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Sims 4 seasons vs. Sims 3 seasons
lienne11
Posts: 192 Member
What were the differences?
Which pack did you believe was better?
Which pack did you believe was better?
1
lienne11
Posts: 192 Member
Comments
I enjoyed Seasons for every installment of every pack because it definitely added that level of immersion in the game. Same with Sims 2 I enjoyed that as well got some favorite items in there I like.
Items in Sims 3 I enjoyed was the Kissing booth, slow dancing and eating contest in festivals when they rolled around.
Sims 4 there's A LOT more weather related clothing in this pack compared to earlier ones like a lot, holidays are more involved, and more things for children to do without them feeling so restricted.
Since it is my current iteration of the sims I play I do like it more especially with more customization options, but both versions did do seasons very nicely.
The CAS, Build/Buy, holiday creation, calender and the big focus on gardening makes me really love it.
Festivals in 3 were neat, but I hated winter so much I would just edit my options and leave it out. If you ever even thought about winter, your plants would dormant and never come back. Snow and cold weather leaked too much before and after winter. It felt like you had Summer, maybe fall, and then two winters because it just ate up most of your spring anyway.
I am loving Holidays in 4 so far. And winter actually works how it is supposed to work. I'm a little sad there aren't igloos to build though.
I think for the first time I'd say 4 beats any of the other games in this expansion.
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The calendar & holiday system in TS4 is very nice and definitely a neat new feature. The snow also turned out better than I'd expected. While I think multi-depth snow could be even better, I wouldn't want to give up any of the other TS4 Seasons features for it (well, okay, I'd give up the gnomes and probably the flower bunny, to be honest), and the snow we do have is really beautiful. I love the way it glistens and sparkles in the light.
The Sims 3 focused too much on Festival gameplay objects which left almost none for everyday gameplay. If you didn’t play with Festival objects, there wasn’t really a lot about Seasons that impacted day to day life as much as 4.
Also, I prefer the Create Your Own holiday as we can basically have our own Festivals.
Alot of the content for Sims 3 Seasons could have been done in other Packs.
That said, Sims 3 Seasons does have more interactions with Snow and more depth in Summer. So that was a plus.
But saying that, it was sacrificed by a lack of Seasonal content.
It’s hard to explain.
They had the same name but approach the topic very differently. I do prefer Sims 4, but Sims 3 wasn’t bad by any stretch.
I just think Sims 3 maybe took too much content from other potential packs and then left itself with no room to move when it came to developing how Seasons effect day to day life.
I think they focused too much on new festival activities and maybe could have sold them as a store set or something instead. Or drip the objects throughout the Packs and let Seasons create the Festivals but use what is there.
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I love that each season is customisable. If I want 3 days of summer, 16 days of summer and 7 days of fall I can have it. It’s my game and my stories and being able to customise it how I want is important to me.
Sims 4 seasons looks good though, I love the thunderstorms in particular.
With game play I think the sims 3 added more, spring had love day with the love tester machine, the kissing booth, egg hunting. Summer gave us tanning and sun burn, sprinklers, the soccer net, face painting, tanning booth, water balloon fights, skating and the eating contests. With the Fall fest we got a lot of the above but we got a haunted house, trick or treating, pumpkin carving, apple bobbing. We also got the raking leaves.The winter fest gave us the snowboard half pipe, ice skating, snow angels, snowmen and building igloos. Not to mention the sims 3 also came with allergies and the ability to treat it with a shot.
I like that seasons really impact our sims. Doing a homeless challenge and it’s autumn or winter is brutal, the sim will be soaked, they will be miserable and it’s a challenge. Likewise in winter they risk freezing to death or bursting into flames come summer if exposed to the elements for too long.
Now of course sims 4 has given us some of the above and I’m very glad we got the items we got. I prefer the sims 3 in terms of game play in terms of quality. I think the sims 4 water balloon fights look really awkward and unnatural for example. I like the holiday system too but I think i prefer the festivals as they lasted for longer and it meant all my sims could get to the festival at one point. I also love the festivals as it’s a great way to meet other sims and hang out and do things they don’t often have on their lot. For example few of my sims have a skating rink or ice cream machine on their lot.
With the sims 4 if my sims go to a festival or holiday it uses a day vacation so I’m mindful of that.
I feel that sims 3 seasons all the seasons got equal treatment by way of activities and seasonal events. With the sims 4 the main focus I think was Winter and the festive holiday there and I really like it don’t get me wrong, but I think spring and summer feel a bit bare by comparison.
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Now if you ask me which one I actually play, that'll be TS4 Seasons, and I can definitely share with you why that is! I enjoy the focus on the sims and the family via the customizeable holidays. Children have a lot of ways to participate, and I like that. They feel like active members of the household with crafts and activities that they can actually do to contribute to holiday preparation. Even toddlers have holiday goals that include them in the holiday process. I really like that, it breathes life into the various life states and makes my simming heart happy.
I very much enjoy the aesthetics of Sims 4 Seasons, too. The shimmering heat in the sweltering summer, gently falling leaves of fall, the insane thunderstorms (really impressed by those, actually), brutal winter blizzards that send sims slipping and falling on the streets, and the gentle breezes and bright colors of spring. How the environment gradually changes between them, is really impressive to be honest. It gives everything new life, and I find myself snapping pictures of mundane locations that previously held no appeal to me, simply because they are so visually different and thus more interesting with the addition of seasons.
At the time, I loved TS3 Seasons. But I think I love TS4 Seasons a little bit better. The level of customization is neat. & just graphically....wow, the game is just gorgeous.
@Sha2520032003 yeah totally agree. But for me, Sims 4 and 3 aren't comparable anymore or for me seems like actually not fair for comparing these two. Each game has different focuses right now. 3 focused more on customization while 4 on characters with smarter artificial intelligence and game optimization. Sims 3 has great varieties of features that the only thing that can limit you to make the most of it is your creativity. Sims 4, well it's actually great for me since we now have a lot of different ways to make our perfect sims and they now have emotions and better for storytelling.
But regardless of that, I'll prefer the seasons ep in the current entry since it really is much more greater and better than 3.
@jackjack_k This for instance makes me curious:
I always figured Seasons would be an atmosphere like pack rather than a gameplay pack. Like you say, the festivals you only use every now and then, they’re not something that affects your sims daily. Weather in the game does though. When it starts raining or snowing or there’s a thunderstorm, I’m always surprised when I look outside and the sun is shining. I sometimes turn off rain for this reason because it can really bring me down. The weather in the game influences me and also my sims. So I’m curious, in what way does the TS4 pack influence your sims in a day to day manner that sets it apart from predecessors?
A p.s. by the way: whenever people start praising the current team in a comparison thread, giving them kudos for their great job, it feels as if they are slating the work of previous teams (quite often the same people). I don’t know Sims 4’s Seasons so I cannot compare, but I’d like to leave my huge appreciation for the beauty and variety of Sims 3’s Seasons here to those devs who it may concern. I love what it added to my game and I think they did a great job with that pack as well. Sims 3 was Sims 3, Sims 4 is Sims 4.
ETA: I actually think this might answer my question
The Holiday system was expanded upon here and made customizable. Sure we could use more traditions, but this is very much the evolution of a TS3 Seasons feature that I'd expect out of a sequel, and it's done quite well. Plus, I think the holidays here have quite a bit more charm than in The Sims 3. For example, there was no Santa/Father Winter in TS3 at all (an oddity for this franchise, the only entry that didn't). My biggest complaint here? Features like fireworks and pumpkin carving are not included in the base game or Seasons - they were put in other packs. So if you don't have them, you have to miss out on these features that are downright essential to various holidays. TS3 has one up on TS4 there since those features were included with Seasons, as they should be.
The Seasonal aesthetic details were really taken up a notch here, too, and this is really important to me because the changing visuals really help keep the game feeling alive. In previous The Sims Seasons EPs the only plants that changed with the seasons were trees. They left the shrubs, bushes, grasses the same for all four seasons - a major drawback, if you ask me. Here, they finally went all-out, turning grasses brown for the autumn and winter, having flowerless shrubs/bushes/etc for the winter, etc., and it is SUCH a massive improvement over TS3 where you awkwardly see green bushes with flowers on them underneath the snow. Another major aesthetic improvement is the changing of the terrain grass over the seasons. I just love this so much and have been wanting it forever and it really makes late autumn and winter look very distinct (coupled with the adjustments to the plants) even without snow.
I love the winter aesthetic IRL. Where I live we don't get much snow (at least not anymore), so during the winter that's mostly what I see (pretty much entirely nowadays, snow is extremely rare now). Seeing winters with green grass terrain and flowering bushes/shrubs in The Sims 3 just really ruined it for me.
Other improvements include blowing snow and rain, I love that. I love the thunderstorms and how the wind shakes the trees in a much more violent, realistic nature than ever in The Sims 3. The rain puddles also form a bit more realistically.
The downsides? Fog is really downplayed, although cloudy days look very pretty. The rain have any visible splashes on the ground nor does it drip off the roofs - but this is The Sims 4, and honestly, I'm so much more impressed with everything that I mentioned above than The Sims 3's rain effects. I'll take changing terrain and changing non-tree plants over rain dripping off the roof any day. Also the lack of snow depth is a bit odd, but again, at least Winter is aesthetically unique this time. If the developers had to choose between these features, I'm glad they picked what they did.
Also a downside that has plagued all of The Sims Seasons games and continues to plague The Sims 4 - Why don't we get blooming trees for Spring and why are the cherry blossoms eternally blooming? Spring could really use that boost in aesthetics, and seeing cherry blossoms blooming during the summer and even the fall in this game's case is not right.
Overall, The Sims 4 Seasons is amazing for me. I did not expect The Sims 4 to be where they would finally fix some of these issues I've had for a long time. I expected TS4 Seasons to play it safe like Cats and Dogs and pretty much just be par for the course. Instead they put a lot of detail into it. This pack is amazing. It's too good for The Sims 4!
I do love seasons for the sims 4. the only thing i will miss is the seasonal festivals
but other than that its the best expansion so far for me
Personally I didn't get swimming in the ocean it's no different than swimming in the pool just more room. You can't even drown in the ocean in S3 for some odd reason. Though to each ones own. Seasons in each installment of the sims isn't terribly comparable as I've enjoyed just weather in each one. I loved it all in 2, 3 and now 4. It's weather and definitely changes things up and the atmosphere of the over all game.
I do love what's on offer here and I don't think I've had this much enjoyment on every season in an expansion that just wasn't Winter. I really like how each world is connected and weather functions a bit differently in each one. Sims participating in holidays (or some might depending on their trait) feels pretty immersive. Like sims care about the others around them and what's going on with the day. I actually feel genuinely interested in their daily life more so than before where it was pretty 'meh'.
Trick or treating unfortunately wasn't terribly fun for me in S3 and it was one of my more anticipated features considering Sims were never at home the majority of the time (Mines seem to enjoy the front of the theater or just hang out at the park) or just didn't want to come to the door. Bout like the crotchety people that don't like halloween and don't want to buy overpriced candy for my sim kid's enjoyment.
Since the festivals came and went never felt like I could have fun with them for too long. Since I found the majority of interesting things to be with the festival's than anything. Outside of that not terribly much less I was gardening. Felt there was a lot more things in S3 Winter to do that didn't have to be connected with festivals is what I liked a lot about it.
I only remember swimming in the ocean (though patched in) and some new pool floats thus far for summer activities along with water balloons.
I prefer the latter. The atmosphere of my Sims 4 game has changed completely.