This game has been out for 8 years, and we still don't have a proper system of toggles for Occults and generated sims.
In case you don't know, Toggles are On/Off switches for different features in the game. There are some available in Settings.
The Sims 3 had toggle switches for all Occults in the game, so you could turn them ON or OFF whenever you wanted.
There should be toggles for the spawning of all Occults (vampires, werewolves, mermaids, spellcasters, etc.), celebrities, and npc characters.
Do you like the BB and CAS of Werewolves, but don't like werewolves? Problem solved, you can turn Werewolves Off with a Toggle.
I constantly see complaints about "nerfing" on the forums, and this would help with that. If we had toggles to turn off features/occults, the developers could go all out on specific features, such as alien abductions and vampire break-ins. If the people who bought the pack don't like these features, they can turn them off.
EA would also make more money if the had Toggles to turn On/Off occults. Customers would feel more comfortable buying Occult packs for the CAS and BB, knowing that they can easily turn off the occult if they don't like it.
So, please Sims team, bring back Occult Toggle switches!
I completely agree with this, and I would go further and say let us toggle it on and off per save. Maybe I want to play with occults in one save, but in another I want to keep it entirely realistic and go from one to the other depending on my mood?
In general, I'm just for anything that puts the power in my hands instead of developers. I want to play my game my way, someone else has completely other preferences. Let us decide how we want the game to be as far as possible without crashing the game.
Moreover, I advise that the cart button must be destroyed!
I don’t know why, but for some reason Maxis prefers to use in game triggers instead of toggles with occults in Sims 4. Ages ago, one of the developers apparently said that toggles contributed to the instability of TS3. If that’s true, I can understand the hesitation, but they definitely used toggles with Neighborhood Stories and a few other things. If they could figure out a way to do it without introducing bugs, I’d be all for it. It would certainly cut down on some of the agitation when a new occult is added, and allow more player control of the type of occult, and maybe even intensity of involvement in any game. Then, maybe those who like them can have them integrated more fully into their games, again.
Until then, if we want the packs for other reasons, we have to avoid in game triggers.
Yup I'm tired of occults getting nerfed because people buy the packs for CAS & Build/Buy ten whine about occults in their game. Just let the whiners turn them off in the settings!
Yes, please let us have toggles for as many things as toggles make sense for. Occult life states is among the most excellent candidates for such options, though I'd prefer it to be per individual occult type and on a save-by-save basis rather than a completely one-click global thing. I enjoy occult game play in general, but I don't enjoy some of the occult life states (aliens very literally make my head/ears hurt with their voices). Also, some of my saves are intended to feature only one or two certain occults (or none), and I'd like to be able to set that up properly. It would be awesome to be able to customize my saves for the way I prefer to play them.
FYI: Just because you can see my signature, don't assume that I can see yours.
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I think this is just one of those things people have to deal with if they want the B/B stuff. The gurus already confirmed they can't do many toggles for the sake of stability. They do what they can. And people never use the in game toggles.
Occults in ts4 is not very invasive and do a good job of staying hidden. You'll never even catch a spell caster doing magic.
I'd love it if they could do it so the stuff I enjoy could stop getting nerfed. But ts4 runs smoothly and I wouldn't want to sacrifice stability for it if it were to cause problems.
As much as I enjoy the Sims 4 occults, I fully agree with this. I want to play *my* way, including in parts of the game that are related to occults. I'd like the option of playing the Scientist career without generating Aliens. I'd like to not need a mod to live in Strangerville without the story (which I really enjoyed but want to replay when I feel like it).
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If they cant make a toggle, then why not take advantage of lot traits/ challenges? We already have some vampire related lot traits and the haunted house lot, so why stop there? Make a lot challenge for increased vampire/werewolf attacks? A lot trait that spawns mostly spellcasters and magical shenanigans? Or maybe a lot trait that doesnt allow for any occult to show up? It may not fully do away with occults in the game, if someone doesnt want them, but at least it gives that player a bit more control over who they want showing up at their front door and doesnt disregard the player that does want occults in the game.
I can't agree to toggles for occults. There aren't that many compared to TS3. I prefer player triggered gameplay. Don't want vamps, don't study vampire lore. Don't open the door. Don't visit one in Forgotten Hollow. Don't want aliens don't make one in CAS. Don't do a lot of things at the science lab that triggers the player finding out just who was an alien which in turn triggered them in the world. Don't marry one, don't date one.
To be bluntly honest there are really only two occults in TS4 that are basically flushed out and they are the vamps and the aliens. There are all sorts of Don'ts to keep them out of the game without any toggles. Whatever was added like mermaids and plantsims or zombies was a joke.
People are only complaining about vampires and aliens. When it is their gameplay that triggers 99% of it. Zombies are in one world...there is a mod to stop them from being zombies isn't there?
Who here is complaining about mermaids, ghosts and or plantsims? I haven't seen any complaints in the past few years about those overtaking any lot and or world other than the specific nights at a bar that generates too many ghosts in the game filling the jobs.
So technically this thread is about vampires and aliens when players trigger this themselves. Why have toggles when all you have to do is avoid particular triggers. TS1 and TS2 remain in the top tier of great gameplay because of triggers...not toggles.
"Games Are Not The Place To Tell Stories, Games Are Meant To Let People Tell Their Own Stories"...Will Wright.
I can't agree to toggles for occults. There aren't that many compared to TS3. I prefer player triggered gameplay. Don't want vamps, don't study vampire lore. Don't open the door. Don't visit one in Forgotten Hollow. Don't want aliens don't make one in CAS. Don't do a lot of things at the science lab that triggers the player finding out just who was an alien which in turn triggered them in the world. Don't marry one, don't date one.
To be bluntly honest there are really only two occults in TS4 that are basically flushed out and they are the vamps and the aliens. There are all sorts of Don'ts to keep them out of the game without any toggles. Whatever was added like mermaids and plantsims or zombies was a joke.
People are only complaining about vampires and aliens. When it is their gameplay that triggers 99% of it. Zombies are in one world...there is a mod to stop them from being zombies isn't there?
Who here is complaining about mermaids, ghosts and or plantsims? I haven't seen any complaints in the past few years about those overtaking any lot and or world other than the specific nights at a bar that generates too many ghosts in the game filling the jobs.
So technically this thread is about vampires and aliens when players trigger this themselves. Why have toggles when all you have to do is avoid particular triggers. TS1 and TS2 remain in the top tier of great gameplay because of triggers...not toggles.
I agree that I prefer triggers and in game gameplay. It's more engaging and totally optional. But people got my precious celebrities nerfed because they didn't want to go out disguise or not go as high as a 5 star celebrity 😭😭😭 the way sims use to act over my famous sim is something I still miss. It felt like ACTUALLY being famous and that's exactly how people act over famous celebrities in real life. If anything it was more realistic.
And every time my celebrity goes out barely noticed I'm reminded of what was nerfed 😩😩😩
I wasn't on the forum at the time and thought my game was broken. I even deleted all of my sims fame and started over (multiple times) to make it work again. Later when I joined Twitter and came here I found out it was nerfed because people didn't want to either use the triggers or opt out of fame 🙄
We don't have have zombies but possessed sims in strangerville that never leave that world. They can be cured or totally deleted. Every occult can actually be totally deleted. There are just so many work arounds that doesn't include toggles.
Only vampires I see in my game are the ones I personally put there, and even then they don't use any powers except speed run or fly like a bat (which is a bug actually. They keep defaulting to fly like a bat)
You will NEVER catch a spell caster doing magic unless you go to the magic realm. And you can delete them as well.
In all honesty, I actually prefer in game triggers, as well. My problem is that the folks who ignore said triggers are getting our games nerfed. They want toggles. If toggles for them will keep gameplay available for the rest of us, then I’m pro-toggles. Otherwise, the devs really need to toughen up and stand by the game as they designed it.
I think this is just one of those things people have to deal with if they want the B/B stuff. The gurus already confirmed they can't do many toggles for the sake of stability. They do what they can. And people never use the in game toggles.
Occults in ts4 is not very invasive and do a good job of staying hidden. You'll never even catch a spell caster doing magic.
I'd love it if they could do it so the stuff I enjoy could stop getting nerfed. But ts4 runs smoothly and I wouldn't want to sacrifice stability for it if it were to cause problems.
I think it's hard to say people don't use it when it's not there, the toggles for neighborhood stories seems fine, I certainly haven't had a more unstable game, and from my understanding people use them all the time. I certainly do. Just like I use toggles for aging on/off or rain on/off (I turn it off in the summers, too much rain annoys me).
The fact that occults "do a good job of staying hidden" is really a part of the problem. If I want to play a game filled with occults, I really don't want them to stay hidden. I want my spellcasters to do magic, my vampires to attack and my aliens to abduct. But I might also want a save that is completely realistic and then not want any of it - and that should be up to me, not the game.
A toggle isn't just so realistic players don't have to have the occult - it's just as much so that occult players can play their games to the max.
Moreover, I advise that the cart button must be destroyed!
In all honesty, I actually prefer in game triggers, as well. My problem is that the folks who ignore said triggers are getting our games nerfed. They want toggles. If toggles for them will keep gameplay available for the rest of us, then I’m pro-toggles. Otherwise, the devs really need to toughen up and stand by the game as they designed it.
I'm with you and others who prefer triggers, but in my case I've found some of them to be a bit unreliable. Sometimes they work as they're meant to, and other times the game seems to tell me, "Nope, I don't care what you want, you need ten random vampires in this neighborhood tonight, and that's that." Or similar things; vampires were just used as an example based on my most recent experience with a "trigger failure."
I have one save that I had originally intended not to allow vampires to roam (I have plenty of other saves where they do roam, and quite freely), and there were no sims in that save that I intended to become vamps, either. When I first loaded the save after I got the Vampires pack I set the front door to disallow vampy visits. No one studied Vampire Lore, no one visited Forgotten Hollow, and no vampire-related lot traits were involved, nor did even a single bit of garlic smell up the place. But on the very first night I noticed that four (possibly more, but four for certain) different vampires spawned into the neighborhood. Two were pre-mades (Caleb and Lilith), and two were randomly spawned townie types.
I have no idea why that happened; I hadn't done anything different from other saves other than actively avoiding all the triggers I knew about. I also don't have any occult-specific mods that would increase the likelihood of their spawning. It's possible that some mod mysteriously influenced things in some way, but if so, it makes no sense why it would be so inconsistent. I've had other mishaps with some triggers for other occult types as well, though not terribly often, and some of them happened before I used mods other than CC. Still, those kinds of things are why I'd like to have some actual toggles. Those at least do tend to be reliable when we have them.
Edit: I can't believe I forgot to add that I don't think they would actually remove triggers in favor of toggles, nor do I think they should be removed. When I beg for toggles I mean in addition to what's already there!
FYI: Just because you can see my signature, don't assume that I can see yours.
Because I can't; I keep all sigs turned off.
I would kind of like to see something like this on an occult by occult level.
Personally, I won't buy Get to Work because I absolutely do not want aliens in my game. I'd love to play around with some of the other features of that expansion, but I don't want aliens. I just don't like Sci-Fi in my Fantasy... it's a thing. At the same time, I'd love to see my other occults acting occult-y. Give me the option to turn up random vampire attacks and mischievous spellcasters... and give me the option to turn them back down if it gets too much for my personal taste.
Options are good.
Fate is a riddle and we choose our own answer.Wyrd Girls
Yeah, they're adding a pack setting that I've wanted for the longest.
After watching the werewolf livestream, I'm happy that they included the option to limit werewolves to Moonwood Mill. Having this feature will allow everyone to play the way they want to play. Hopefully, there should not be any request to nerf features since you don't have to have werewolves appearing in other worlds.
I hope they add toggles to the Ghosts & Aliens as well. I don't like Ghost breaking things & for my male sims to unexpectedly be abducted & pregnant. I want to be able to have more control of my households.
I hope they add toggles to the Ghosts & Aliens as well. I don't like Ghost breaking things & for my male sims to unexpectedly be abducted & pregnant. I want to be able to have more control of my households.
I have to ask, how many times has the abduction event triggered for you since the nerf? I can genuinely say I haven't had a single abduction since the nerf nor a single alien pregnancy at all in 4 and I've played since launch purchasing every pack pretty close to launch (except Batuu).
They even patched the satellite controls so you could turn abductions completely off with an ingame object, even in the scientist career which is a trigger for aliens.
I think about 10 times. I didn't really count how many Alien Abductions Male Pregnancies there were. However, I just got a recent one with my historical Peasant family. After the wife gave birth to their son & turned into a toddler, the husband got abducted & is pregnant. And get this, he was able to get his wife pregnant again at the same time. I don't mind that they are getting a little Alien Hybrid baby, I just wish that the wife could be it's Mother.
Yeah, they're adding a pack setting that I've wanted for the longest.
After watching the werewolf livestream, I'm happy that they included the option to limit werewolves to Moonwood Mill. Having this feature will allow everyone to play the way they want to play. Hopefully, there should not be any request to nerf features since you don't have to have werewolves appearing in other worlds.
It will be truly happy days if we can get this added to all previous occults, so then the non-occult players will quit wrecking our fun. I don't mind that some people don't share our passion for occults, everybody has their favorites and their own gameplay style. But it gets old losing out on having our gameplay at it's fullest because some people want the CAS and BB and not the main thing the pack was supposed to be about, the occults. There should be no reason to see any feature of this pack nerfed now.
I think about 10 times. I didn't really count how many Alien Abductions Male Pregnancies there were. However, I just got a recent one with my historical Peasant family. After the wife gave birth to their son & turned into a toddler, the husband got abducted & is pregnant. And get this, he was able to get his wife pregnant again at the same time. I don't mind that they are getting a little Alien Hybrid baby, I just wish that the wife could be it's Mother.
That is weird. I'm assuming you aren't a scientist or use the telescopes to do it.
I'd cheat place the satellite and turn those abductions off.
Nope. I was playing them in my Medieval game save. Plus, I always make sure that my historical households dislikes video gaming, rocket science, robotics & programming. Also, I only play vanilla & my packs.
Agreed! People who hate occults are not going to stop buying occult packs just for BB/CAS. That much is clear. They created a toggle for the werewolf pack so that werewolves won't show up outside of Moonwood Mills, but having a full-on set of toggles for occult spawning and behavior like the MC Command Center mod has would be ideal.
I think we're getting some kind of toggles with Werewolves. In the livestream there was an option that would keep Werewolves in Moonlight Mill so you wouldn't see them outside. There was no Vampire option but if they didn't have Vampires installed then you wouldn't see it.
I'm not sure completely toggling off the entire point of the pack would be possible. And I know I won't be toggling it off.
Every time a pack comes out, I upgrade my Special Project.
I play with all the occults, and I still would like to have on/off toggles regarding random generation of them.
I have a lot of different saves, with a lot of different story and world concepts. Some of those stories include random occult types running around, and some don't. I'd like to be able to choose.
In game triggers don't always cut-it for my story concepts. For example, in one story the alien I am playing is supposed to be the only alien on the planet. He's the field agent sent to study humans and report back to Sixam about them. Trouble is, the in-game trigger of making and playing an alien causes the game to allow undisguised aliens to be generated and triggers a lot of alien abductions to happen. It's kind of hard to pretend my alien is the only one on the planet when aliens keep turning up all over the place. I can ignore them, but it's kind of immersion breaking. It would be nice to just be able to change a setting so that no random aliens get created by the game and alien abductions are turned off until the story reaches a point where I want them to happen.
The same is true for any of the other occults and occult related activities. I'd like to be able to say "In this story vampires break into people's houses and bite them, and people have to protect themselves. But in this other story that does not happen because there's only one vampire left in the world and he's a pacifist who doesn't do that." And be able to set-up each of those story concepts in the game with a few simple settings.
Toggles for population control and gameplay features can be a useful tool for any story-based player. Not just people who want the pack for the CAS and BB items. I'm always in favor of giving the players more tools and controls for playing the way they want to.
Comments
In general, I'm just for anything that puts the power in my hands instead of developers. I want to play my game my way, someone else has completely other preferences. Let us decide how we want the game to be as far as possible without crashing the game.
Until then, if we want the packs for other reasons, we have to avoid in game triggers.
Tales From The Myst
The Blue Moon Jukebox
Because I can't; I keep all sigs turned off.
Occults in ts4 is not very invasive and do a good job of staying hidden. You'll never even catch a spell caster doing magic.
I'd love it if they could do it so the stuff I enjoy could stop getting nerfed. But ts4 runs smoothly and I wouldn't want to sacrifice stability for it if it were to cause problems.
If werewolves will show up and destroy people's home lots, then we will probably see a nerf like we saw with vampires.
To be bluntly honest there are really only two occults in TS4 that are basically flushed out and they are the vamps and the aliens. There are all sorts of Don'ts to keep them out of the game without any toggles. Whatever was added like mermaids and plantsims or zombies was a joke.
People are only complaining about vampires and aliens. When it is their gameplay that triggers 99% of it. Zombies are in one world...there is a mod to stop them from being zombies isn't there?
Who here is complaining about mermaids, ghosts and or plantsims? I haven't seen any complaints in the past few years about those overtaking any lot and or world other than the specific nights at a bar that generates too many ghosts in the game filling the jobs.
So technically this thread is about vampires and aliens when players trigger this themselves. Why have toggles when all you have to do is avoid particular triggers. TS1 and TS2 remain in the top tier of great gameplay because of triggers...not toggles.
I agree that I prefer triggers and in game gameplay. It's more engaging and totally optional. But people got my precious celebrities nerfed because they didn't want to go out disguise or not go as high as a 5 star celebrity 😭😭😭 the way sims use to act over my famous sim is something I still miss. It felt like ACTUALLY being famous and that's exactly how people act over famous celebrities in real life. If anything it was more realistic.
And every time my celebrity goes out barely noticed I'm reminded of what was nerfed 😩😩😩
I wasn't on the forum at the time and thought my game was broken. I even deleted all of my sims fame and started over (multiple times) to make it work again. Later when I joined Twitter and came here I found out it was nerfed because people didn't want to either use the triggers or opt out of fame 🙄
We don't have have zombies but possessed sims in strangerville that never leave that world. They can be cured or totally deleted. Every occult can actually be totally deleted. There are just so many work arounds that doesn't include toggles.
Only vampires I see in my game are the ones I personally put there, and even then they don't use any powers except speed run or fly like a bat (which is a bug actually. They keep defaulting to fly like a bat)
You will NEVER catch a spell caster doing magic unless you go to the magic realm. And you can delete them as well.
Tales From The Myst
The Blue Moon Jukebox
I think it's hard to say people don't use it when it's not there, the toggles for neighborhood stories seems fine, I certainly haven't had a more unstable game, and from my understanding people use them all the time. I certainly do. Just like I use toggles for aging on/off or rain on/off (I turn it off in the summers, too much rain annoys me).
The fact that occults "do a good job of staying hidden" is really a part of the problem. If I want to play a game filled with occults, I really don't want them to stay hidden. I want my spellcasters to do magic, my vampires to attack and my aliens to abduct. But I might also want a save that is completely realistic and then not want any of it - and that should be up to me, not the game.
A toggle isn't just so realistic players don't have to have the occult - it's just as much so that occult players can play their games to the max.
I'm with you and others who prefer triggers, but in my case I've found some of them to be a bit unreliable. Sometimes they work as they're meant to, and other times the game seems to tell me, "Nope, I don't care what you want, you need ten random vampires in this neighborhood tonight, and that's that." Or similar things; vampires were just used as an example based on my most recent experience with a "trigger failure."
I have one save that I had originally intended not to allow vampires to roam (I have plenty of other saves where they do roam, and quite freely), and there were no sims in that save that I intended to become vamps, either. When I first loaded the save after I got the Vampires pack I set the front door to disallow vampy visits. No one studied Vampire Lore, no one visited Forgotten Hollow, and no vampire-related lot traits were involved, nor did even a single bit of garlic smell up the place. But on the very first night I noticed that four (possibly more, but four for certain) different vampires spawned into the neighborhood. Two were pre-mades (Caleb and Lilith), and two were randomly spawned townie types.
I have no idea why that happened; I hadn't done anything different from other saves other than actively avoiding all the triggers I knew about. I also don't have any occult-specific mods that would increase the likelihood of their spawning. It's possible that some mod mysteriously influenced things in some way, but if so, it makes no sense why it would be so inconsistent. I've had other mishaps with some triggers for other occult types as well, though not terribly often, and some of them happened before I used mods other than CC. Still, those kinds of things are why I'd like to have some actual toggles. Those at least do tend to be reliable when we have them.
Edit: I can't believe I forgot to add that I don't think they would actually remove triggers in favor of toggles, nor do I think they should be removed. When I beg for toggles I mean in addition to what's already there!
Because I can't; I keep all sigs turned off.
Personally, I won't buy Get to Work because I absolutely do not want aliens in my game. I'd love to play around with some of the other features of that expansion, but I don't want aliens. I just don't like Sci-Fi in my Fantasy... it's a thing. At the same time, I'd love to see my other occults acting occult-y. Give me the option to turn up random vampire attacks and mischievous spellcasters... and give me the option to turn them back down if it gets too much for my personal taste.
Options are good.
After watching the werewolf livestream, I'm happy that they included the option to limit werewolves to Moonwood Mill. Having this feature will allow everyone to play the way they want to play. Hopefully, there should not be any request to nerf features since you don't have to have werewolves appearing in other worlds.
I have to ask, how many times has the abduction event triggered for you since the nerf? I can genuinely say I haven't had a single abduction since the nerf nor a single alien pregnancy at all in 4 and I've played since launch purchasing every pack pretty close to launch (except Batuu).
They even patched the satellite controls so you could turn abductions completely off with an ingame object, even in the scientist career which is a trigger for aliens.
It will be truly happy days if we can get this added to all previous occults, so then the non-occult players will quit wrecking our fun. I don't mind that some people don't share our passion for occults, everybody has their favorites and their own gameplay style. But it gets old losing out on having our gameplay at it's fullest because some people want the CAS and BB and not the main thing the pack was supposed to be about, the occults. There should be no reason to see any feature of this pack nerfed now.
That is weird. I'm assuming you aren't a scientist or use the telescopes to do it.
I'd cheat place the satellite and turn those abductions off.
I'm not sure completely toggling off the entire point of the pack would be possible. And I know I won't be toggling it off.
I have a lot of different saves, with a lot of different story and world concepts. Some of those stories include random occult types running around, and some don't. I'd like to be able to choose.
In game triggers don't always cut-it for my story concepts. For example, in one story the alien I am playing is supposed to be the only alien on the planet. He's the field agent sent to study humans and report back to Sixam about them. Trouble is, the in-game trigger of making and playing an alien causes the game to allow undisguised aliens to be generated and triggers a lot of alien abductions to happen. It's kind of hard to pretend my alien is the only one on the planet when aliens keep turning up all over the place. I can ignore them, but it's kind of immersion breaking. It would be nice to just be able to change a setting so that no random aliens get created by the game and alien abductions are turned off until the story reaches a point where I want them to happen.
The same is true for any of the other occults and occult related activities. I'd like to be able to say "In this story vampires break into people's houses and bite them, and people have to protect themselves. But in this other story that does not happen because there's only one vampire left in the world and he's a pacifist who doesn't do that." And be able to set-up each of those story concepts in the game with a few simple settings.
Toggles for population control and gameplay features can be a useful tool for any story-based player. Not just people who want the pack for the CAS and BB items. I'm always in favor of giving the players more tools and controls for playing the way they want to.