So, in other words, you don't want the series to continue?
If they scrap it being emotion-based, they have to redo the engine. Problem: This game will have had five years development in next year, and the max development time before you will never even make back your investment is eight years. Sims 4 would become vaporware under your idea. It would never be released and the series would end with the ITF expansion.
I think that having emotions in the game is a great idea, but having the entire point of the game tied into emotions (which I fear will be as shallow as the moodlets and traits in TS3) will really limit the game. The videos that we have been shown makes it seem as if we will be told what emotion the sim has at any given time.....and I think that this really dumbs down the gameplay. Do we really need to be told what our sim is feeling if we can just see it?
It will limit the game... but there's no way of doing complex emotions without making them the entire point of the game. Computers are not as advanced as people think they are; if you're going to do a video game with complex emotions, you're either going to be using massive amounts of slight of hand (which works in single player games where you play one character), or you're going to program the entire thing around emotions; there's no other options, as all other options require replicating the human brain to the point you would spawn true AI and we currently do not have the technology to do that on purpose yet.
So it's either emotions in the game and the game focuses on them, or no actual emotions with this game series. There's no middle ground. And despite what people say, not even Sims 2 actually had emotions, but it just used a lot of slight of hand and hoped people wouldn't notice (and most didn't).
As for being told what emotions a sim has... this is actually necessary if they got anywhere close to replicating actual emotions. There are 182 different emotional states in normal humans that cause tears, and they cover everything from sadness to happiness to rage. As a species, humans tend to cry a lot, and yet for some reason humans always associate tears in video games with sadness. So if your sim is crying because they're happy, you're not going to know it unless you have a little box that says happy. And people also associate smiling with happiness in video games, despite the fact that most of the reasons why humans smile have nothing to do with being happy.
So, really, if they are going to actually do emotions and do them well, they will need a box to tell you what the emotion is simply because the normal associations with each action don't match up to emotional reality and would cause you to draw the seriously wrong conclusions as to what your sim is feeling. Because, let's face it, humans suck at reading each other well and find reading a fictional character existing inside a computer program nearly impossible.
So you say computer are not that advance. Go fetch me 16 Kilobytes of ram. Next fetch me 32 megabytes of ram. Thirdly fetch me 8 Gigabytes of ram. Come on. We gone a long way since Commodore 64 computers. Today computers can multi-task. A big fact Amiga could multi-task in real time. Heck my mom programmed on punch cards. A lot of things have changed. We no longer use floppy drives. Hard drive storage has gone up.
CPU cores have gone up. We gone from 1 megahertz CPU to Gigahertz CPU. We gone from Single core CPU to Quad-core and up CPU. Disprove all my facts if you can.
You realize you replied to a post made before Sims 4 even came out, right?
In the days of Commodore 64, a video game would be a set of pixels on a screen that made even the NES look advanced.
Also, the amount of memory means nothing; memory != processing power, display capabilities, or programming capacity. Technology is never one component; if it was, the space program would have been invented by the Chinese in the 1100s and the ancient Greeks would have dominated the battlefield with flamethrowers. Plus, modern memory isn't actually enough for it anyway; even Watson, the most advanced AI on the planet, is basically little more than an advanced search engine hooked up to an Eliza program... and that's using the most advanced computers that exist and pretty much the entirety of human computer communication infrastructure for memory storage. So, literally, the combined power of nearly every computer hooked together is still not enough to replicate true human sentience.
We don't have to worry about Skynet showing up and wiping out humanity; we don't have the processing power for it yet.
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You realize you replied to a post made before Sims 4 even came out, right?
In the days of Commodore 64, a video game would be a set of pixels on a screen that made even the NES look advanced.
Also, the amount of memory means nothing; memory != processing power, display capabilities, or programming capacity. Technology is never one component; if it was, the space program would have been invented by the Chinese in the 1100s and the ancient Greeks would have dominated the battlefield with flamethrowers. Plus, modern memory isn't actually enough for it anyway; even Watson, the most advanced AI on the planet, is basically little more than an advanced search engine hooked up to an Eliza program... and that's using the most advanced computers that exist and pretty much the entirety of human computer communication infrastructure for memory storage. So, literally, the combined power of nearly every computer hooked together is still not enough to replicate true human sentience.
We don't have to worry about Skynet showing up and wiping out humanity; we don't have the processing power for it yet.