Thoughts on Strangerville Gameplay (SPOILERS)

Triplis

So... MAJOR SPOILERS ahead. Beware and all that.

I decided to get Strangerville and give it a shot. It was kind of middle of the road for me. Didn't hate it, didn't love it. Mildly entertaining, don't feel 🐸🐸🐸🐸 or anything, just doesn't feel all that memorable.

But I'm not here to just give a summary of my feelings about it. I'd also like to share some more specific thoughts on gameplay and things that occurred to me throughout.

1) It felt like kind of a scavenger hunt in a way. Sort of a mini adventure game. Which can be fun and it was mildly fun for me. The main thought that stuck out to me though was I thought at one point, "What if we (the players) had a set of tools to create narratives along the lines of Strangerville in a sims game?" I'm sure that'd never happen in TS4, but maybe something to consider for the future of the franchise at some point? I mean, I don't think this kind of gameplay is necessarily poor or uninteresting, but it comes across to me as very sort of one-and-done, and part of how the sims gets around that problem is by letting you make your own creations and use other peoples' creations; CAS, lots, etc. If we had a tool to make mini adventures like Strangerville and create our own sort of scavenger hunt narratives, I think that could become a very interesting and loved part of the series (consider the delicious marketing, too, "a whole new way to create stories in the sims and share them with others"). When it comes to Strangerville itself, I'm not sure that "one and done" packs with single narratives are going to go very far in the long-term.

2) It was interesting seeing the intersection of normal sims gameplay and Strangerville elements, sometimes in cool ways and sometimes not-so-cool. One cool example is I was doing it with one new sim and trying to do the last part (recruiting/curing) within a sim day or two, and I hadn't really done any friend-making yet with that sim as they were occupied with the military career and managing their needs. So after making three vaccines, I saved first, then tried to cure and recruit (took some failing before I realized how it all worked and ended up reloading). But once I got the general gist of what was required, I would cure a sim, ask them to hang out, stargaze/cloudgaze with them to build friendship fast, and then recruit them. One not so cool example is all of the sims I was trying to do this with were walkby sims and would try to leave almost immediately after I cured them. One in fact did successfully leave and I couldn't invite them to hang out because they were... sleeping. So I ended up using the MC Command Center mod "summon" function to bring them to lot and build friendship... didn't want to wait until the next sim day just to call them over, or go build another vaccine. That said, I'm sure there are many ways that part of the narrative could have been approached by a player and it's nice to know that if I were to do it again, I wouldn't necessarily have to go the exact same route.

3) Limitations. There were some areas where I noticed the limitations of TS4 as a platform for something like this coming through. Most notably, the boss fight, with the abilities to change up your "team" strategy. The cooldown seemed to have no visible duration and the buff indicating it was active is easily buried under other buffs. Perhaps the buff could have been given a visible timer, but still, the interface just clearly wasn't built with RPG boss battles in mind, complete with ability cooldowns. Nonetheless, I was a little pleasantly surprised at how much detail of it was tolerably integrated well into the limitations of TS4. The health bar, the infection bar. The main downside was that it was kind of boring to sit there and watch them carry out the actions, with only the occasional "strategy" adjustment to make sure you didn't lose.

Ultimately, I'd call it an interesting experiment and it may be worth exploring how you could put something like this more in the hands of players for future iterations of the franchise, rather than being limited to a single narrative in a single pack made by the sims team. I don't think I would buy a pack like this again as a one-and-done narrative, unless there were significant sandbox elements in it that I could benefit from apart from the narrative. But I wouldn't call that a failure of the pack, so much as a failure to intersect well enough with my personal preferences and reasons for playing a game like the sims.

Expression of creativity is what makes a game like the sims stand out for me and though this was a pleasant enough way to kill some time, I can play games that were built entirely around structured narrative / adventure that are worlds better at it because that's what they were trying to be from start to finish. Again, not trying to insult the pack or the work that went into it and not just out of politeness; I think that given the limitations, you did about as well as you could do and what comes out feels refreshing, even if limited and somewhat forgettable. It's just, there are limitations. And I'm sure you're very aware of them now as they pertain to a pack like this, if you weren't before.

That's my immediate take, anyway. It might change a bit over time.

SheriSim57

I think we did get some sand box play. We got a new world which is similar to the others, large for the standards of a stuff pack. We got a new military career, though I would have rather had it be an active career ( I like them, and I think it is fun getting to the top of them, and the science career came with so many useful things). Or at least more rewards items that would have been useful to make our own military lot, like the sparring machine. Although this lot came with some great building tools, I would have liked to see more in the way of useful objects. A laptop was a good object, but wish we would have gotten something like a pool table that had interactions to make money off of people with not as much pool skill, or something like that. Or, some new useful plants other than the bizarre fruit. I thought the plane wreck lot was cute, but I wish we could have been able to change the lab after being successful in the Quest.