a feeling if an iteration does extend too much, that it makes it easier for competition to sweep in and take a lot of customers away. So that's the thing waiting too long can cause a shift in the market too. If a company doesn't provide a decent new product we see things like what City Skylines did with SimCity. City Skylines is years ahead of technology now than SimCity and a much bigger world system.
“Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.” –Helen Keller
Comments
I disagree.. Like I said, there are food stands, festivals, performers, musicians, firework shows, protests etc.
San Myshuno feels the closest to an actual world than any other sims game for me.
Just because it has a lot of back drops and places you can't go doesn't mean anything, and that's not what I'm talking about.
I disliked sims 3, because there were vasts open worlds, but lots of empty spaces in those worlds. And the things you could do were all repetitive, the same old bar with a juicer where you made your own drinks, the same old rabbit hold restauraunts movie theater etcs.
I like the closed world approach of sims 4, opening up the lots in a single district would be nice, but impossible for this iteration.
Completely disagree with the focus on lots. The area around the world is what makes the world unique, they NEED to be unique. It was annoying in sims 3 because you couldn't travel from world to world. Dive lots were only in Isla Paradiso unless you did a very complicated and barely working work around, or lived in a custom built world. Lots of things were world specific, which was bad because you couldn't just travel.
Sims 4 worlds are different. I am not missing out on anything if one world has something the other doesn't, because I can visit that world in a matter of seconds. The worlds need their own flare.
And I am loving what they've done with San Myshuno and Bridleton bay. I dislike the base game worlds. Windenburg is absolutely stunning, but it's just always empty for me, which was my complaint with sims 3 worlds.
Don't know if you've played any Zelda games but here's a comparison. Twilight Princess had a pretty decent sized overworld, but there was nothing to do in the overworld. Then came breath of the wild and they added literally so much inside that world to explore that I often get side tracked. Worlds need their own unique flavors.
"Games Are Not The Place To Tell Stories, Games Are Meant To Let People Tell Their Own Stories"...Will Wright.
In dreams - I LIVE!
In REALITY, I simply exist.....
The worlds are unique by the nature of their decoration. The city is totally different (visually) from any other world, Willow Creek is different (visually) from Oasis Springs, Windenburg, Forgotten Hollow, etc. They are already unique. If it takes locking gameplay, content, and game features to any specific world to make it ‘unique’ then they have no reason to spend so much time on the decoration.
The difference with Sims 3 is that you could utilize the map. You could place your own lots, and put whatever you wanted on those lots. I didn’t need Maxis locking penthouses to Bridgeport to make it ‘unique’ - it was unique on it’s own, even if I cut out every high rise. Still totally unique from Sunset Valley, or any other world. Had way less static decoration too. Still unique. Maybe open your mind a little bit to the idea that forcing players to play a game a specific way is counter to the fundamental principals of The Sims. Even Sims 4 used to say ‘You Rule!’ - even though that has became a fallacy with regards to what they are producing.
So you enjoy the world due to the aesthetic is what I gather from your post. There’s more to look at in SM than there is to do; don’t just list off what’s in the world because that only proves my point. Food stands, at a maximum you click on it and it pops up a UI box. No different than buying books from the bookshelf. Festivals, well those are primarily assembled using content that was released with the base game, or other DLC. They repurposed things that were already there and stuck it in the middle of the world. How exciting. Performers and musicians, are there for you to look at. The gold people are especially pointless, as are the weirdly dressed people. Firework shows, again just there for you to look at. Your sims will watch it, but it’s nothing more than a visual effect. Sims 2, and 3 both had fireworks. Protesting is exactly just something to look at. What does protesting do? Doesn’t get rid of the horrid weirdly dressed wrestler people walking around. Doesn’t actually do anything, it’s just there.
So no, none of those world exclusive things are game changing by any means. They either use things that the game already had, or they are there to look interesting for the player. Like the world for what it is, but there’s nothing about worlds in Sims 4 that makes them any different than before. Forcing restrictions and stifling creativity in the name of being ‘unique’ is flat out sad, and again counter to what made The Sims as popular as it is.
I love how people say “City Living added nothing” while Late Night added much less.
City Living got incredible reviews.
We have 6 new semi-active career branches that add gameplay around the world.
We got festivals. We got the ability to sell items on the street. We got heaps of new gameplay items. Apartment gameplay is twice as extensive than 3.
What did Late Night add? It took base game venues and added a bartender and a bouncer, that’s it. We got a butler that’s buggier than TS4 one. It added 2 semi-active career branches instead of 6. And a celebrity system that provides almost no gameplay. And Vampires that were so pointless EA had to revisit them later and had to offer them for a second time, because the
Bands however, were a great addition.
Bridgeport should have been a Store World, and everything else should have been added into Showtime. Showtime was also a small EP, that didn’t really make sense to be on its own.
I also think Generations and Seasons should have been combined too.
It’s so weird though, because we have Packs like WA, INF, University, Supernatural etc that add SO MUCH and then packs like Generations, Seasons, Late Night, Showtime that felt so small.
Idk. To me, City Living is the biggest EP so far in terms of “things to do” however I do feel that “City Life” is way to broad and it shows.
Late Night though, just feels like a store world turned EP. And no one has ever been able to easily explain how Late Night is bigger than CL.
They just say “we can place Apartments in other worlds” like that counterpoints anything.
Or that “San Myshuno is fake” while Bridgeport is 90% fake city too. Same with Roaring Heights.
The Urbz is the closest we have to a real city
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Late Night did something for TS3 it didn't have and that was giving it community lots (open ) that it was sorely lacking and from then on we were able to build 'open lots' and hangouts with any object for Sims to use, and until then they didn't have any bars or clubs to visit, so you can't say it didn't add anything. It also added TS3's attraction system which most don't actually understand like we can TS2's attraction system. TS4 still needs one three year's later. But this game is so politically correct I doubt you would ever see a Sim attracted to another based upon eye color or hair etc. That is probably too taboo for TS4 to judge other Sims own physical attributes. ETA: Apartment buildings (you never had to use shells) are a big deal to those of us who like playing and building apartment buildings, duplexes, condos etc.
I give it another six months.
So let us return to the subject of this thread which is to guess about how many years the Sims 4 has yet before EA stops making expansions for it. People seem to just throw out random numbers. So they can say 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, 5 years, 8 years without giving any reasons at all. But why is this random guessing interesting? I don’t see it.
So let us instead use knowledge about how EA and other game companies decide such things because they don’t just throw a dice to decide how many years each of their games will live. They use reasoning instead!
How has EA’s reasoning worked until now? For the Sims 1 EA got into technical problems because TS1 hadn’t been planned to have many expansions and it was hard for EA to make them such that they were easy to install. EA never really solved that problem and we had to install all the expansions in the correct order or there were no chance that it would work. Therefore EA only let the Sims 1 live in 4 years.
But the Sims 2 and the Sims 3 didn’t have this problem. So EA let them both live in almost exactly 5 years.
But some simmers think that the Sims 4 will live longer because online MMO games like the Sims Freeplay, the SimCity BuildIt and similar games do. Again they ignore the reasoning behind this and EA’s reasons for not letting the earlier big Sims games live longer than at most 5 years. So why not? And why do the game companies let their free-to-play MMO games live longer?
We have to consider the main differences between big offline games and free-to-play MMO games to understand this:
1. The big Sims games get a lot of expansions each year and after 5 years they have so many expansions that sales numbers for new expansions usually went down. The main reason for this is that a lot of new simmers prefer to buy earlier discounted expansions instead of the new full price expansions. But another reason is that more and more simmers stop buying the expansions and maybe also stop playing the game. EA’s only way to avoid this (at least partially) would be not to discount old expansions - but then old expansions wouldn’t really sell at all. So until now EA has always decided to release a new and different basegame with a different focus after (at most) 5 years.
2. Sims Freeplay is now 6 years old and EA releases more and more expensive stuff for the game. All this stuff is sold as ingame purchases and usually only available for a couple of weeks. Then EA offers something else instead. Besides that EA earns money by showing adds from other companies in the game. This game doesn’t have big expansions like the PC game has. So it won’t ever get the same problems. New simmers only see the most recent stuff for the game anyway and if EA stopped supporting the game then the simmers would become very angry because they couldn’t play the game anymore if EA took the server down and they would lose both their ingame friends and all the stuff they had bought. Therefore they likely would switch to the next version of the game anyway. (I also play big free-to-play MMO games from other companies and in one of them the game company just a couple of months ago changed all the graphics in the game and replaced many of the objects with nicer looking objects with the mostly the same way of working. So this is the way to renew such games instead of attempting to force the fans to switch to a new game.)
Therefore I believe that EA will support the Sims Freeplay in several (and maybe many) more years unless people stop playing it and it at some point doesn’t attract new simmers anymore. The same thing will be true for the Sims Mobile and SimCity BuildIt until one of the games fail. But not for the Sims 4 because it still has all those expansions (where half of the EPs compared to the earlier games have been replaced by GPs and more SPs than for any earlier Sims game). That is why I still don’t guess blindly but just expect to EA to release a new basegame after almost exactly 5 years and announce it about 15 months before its release - just like EA now has done for both Sims 2, Sims 3 and Sims 4!
I doubt there will be any supernatural packs coming. I think they did their tribute to the supernatural already and given how long they take to release packs, they would probably never get around to it again in this century. I am not banking on farming either. Once again there have been no hints whatsoever in this direction. The only hints I have seen and I do place reliance on hints as they have played out previously, are those related to seasons and vacations. There have been no indications of interest in a University pack by the devs either.
As to Future Technology and Superstar, were there any surveys related to these areas?
The only thing we can be sure of in 2018 is that we will be doing laundry ad infinitum. Do you prefer Tide or Arm & Hammer?
They didn't remove it @catitude5. It's buried in Off Topic chat as I said it would be, just like all other Sims 5 threads do. It's basically what Erpe said - they want people focused on the current game.
> Hopfully just next year and then time to finally call it quits
no way. there's way too much unfinished business and potential for new packs for ts4 for them to stop working on it next year...... that wouldn't make much sense
Do you not use a computer when you work from home? Serious question.
Also, tell me what uses a PC in The Sims 3 that was done differently in 2 or 3. I’m thinking you’re creating a problem that doesn’t exist, honestly.
Hangouts were added with the Ambitions patch, not with Late Night.
Late Night just added NPC staff to venues we already had, that should have been in the base game.
There’s a difference between Apartment buildings that The Sims 2 had, vs the Skyscrapers The Sims 4 has.
It’s already confirmed that Sims 2 style Apartments may come later. Same way that they sort of arrived later with S3 University.
They just launched the game on PS4/Xbox and they are launching The Sims mobile in around 6 months that will use content from The Sims 4.
I’d say you’d be closer to 6 years than 6 months. EA are still exceeding sales and player stats.
This has a chance to be like Elder Scrolls where the game just doesn’t slow down, so there’s no need for a sequel.
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Your first statement is beyond incorrect. The Sims 4 adds the most stuff per pack so far.
The second statement is subjective. The Sims 2 EP’s feel like Game Pack level to me, minus Bon Voyage. Yet, people claim they are those EP’s provide the most gameplay.
Bon Voyage is the only EP that feels like a Sims 3/4 level EP. The rest just add 6 or so new gameplay items, a new venue and some extra gameplay tidbits.
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Elder Scolls is a game that just sells in several years before it becomes so outdated that Bethesda wants to release a new game. But the Sims games are mainly made for EA to be able to sell a huge number of expansions year after year until the game has so many expansions already that sales numbers for the new expansions go down and become a little unsatisfying for EA. Then EA releases a new basegame (which until now usually has happened every 5 years).
The console version of TS4 is mainly made by another company who has developed a technic to port PC games to consoles quite easily. But the Sims Freeplay and soon the Sims Mobile too are very different games that will live as free games almost forever but let EA earn a lot of money from adds and from offering stuff that mostly only will be available for a short time. So those games live their own lives and haven’t really anything to do with the PC game.
Oh shush up. I have heard a lot of ridiculous things from you but do not even begin to create such a lie.
The Sims 4 doesn’t get that much *new* stuff per pack. Ya you conveniently skipped over the word new and completely missed the point. Additionally you clearly don’t understand what a ‘big game feature’ is or you wouldn’t be playing the subjective card - which BTW is only played when you want to disagree with something but have no actual argument to disagree. Your argument is weak, and frankly makes no sense. The Sims 4 doesn’t get very many big game features. Refute that without obnoxiously changing the topic, or don’t mention it at all.
The Sims 4 gets tiny packs, most of them are stuff packs. Expansions add LESS than before, game packs add LESS than expansions, and stuff packs don’t add any big game features at all, and usually a total of 2 *new* things at most. Seriously if you have nothing but nonsense to type back to me then skip it because it’s old, and annoying.
Jack , I complained about the over use of the pc in TS4 (for every thing) to SimGuruLyndsay (before she replaced Rachel) a long time ago. It is a problem to many of us who want to see part time jobs not revolve around the pc. In TS3 you dress Sims and give them remakes without ever toughing a pc. You can dig in the junk yard and create and build things to sell without ever touching a pc. You can run a daycare and never touch a pc. There are all sorts of things self employed carers in TS3 you go to City Hall and register as self employed. As a matter of fact the Detective career never touches a pc. Or the ghost hunting one. Military or some other jobs that aren't active never touch the pc. There are so many jobs in TS3 I can't even remember or list them all, and most never have to touch a pc. I'm sure others who are currently playing can tell me and you how many never touch a pc. Whether they are standard or hands on and it makes TS4 look like it can't think of anything outside of using a pc.
On the other point I want to go over, where is the confirmation TS2 style apartments are coming later? Who said that (official) and where? I still think TS4 ends sometime in 2018. ETA: The Sims Mobile is available now for the United States and to best of my memory that is what some were waiting on in that section. Check your emails.
P.s., sorry, the question: I think Sims 4 will at least run another four, five years. It’s so easy for them to just keep adding small things to this game and people will buy anyway. Why bother by putting money and effort in developing an entirely new game. I just don’t see it happening any time soon.
Why didn’t EA learn a lesson already after TS1 when the release of TS2 caused half of the simmers to just continue to play TS1 and never buy TS2? (The sales numbers for TS2 were only a little more than the half of the sales numbers for TS2.)
When the same thing happened once more when EA released TS3 (even though the lower sales numbers from TS2 just were repeated for TS3) why didn’t EA still learn the lesson but after only 5 years released TS4 anyway - and with less content than the previous game??
Is it because EA’s top have huge salaries of many million dollars each year because EA earn so very much money?? Or are EA’s top really considering things anyway and thus being worth all those millions of dollars??
I am still sure that EA’s headhunted top of top managers from other huge companies aren’t at all as incompetent as simmers in this forum always think that they are because then EA never would have become such a huge company and earned all that money! So why did those top managers always release a new basegame after at most 5 years even though they knew how much the simmers in the forums always hated it?!???
My own answer is that EA of course can’t accept only to sell the game to the fewer and fewer simmers who played all the previous games too! But if EA just went on and on and released hundreds of expansions for the same game in 10 to 15 years then new simmers would give up and never plan to buy both the basegame and all those expansions too! So only the few remaining veteran simmers would still buy the new expansions when they were released. Therefore sales numbers would just go down and down and EA would therefore have to stop making any more expansions a long time before EA wanted to stop.
So EA has investigated the market to find the best lifetime for each Sims game if EA wants a balance between the extra costs to release a new basegame and to avoid that sales numbers for the new expansions become too low. The result clearly has been until now that the best lifetime for a Sims basegame is 5 years. So why should EA suddenly now ignore all the earlier market investigations and considerations and let TS4 continue to get about 7 paid expansions (SPs + GPs + EPs) in many more years and accept that more and more simmers stop playing the game and less and less new simmers start playing it because they won’t let themselves feel that they have to buy that many earlier released expansions too to catch up with the current game?
I don’t see where the ‘lower sales numbers’ are coming from either - both games respectively broke records for fastest selling PC game at their time of release. That generally means that they sold *more* games at a faster rate than the predecessor. The only main title game to not break that record is The Sims 4 so your analysis is a little off.
I’m under the impression so far they’ve always wanted to expand the game, renew it, reinvent it. To me Sims 4 feels different. There is nothing actually totally new in there, it just seems to be more simple. And they are adding stuff to it much slower than they ever did before, which indicates they’re not in a hurry (like they clearly were with Sims 3). In fact they’ve stated that the development of Sims 4 is totally different compared to the predecessors, suggesting the game in fact would last much longer than those four/five years.
I think it’s much more effective for them now to really milk Sims 4. To be honest I even wonder if we’ll ever see a Sims 5.
I think what people are most scared of is because graphics are one the strongest point of the Sims 4, a newer Sims game will overshadow it because with technology usually comes better graphics. Plus I'm pretty sure it will have a better world system too. Story progression, well that is something Maxis still has to improve upon. I really would be interested to see height adjusters and gradual aging progressing with the series next. I also think there is potential for side game progression too. Like although I don't want to see VR for the PC series, I could see it working really well with a Sims Castaway sequel that will be more interactive with building things and survival. I guess I'm hopeful for the future of the Sims and its advancements. I do have a feeling if an iteration does extend too much, that it makes it easier for competition to sweep in and take a lot of customers away. So that's the thing waiting too long can cause a shift in the market too. If a company doesn't provide a decent new product we see things like what City Skylines did with SimCity. City Skylines is years ahead of technology now than SimCity and a much bigger world system.