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An Option to Set Gender Preference in CAS
Huiiie_07
Posts: 1,200 Member
It seems like every sim is bisexual by default, which in itself isn't a problem, but can be very immersion breaking when there's a sim you imagine to be completely different.
I find it very annoying when my sims I imagine as 100% straight autonomously (!) do romantic interactions with someone from the same gender. Or when my sim I imagine to be asexual is constantly rolling whims to woohoo like it's the most important thing in their lives.
I would really love some toggles in the gender options in cas, where we can choose the preferred gender of our sim (male, female, both or none). I'm sure it would give our sims some more personality and would stop them flirting with everyone they see.
I find it very annoying when my sims I imagine as 100% straight autonomously (!) do romantic interactions with someone from the same gender. Or when my sim I imagine to be asexual is constantly rolling whims to woohoo like it's the most important thing in their lives.
I would really love some toggles in the gender options in cas, where we can choose the preferred gender of our sim (male, female, both or none). I'm sure it would give our sims some more personality and would stop them flirting with everyone they see.
Origin ID: Huiiie_07
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Because it's a game, not real life, and it would make things much easier.
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Games should challenge you. If it's too easy, players get bored.
> Huiiie_07 wrote: »
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> Dannydanbo wrote: »
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> We can't toggle people in real life, why limit our sims?
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> Because it's a game, not real life, and it would make things much easier.
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> Games should challenge you. If it's too easy, players get bored.
Some people like to make up stories for their Sims games, and a toggle would make it much easier. Not everyone has the same playstyle. I know it would be very annoying to have a decidedly gay sim roll wants to flirt with a female and vice-versa. Or I might have a sim not interested in romance and it would be annoying to have them constantly roll woohoo wants, etc.
Anyway, I do have a mod that allows me to set gender preference for all sims (it is probably from MTS for those interested) but it would be nice to have as an in-game feature, since not everyone plays with mods. So I agree with the OP that a toggle would be great.
Amen.
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Flirting doesn't always have to mean attraction... at least irl.
What happens to your story telling when you want your straight sim to have a gay affair? That happens in real life more often than people want to admit.
P.S. 100% straight doesn't exist. There is no absolute guarantee.
Right, but it can mess up storylines badly, and not everyone likes randomness in their games. You just happen to play differently than me and some others.
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Most people IRL have a strong preference for one or the other. It’s actually more realistic to incorporate sexual orientation into the game instead of having every Sim be totally bisexual with no preference one way or the other.
Townies sometimes do, though, which can start a romantic relationship between your Sim and them- along with autonomous flirting from your Sim and plenty of unwanted romantic whims. I’d like to see Sims reject romantic advances from Sims of the wrong gender, at least if they don’t have a solid friendly relationship beforehand.
It wouldn’t have to be some set-in-stone choice of four options. For an example of how it should be done, take a look at how it worked in TS3:
Each Sim had a value for attraction to males and attraction to females. 0 was neutral, anything above zero meant Sims of that gender were potential candidates for attraction (which also included a bunch of other factors, and I’d love to see a return of a proper attraction system like TS3 had), and anything below 0 meant the Sim was not attracted to anyone of that gender.
Each romantic interaction increased the attraction value for the target’s gender by 2 and decreased the attraction value for the opposite gender by 1. This effectively allowed the user to decide their Sim’s orientation and also made it changeable.
The player’s options were never limited by this; the attraction system never had any effect on user-directed actions. What it did affect was how the target Sim responded - Sims, including player-controlled Sims, would reject romantic socials from anyone with a low attraction score (which by default included every Sim of a gender they weren’t attracted to) unless they had a high relationship already.
Gender preference is already partially incorporated into TS4, anyway. The values are there - though they’re capped at zero this time and can’t go negative - but they don’t actually do anything yet. Manually setting the values using a mod doesn’t have any effect on anything, as far as I can tell - whether the male/female attraction values are set to 0/0, 100/100, 0/100, 100/0, or anything in between, there doesn’t seem to be any difference in whims, autonomy, acceptance/rejection of romantic socials, anything.
Like, take one of my Sims who was 100% straight, for instance. His attraction values were 100 for females and 0 for males.
Cue a conversation with the mailman. When I wasn’t paying attention for a couple seconds, I see that my Sim is suddenly Flirty. What?
He has the “Titillating Banter” moodlet and the start of a romance bar. The mailman had gone from Acquaintance to Romantic Interest.
Is it realistic to allow “straight” Sims to have same-sex affairs? Absolutely. Is it realistic for a straight man to be easily seduced by the mailman he hardly knows and suddenly start rolling whims to WooHoo with him? Absolutely not, yet it happened in my game just a couple hours ago.
This is why it should be up to the player and influenced by player-directed actions. Players should have the option to have their Sims pursue any relationship they want, but Sims should also reject advances from Townies of a gender they aren’t attracted to (unless, of course, the player decided to pursue a romantic relationship with said Townie first).
I’ve heard good things about the TS2 attraction system, so maybe some sort of attraction system taking elements from both TS3 and TS2 could be implemented in TS4?
It would also be nice if we could specify that a sim is asexual. These sims would not get the flirty emotion or autonomously flirt with others.
I don’t mind that sims start off bisexual right now, as you can basically make them what you want. But, it would be nice to know that they had a set gender preference in line with what you imagine for them.
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I may want a little more consistency regarding which other sims they autonomously flirts with. Like if Don has been in 4 relationships with females, maybe just keep having him flirt with female sims. Wasn't Sims 2 like that? That whomever your sim flirted with first decided the main preference for that sim?
The Sims is already open to player choice, I don't think a sexuality slider or button or whatever, makes any sense. If a sim flirts with a male or female in the game the sim will get a preference for that gender it's always been like this in previous games.
The system already exists, it is just invisible to us. Make it visible and let us set a starting point in CAS.
It is no different from the fitness and fat sliders. You set a starting point and your sim either maintains or deviates from that starting point depending on your gameplay choices. It's exactly the same thing. I find it unrealistic that everyone starts smack dab in the middle of bisexuality, the same way that I would find it strange if we couldnt set starting weights.
Because, unlike in a game, I don't have control over people in real life.
But... I don't think it's unrealistic to want a slider because, in real life, for example, you wouldn't catch me flirting with a girl. So it doesn't seem weird for a sim to have set definitions on what they like, either. I'm 100% not straight and I don't expect myself to sway back onto the straight side just because in real life, unlike the sims, not everyone is bi.
Plus, it wouldn't be harmful if you as the player can override the settings and flirt with whomever you choose; it's just so that sims don't start flirting with both genders randomly like it usually happens.
Everyone I know will flirt with girls. It doesn't matter if they're gay, straight, ace... they're all human, and a bit of flirtation makes people feel good. Honestly, in my experience, gay guys are the worst. All the ones I know will flirt with anything that has a pulse.
However, straight guys and gay girls don't tend to flirt with guys.
Flirting doesn't always have to mean that you wanna woohoo, it can be a friendly interaction. The best people to flirt with are old ladies, I sure as heck don't want any woohoo there, but it's a heck of a lot of fun.
Maybe it's an Aussie thing, maybe we're just a flirty bunch.
I guess it is just cultural thing. There's a big differentiation in my mind between friendly compliments and jokes to be friendly versus flirting; where I am located, flirting is strictly romantic and is done to kind of show you're attracted to them a bit and want to get to know them better in a "we could go out for a drink/date sometime" type of way. I dunno what the gay guys are like in Australia, but I (a Canadian) would feel seriously uncomfortable flirting with a girl, haha.
I disagree slightly. My male sim was happily married to a female, got lots of whims to woohoo with her, kiss her etc. Was like that for a long time. Long enough to have children with her.
Then one day he went to the Bluffs with his in laws. His wife was there but wasn’t near him. He got the flirty moodlet from being near the pool (really?) Now who he did he direct his all of a sudden romantic desires too? His wife?
No.
My sim autonomously hit on his father in law. His married father in law at that. Right in front of his mother in law. My sim is not gay nor had shown any affection towards any Male before. I don’t have mods or cc. It’s like once in the flirty mood sims simply don’t care who their target is, it’s just the closet person. (As was the case in my scenario above)
In the sims 2 however you had to work very hard to unset the gender preference once you set it. My Male sim wouldn’t hit on another man autonomously if his targets had always been female. It wasn’t impossible to change it but your sim wouldn’t all of a sudden change their preferences unless the player intervened.
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Flirtation is a form of banter, and I do it with platonic friends.
I play characters and I expect the game to do what I tell it to do. Yes, there can be an event that may throw a monkey wrench into my well laid plans, but not when it comes to sexual preference. That really does break the immersion. It's our games we should be able to say who is going to be involved and who is not. We may not be able to say who gets sick etc. however, we should be able (as gods) to say who is going to be involved.
It has nothing to do with a challenge or reality or anything else anyone wants to throw in here, it has to do with taking away the control the past games gave the player by setting that preference the first time a Sim checks out another Sim or flirts. That became their preference, and I wish this game would return to standards that keep players in control.