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What do players mean by "gameplay"?
Lavenderlights
Posts: 76 Member
This is one of the most common terms I see around on this forum, and it also seems to be one of the main complaints consistently made against ts4. However, I can't quite wrap my head around that complaint mainly because I'm not very sure as to what the exact definition of "gameplay" is. Will you guys explain it to me? Does it mean something along the lines of replayability, interactivity etc.? Or is it something else entirely? Since I often see ts2 as the most lauded in terms of "gameplay", maybe use some solid examples from it? I'm really curious as to what it means as the term seems very vague to me.
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If I tried to make that scene in the sims 4, the two sims would have the exact same reaction and for me it’s boring. There’s no game play in that. Half the fun of the sims is watching how they react to things and when in the sims 4 the personalities are so dull and bland? It doesn’t make for interesting game play.
Another major factor that makes good game play for me is depth and not surprisingly an area where the sims 4 falls on its backside. Depth is a staple for me for all the games I play not just the sims. I have to care about my characters (in this case the sims) and the more depth they have the better. Again case in point the sims 2. While I can decide their hair colour, body shape and other physical features the game assigns them their own “natural talent” they decide if they have chemistry and attraction for the Sim I make for them or if they have the hots for the guy/gal next door and while I can steer them away from something I don’t want them doing like maybe harbouring a crush on the guy next door when I really don’t want them too with the sims 2 sims if there’s no attraction there your sims will be quick to show it. My sims 2 sims have memories and I love that a few weeks after a burglar break in they will still be thinking about it, sometimes still getting upset at the memory. I love that relationships aren’t equal and that unrequited love is a thing. That never happens in the sims 4, if your sim has a crush on another sim and they have a relationship bar at 50 the other sims is identical. Dull and unrealistic. Not to mention a huge game play killer for me anyway. Family game play is still the best in that game as sims react appropriately to family events (like cheating), the relationships seem the most natural and believable and they act like a family. None of it’s fake or for show.
With depth comes consequences and again this for me is probably the sims 4 weakest area because the game warns you of impending doom (assuming you make it that far) I don’t want my Elder sims to get a warning about too much woohoo too quickly or the cowplant too. always give a second chance by spitting the sim out the first time. I’m not the type to go about killing my sims on purpose but if they are doing something dangerous like going into a tomb or repairing an electronic item whilst standing in a puddle of water knowing that there’s a chance of something going wrong makes for some interesting game play. I care if my sim is starving whilst deep in a tomb, i care if it’s day 5 of my apocalypse challenge and my sims are starving and the fridge is facing the wall and can’t be turned round till the new day. I want my sims to survive and I’ve played enough of the previous games to know the game might decide to throw a cat among the pigeons.
With the sims 4? What danger? What consequence? My Apocalypse challenge sims are happy. All the darn time. I can’t play that challenge in 4 because of that. I love it in the sims 2 but there’s no gameplay in it in 4. All my sims have the same reactions to “bad events”and if they don’t care I have a hard time caring. The sims 4 has a lot of repeated socials and socials that don’t do much or mean anything. Best example is “show photos”exact same animation as “show off selfie”that teens can do. There is a heck of amount of grinding in the sims 4 to me at the expense of game play. Not to mention a lot of repetition, if I had a dollar for every time I have to click away “look for vampire info” I would be a very rich woman. In th previous sims game occasionally my sims get a wish for perhaps a certain career or to try a certain dish if I ignore it and click the wish away the game won’t push it and will most likely never bring it up again. The sims 4is stuck on a loop for all sims to have the same whims irrespective of traits (and sometimes age; children getting whims to buy dishwashers, adult sims with the hates children traits getting whims to buy puppet theatres?! ) it all feeds into game play or lack of. Once you have seen one sim do an interaction there’s not much incentive to watch their sibling do it. Same behaviour, different sim.
Well said.
Yep This^^
I like Sid Meier’s definition of gameplay which is that it is ”a series of interesting choices”. To me it is the game apart from sound, graphics and dead stuff that hasn’t any interactions. It is the way I play the game and not at all the things that I only look at or hear when I play the game. I therefore also don’t include autonomous behavior of my sims in the gameplay and therefore agree with people who say that TS4 is lacking in gameplay.
Emotion: the involuntary impulse, originated in response to the stimulus of the video game and induces feelings or unleashes automatic reactions and conducts. The use of emotions in video games help to obtain a best player experience and leads players to different emotional states: happiness, fear, intrigue, curiosity, sadness… using the game challenges, story, aesthetic appearance or the music compositions that are capable of move, affect, to make to smile or to cry to the player. A big success of video games is that they can provoke to players different feelings in a short space of time, some of them hardly obtainable daily in the real world.
A Sim who had divorced my Sim was a real cad. (I suppose I made him that way but he did a lot of stuff on his own). He broke off the marriage but it was he who was upset. True, this could just be random the game picked him to be the one to have a sad memory about the break up but TS2 players don't believe that since there is an attraction system, it is highly likely he was upset by it.
Moving his ex wife, to a different house and her first night out ( a match made by the 🐸🐸🐸🐸 which is always a good one) after she moved out. Sims don't do walk bys late at night like they can randomly do in TS4. It's not how TS2 works. Walk bys in TS2 are at particular times and one or two and hours apart, and never late at night.
I allowed this Sim to kiss her date good night on the porch. Who strolled by at that moment? Her ex husband. He stood there and watched them, and he wasn't very happy about it. My Sim finally went to the sidewalk to speak to him but it was too late, it was time for him to go on his way since all Sims will leave a property around 2:00 A.M. in TS2.
I understand it's mechanics, but him showing up (had not walked by any other night) on the very night, her first night she decides to have a real date with someone new, tells me, TS2 is a deeper game when it's not TS2's normal generator of Sims situations for walk bys and or at the time they do walk by. And it was more than just walking by to read a paper, it was to see what she was doing.
If you never make Sims unhappy in the series you will never see how intricate they are built. But that is a mild example of why TS2 is lauded above the rest. It took the player's story in a new and different direction to think the ex actually still cared enough to come by her new home at the right time to see her moving on with her life. Projecting my own thoughts onto the game? yes, but the gameplay is there to believe it, and no happy, happy, big grin on faces.
ETA: Able to suspend my disbelief. It matters.
I'm enjoying ts4 as of now, but I wish it had AI like that. The storytelling it could've provided, combined with the expressive animations, would've been amazing. *sigh*
Yes, it is a broad term, but it applies to what is available in the game itself. What you do with it, is strictly up to you.
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This is contrary to some of the developers' belief that a simple new object with a brand new animation tied to it is, somehow, gameplay.
Also emotions IMO don't add much in terms of gameplay either. Certain things give the sims a moodlet (which doesn't do anything gameplay wise), which then dictate what emotion the sim is experiencing. All that does is we are told by the UI that the sim is happy, fine, flirty etc. Apart from that a few specific interactions become available and a whim or two but that is it. We are just told what the sim is feeling (a pop up saying they're happy is not gameplay). Does not affect gameplay in any other way whatsoever. The sim doesn't actually behave like their emotion. It's pretty disappointing considering they made such a big deal about emotions in their marketing, claiming they were the big, new gameplay feature that was so big they had to sacrifice toddlers, pools, ghosts, open world etc.
Totally agree.
Look back at Sims 1. The two main goals of that game were to get married and have kids or max your career. In both cases you have a long-term goal (marriage, a promotion), they're something to work towards (flirt and socialize with your spouse of choice, improve your skills), you get a reward for the milestone (another sim to play, new skills or paycheck that you benefit from daily), and something that distinguishes the performance of various Sims from one another. (This wasn't Sims 1's strongsuit, but their personalities helped set them apart from each other while some of the expansion jobs or tasks did set them apart, for example being a celebrity meant other Sims would react differently to you)
Now look at Sims 4. Let's grab the last three expansion packs as examples. All three of them had a skill that existed "just because" and had weak to no rewards whatsoever. Get Together had DJing, which was just a copy-pasting instrument skill with no unique reward and no motivation to actually bother with it. The only reason to bother with it is because if you want your Sims to be a DJ, but actually being a DJ doesn't make him unique or give him unique abilities or qualifications. The skill just exists as something to do if you're exceedingly bored and that's it.
City Living did the exact same. Singing skill again had zero long-term goal and again it was a copy-pasted instrument skill that was more or less functionally identical to the other four. Singing afforded you no special qualifications for jobs and no special abilities. It was just a copy-pasted skill with no goal or purpose. Again your only motivation for using it is if you want your sim to be a singer, but what you earn is little more than an absolutely meaningless title of "singer" with no practical effects on how they perform in day-to-day life. Yes, some animations and audio files improve, but this achieves absolutely nothing in terms of the game.
Pets? The Pet training skill. What does this do? Again it's just....there. You don't get anything for it, there's no special benefits for mastering it. It's just there and the best-case-scenario is shinier interactions. I don't own the pack, but it seems to me that pets themselves - in their entirety - are completely devoid of goals or gameplay. They just sit there, poop on your couch and the new "gameplay" is you get to clean it up. Wow, real exciting.
Let's look at vampires as a comparison, since it's probably the most praised pack in terms of gameplay. Does it have a long-term goal that changes how you play? I don't know about super long term, but the aspirations do help personify your vampires a bit and give them a personalized goal, not to mention maxing your vampire powers is of course a standard goal. Does it have something to do and to work for? Yes, again there's three aspirations and tons of powers to work towards. Does it have a reward at the end or at milestones? Yep, the vampire powers themselves. Does it have something that distinguishes the performance of various different Sims from one another? Yep, the vampire powers and even the vampire lifestate itself do this.
Vampires is so praised because it gives Sims more personality and variety than the base game traits do. That's ridiculous, and it speaks volumes about how bad the traits are. What's more, it attaches this personality and variety towards something to work towards and a goal. You don't just get the personality of being an all-powerful vampire handed to you on a silver platter; you have to earn it. This keeps you busy and keeps you invested in your game, and this is a good thing.
Unfortunately, Sims 4 repeatedly lacks this. It spams stuff packs at us with absolutely zero gameplay involved, it throws out lackluster expansion packs that - until now - have only offered skills that seem to copy-paste the designs of other pre-existing skills (baking copying cooking, DJ and singing copying any other instrument, Vet copying the Scientist and Doctor careers rather than another skill) and only one seemed to have any semblance of goal-orientated gameplay. (Get to Work) Even the Game Packs often get overpraised, because thusfar only Vampires and Parenthood have succeeded in providing gameplay. (Spa Day had practically zero, Outdoor Retreat's was waaaaaaaay too niche, barebones and repetitive to be interesting, Dine Out completely lacked meaningful rewards for any work provided)
That's why you hear outcries for gameplay. Because astonishingly, the Sims team seems to have forgotten that games require gameplay.
I agree with this in parts and I don't disagree I think I just view it slightly differently. To the me sims 1 is a true sandbox. I don't have any goals forced on me set by the game and the game is what I make it. There's no end. It's only limited by my imagination.
The sims 4 on the other hand is not a sand box. The player has goals in everything. Life time aspiration? Here's a checklist of mini goals to achieve it. Throw a party? Here's another checklist if you want the reward. Ditto dates. Join an active career and its checklist city. Check you can't even build a community lot without completing some darn check list.
For the smaller skills like dog training I agree there's not much point in training them. House training your dog and they will still wait at the back door any way instead of going out on their own.
Singing skills just gets you more genres of songs to sing. I suppose the reward is and I use that term loosely is you get to see your sims murder more songs. Ditto instruments the reward is they learn more songs. You want your mean sim to become a mischievous sim you need to spam the mischief interactions hard to get to the more "interesting ones" ((What is the point of the mischief skill? Surely that's the one skill that shouldn't be hidden behind an unlock chart?)
I've realised that so much of the game play in this game is grinding as means to an end. I don't get this vibe or feeling or need when I play the previous games. Sure my sims skill up be it naturally or me telling them too but it feels natural. I don't fee like I'm spamming my game to get a desired result. Whereas with Parenthood I spam I interactions to achieve a certain character value because certain ones don't seem to move on their own. Particularly if you want a negative character value. My slob sims are all well mannered for example with no input from me.
I want game play. I want my sims to care about what's going on in their lives. I want my sim to care that her kid is flunking school but she doesn't. I want my sim to want to say max a certain skill but I never see that. There's no reward in pushing them a certain way if the sim themselves doesn't care one way or another. And this for me is a problem if the game is so goal centred which it seems to be why don't the sims care? I have a sim who has the romance aspiration? She's never made it past the first checklist of having x kisses with so many sims. Does she care? Nope. My sims 2 romance sim has been whining for weeks because I made him get married and he hasn't seen any of his girlfriends or had any new romantic interactions. Keeping him happy is a challenge.
I don't mind goals if they make sense and are not repetitive. I don't play as vampires although I own the pack so I can't comment. But generally speaking I wish EA would stop forcing goals in the game. For something like vampires I can see how that would be useful but to me goals aren't game play. I wouldn't mind but none of the goals in game the sims care about.
So even doing those DJing and Singing activities didn't give you tips and/or gradually upped payout as their skill increased? Hmh I can really see how that could make the game repetitive and less invested in doing such recreational stuff. It's unfortunate. If only it were like showtime, where you would get a phone call for an opportunity when at a certain skill level a bar owner for example would invite to do a gig there for the pleasure of customers/audience and in return receive cash a reward after turning and mixing the tables.
I think that you hit the nail on the head.
Just try to compare Sims 1, Sims 2, Sims 3 and Sims 4 with eachother and this should be very clear for everybody. At least it is for me!
So don’t encourage the developers to copy anything from a previous game because then they will alas just have to ignore you.
But apparently "click animation selection from menu around Sim, then watch Sim play out said animation" that has existed since Sims 1 is a big thing for others, and it's only real gameplay if you click it twice, or maybe three times.
Sims 1 was excrutiating to play out legit without money cheats and/or need-filling modded objects. Years later, Sims 4 actually gives you time to do things outside of (or instead of) a job. But regardless, I use 'live mode' for the same thing. Build testing and how Sims use it. The only thing I miss about older gameplay is having Sims approve of or hate various things around homes when they move in.