I don't think we will be able to swim in any body of water in the future either.. they might make some accessible, but even then I think it would be less problematic if they just added areas where it can be done. It doesn't bother me personally. I do want my sims to eventually swim in a beach area for sure though. This thread has become about open vs closed (loading in) areas and I'm not sure that was the OP's intent? I could talk a lot about how it's really easy on most non residential lots to just build on the fly and bring in desired game play or the crazy amount of portable stuff that is now in game... without going into managed worlds at all and therefore not disrupting your game play much at all. The topic however is basically what can you do with the view. What good is it? My answer is enjoy it, the feeling it gives, the art style and the stability it offers. If you can't do that on some level then this very likely isn't the game for you. It's not like it's likely to change markedly in the future in this iteration.
Yes and I remember when everyone thought Sims 4 was so much better then Sims 3. It does work better I will give it that as a whole but the reason is because they didn't give us much to play with. Not much to upset the apple cart.
I agree with you.
I think sims look better in 4 but being better than 3 as a game. if it was than why as it not got all the missing features in it.
if i want full life stages
story progression
open world
proper and large worlds
create a pattern
create a world
terrain,water tools shopping
full NPC's
I have to go back to the other games as 4 did not provide them all!
of course it runs better. its got not even half of what 2 and 3 had:#
Shopping already exist you just have to build them. I for one prefer to build shops where my sims can go buy furniture instead of using build mode.
i am talking about proper shopping!
grocery
proper clothing shoping
books
movies
games
magizine
The landscape isn't the focus of the game though.....
We will get to swim in the ocean, and build sandcastles later. Not right now though...
I'd rather have a "fake" landscape, than something that is expansive, dull, and lag-inducing.
The way that ponds, lakes, and oceans are set up in TS4, it would require a vast redesign of each to allow for swimming and other interactions. The developers have said they are not able to go back to existing worlds and allow for major adjustments to be made, so it looks as if this won't be happening for TS4. It is a shame, because a solid base game should be able to be expanded in almost any regard possible.
I don't think the lag from TS3 is caused from the large worlds at all. It is just all around bad optimization of the content the game has. If I were to play vanilla TS3's Sunset Valley, I would experience the smoothest gameplay. It is when I install all packs that I start seeing my FPS drop.
Having the developers dictate how each world is to look is boring to me. The Sims is often called a doll house in the way you are given space and can do absolutely anything with it. The Sims 3 completely transformed that, making the series pretty much a doll world. The Sims should always be about the Sims themselves. However, it should never be forgotten that their world/environment is a huge extension of just how far we can really express our Sims’ personalities, and express ourselves through customization.
I assume by lag people mean stuttering and freezing (because lag must be CC related, it’s as non present in my Sims 3 game as error code 12, I simply don’t recognize it and I have quite a few hours in that game) and stuttering and freezing often comes down to routing errors. I suppose that how larger the world, how more probable it is to make errors. In that respect there might be a connection. An Overwatch/Errortrap (NRaas) system would take care of that. Nobody claims creating the game with an open world is easy by the way (and I think it also may be not comparable to open worlds in other, more scripted games).
I agree Sims should always be about sims in a way, but for me that implies “playing with (human) life in the broadest way thinkable”. An evolving world plays an essential part in that. More so than random emotions. On topic: I want my sims to live in that world, not just look at it.
(if I sound counterposing, I’m not, just elaborating, I basically agree with you)
The landscape isn't the focus of the game though.....
We will get to swim in the ocean, and build sandcastles later. Not right now though...
I'd rather have a "fake" landscape, than something that is expansive, dull, and lag-inducing.
The way that ponds, lakes, and oceans are set up in TS4, it would require a vast redesign of each to allow for swimming and other interactions. The developers have said they are not able to go back to existing worlds and allow for major adjustments to be made, so it looks as if this won't be happening for TS4. It is a shame, because a solid base game should be able to be expanded in almost any regard possible.
I don't think the lag from TS3 is caused from the large worlds at all. It is just all around bad optimization of the content the game has. If I were to play vanilla TS3's Sunset Valley, I would experience the smoothest gameplay. It is when I install all packs that I start seeing my FPS drop.
Having the developers dictate how each world is to look is boring to me. The Sims is often called a doll house in the way you are given space and can do absolutely anything with it. The Sims 3 completely transformed that, making the series pretty much a doll world. The Sims should always be about the Sims themselves. However, it should never be forgotten that their world/environment is a huge extension of just how far we can really express our Sims’ personalities, and express ourselves through customization.
I assume by lag people mean stuttering and freezing (because lag must be CC related, it’s as non present in my Sims 3 game as error code 12, I simply don’t recognize it and I have quite a few hours in that game) and stuttering and freezing often comes down to routing errors. I suppose that how larger the world, how more probable it is to make errors. In that respect there might be a connection. An Overwatch/Errortrap (NRaas) system would take care of that. Nobody claims creating the game with an open world is easy by the way (and I think it also may be not comparable to open worlds in other, more scripted games).
I agree Sims should always be about sims in a way, but for me that implies “playing with (human) life in the broadest way thinkable”. An evolving world plays an essential part in that. More so than random emotions. On topic: I want my sims to live in that world, not just look at it.
(if I sound counterposing, I’m not, just elaborating, I basically agree with you)
Yeah, my lag in The Sims 3 isn't so bad, especially when I found out how to allow the game to use more ram than the default 2GB. It just really feels they dropped the ball in ensuring the game would be optimized for a wide variety of PC specs, all of its content, routing issues, etc.
I am just not a fan of TS4's repeated approach of leaving things out rather than re-introduce them better. We've seen it, even with routing issues. Their solution was to just have Sims clip right through each other.
I agree with you entirely there. Even in terms of emotions, our Sim's environment plays a crucial role, and shouldn't be neglected.
I always had a computer with good specifications, but I can not say that The Sims 3 really worked well. Fortunately, I almost never had game errors like "12/16 error" or problems like "the game stopped working", but the lags were still there somehow, although they might not be as intense as those suffered by other players . The problem is that with each new expansion released, and a new update, I felt that the performance in the game was degrading in a very visible way.
Honestly, I came to feel that the performance of the game began to change for the worse from the Showtime expansion, which was developed by another studio, and this was intensifying. Maybe the differences in how to program the game between different studios compromised beyond the normal performance of The Sims 3, and this is something that was already mentioned indirectly by SimGuruGraham once when he mentioned that it was much better the game to be developed in a single studio, mainly because of the code.
For me, it is undeniable that The Sims 3 has major performance issues, and this is not due to the open world or features of the game, but rather the way the game has been programmed over time.
The Sims 4 already has 4 expansions, 6 game packs and more than 10 stuff packs, and to this day I do not know what it's like to have lags in the game. The game is simply fluid, even more so than The Sims 2 in terms of performance. I do not use ccs, just mods. more than 40 mods, and yet, the performance is very good.
The fact that the game is being developed by only one studio has some advantages, but if there was another studio working, at least we would have more than one expansion a year, even when there were more complex expansions being made, such as Pets or Seasons.
TS3 did have optimization issues. Nevertheless, I don't think that the game had issues that couldn't have been greatly alleviated by a 64-bit .exe As the game became more and more stressed by the weight of its own content, that one update could have spared players a lot of save errors and crashes to desktop due to running out of RAM.
Other than that, TS3 continues to be a technological marvel that was well ahead of its time. However, instead of trying to fix it, EA left that up to the community and kept cranking out the expansions.
If anyone believes that the same thing won't eventually happen to TS4, I've got a bridge to sell you, because it's already happening. TS4 may run more smoothly. However, it has bone deep issues that the team continues to ignore. The number one issue being that the TS4 engine doesn't seem to have the muscle to support a believable AI, realistic seasonal effects, or customization of its worlds in order to keep the game feeling fresh. That's always going to be the bottleneck.
There's a reason that, to this day, with all their inherent problems, people are still playing TS2 and TS3. A large part of that is the believable AI, immersive seasonal effects, and the ability to continuously change the Sims' environments, year after year. Decades later, as long as there's still a version of Windows that can run them, players can still crank up a new save and experience something totally new.
That is a quality that TS4 will never have.
Once EA shuts down TS4 and moves onto the next new thing, once EA is no longer creating new worlds, all players will be left with will be the same stale handful -- unchanging, until kingdom come. For that reason alone, I'll go out on a limb and say that TS4 will never have the staying-power or longevity of the other games. It will eventually be thought of as the outlier that was intentionally handicapped.
Comments
i am talking about proper shopping!
grocery
proper clothing shoping
books
movies
games
magizine
ect ect
I agree Sims should always be about sims in a way, but for me that implies “playing with (human) life in the broadest way thinkable”. An evolving world plays an essential part in that. More so than random emotions. On topic: I want my sims to live in that world, not just look at it.
(if I sound counterposing, I’m not, just elaborating, I basically agree with you)
Yeah, my lag in The Sims 3 isn't so bad, especially when I found out how to allow the game to use more ram than the default 2GB. It just really feels they dropped the ball in ensuring the game would be optimized for a wide variety of PC specs, all of its content, routing issues, etc.
I am just not a fan of TS4's repeated approach of leaving things out rather than re-introduce them better. We've seen it, even with routing issues. Their solution was to just have Sims clip right through each other.
I agree with you entirely there. Even in terms of emotions, our Sim's environment plays a crucial role, and shouldn't be neglected.
Honestly, I came to feel that the performance of the game began to change for the worse from the Showtime expansion, which was developed by another studio, and this was intensifying. Maybe the differences in how to program the game between different studios compromised beyond the normal performance of The Sims 3, and this is something that was already mentioned indirectly by SimGuruGraham once when he mentioned that it was much better the game to be developed in a single studio, mainly because of the code.
For me, it is undeniable that The Sims 3 has major performance issues, and this is not due to the open world or features of the game, but rather the way the game has been programmed over time.
The Sims 4 already has 4 expansions, 6 game packs and more than 10 stuff packs, and to this day I do not know what it's like to have lags in the game. The game is simply fluid, even more so than The Sims 2 in terms of performance. I do not use ccs, just mods. more than 40 mods, and yet, the performance is very good.
The fact that the game is being developed by only one studio has some advantages, but if there was another studio working, at least we would have more than one expansion a year, even when there were more complex expansions being made, such as Pets or Seasons.
Other than that, TS3 continues to be a technological marvel that was well ahead of its time. However, instead of trying to fix it, EA left that up to the community and kept cranking out the expansions.
If anyone believes that the same thing won't eventually happen to TS4, I've got a bridge to sell you, because it's already happening. TS4 may run more smoothly. However, it has bone deep issues that the team continues to ignore. The number one issue being that the TS4 engine doesn't seem to have the muscle to support a believable AI, realistic seasonal effects, or customization of its worlds in order to keep the game feeling fresh. That's always going to be the bottleneck.
There's a reason that, to this day, with all their inherent problems, people are still playing TS2 and TS3. A large part of that is the believable AI, immersive seasonal effects, and the ability to continuously change the Sims' environments, year after year. Decades later, as long as there's still a version of Windows that can run them, players can still crank up a new save and experience something totally new.
That is a quality that TS4 will never have.
Once EA shuts down TS4 and moves onto the next new thing, once EA is no longer creating new worlds, all players will be left with will be the same stale handful -- unchanging, until kingdom come. For that reason alone, I'll go out on a limb and say that TS4 will never have the staying-power or longevity of the other games. It will eventually be thought of as the outlier that was intentionally handicapped.