Simmers! Did you miss the Behind the Sims Livestream on Twitch? You can still check it out
here. You can also follow along in the dedicated thread
here as well.
It's Patch day! The latest update is now live for The Sims 4 which includes a whole heap of bug fixes and console improvements. Click
here to read the notes.
Comments
Even game changers are getting frustrated how the game hasn't changed much or old five year old bugs haven't been fixed yet. I just don't see things changing and had plenty of Simmers tell me how much things will change in five years, five years ago. So it is like ok I'm being told that again, why? Can you promise that things will change? No Simmer can. So why carry on all these false promises further. Sims 4 was falsely advertised in so many aspects during launch and five years later those claims of what the game being and what it actually is are just still not there. I don't think the game will ever deliver what it promised for the base game and time has proven that. The schism of the Sims community is too strong to sustain five more years of development. Any normal company would move onto a new product that split their customer base in two and a 10 year old product especially in the gaming industry is going to age really badly especially since Sims 3 graphics and game engine are still considered more modern than the Sims 4 one. Out with the old and in with the new. Sims 4 is old now. Time to bring in the new gaming engine technology and fashion and music. I'm not getting any younger either, younger Simmers may have time to spare on a dated Sims 4 game, but I don't. Time is valuable to me and I would like to see the franchise grow beyond just the Sims 4. I'm hoping I'll still be alive by the time the Sims 10 comes out. But oh well, I'm sure by the time Sims 5 comes out, competition will come in with new gaming engines and graphics easily. So might be a good thing for Sims 4 to extend development, to make the barrier of entry of competition easier to come through just for the simple fact that "people like new graphics". I hope Paralives is one of those. But it amazing what one developer has done with Stardew Valley since 2016 compared to what little Sims 4 has done since 2014. Shows how much indie developers are going to save the gaming industry. They are just doing amazing emotional things with GRIS and Celeste and winning awards for their efforts. Their sales are killing it too: "As of March 2019, Gris has sold 300,000 copies worldwide." "By the end of 2018, over 500,000 copies of the game had been sold." So yes games with real human emotions do sell well rather than whatever robotic emotions the Sims have that were supposed to be the best emotion system in the franchise yet and the smartest Sims yet and best multitasking yet. I have yet to see that. XD
I don't think any of those games are lazy development, honestly. Indie developers have it far more tougher than established game studios, and often their projects end up better because of the amount of passion they have for their craft and control to make what they want a reality.
It's far easier to call EA "lazy" (although I think it's more appropriate to use the word mismanaged instead) because they have more resources to do better than anyone else, yet choose to impress shareholders over releasing a good game. Really, both can be done, but when you have people leading a company with zero interest in the product, the former is going to happen. I think things are starting to really crack though, judging by the whole Blizzard and Hong Kong controversy that has been going on.
I said nothing about HOW things were implemented (and honestly, the fact that there's so little occult stuff in the game just tells me that there's room for more). I only spoke about magic, not about occults in general too so I'm not even saying there's too little or too much, that's a whole another conversation. I'm also not talking about how much the game can change.
Bottom line: you hate TS4, I don't. Each to their own. Just as I think there are still a lot of themes to be added after University, which is why I answered your question: what more can be done in the game? Tons. Things brought back from previous versions, brand new things that were not in the games before. That's it, simple answer to a simple question in one specific post.
Because it's always used as one or all of the following:
1 - An excuse not to do something IE allowing male sims to wear female sims clothing, was it inclusive?, or simply to stop people complaining that male sims don't have enough clothing.
2 - An ideological shield for a shoddy product, take the latest Batwoman series for example, anyone protesting against it is automatically assumed to be doing so because of the lesbian status of the lead and not because the series stinks, same with other things that didn't go over so well, The Last Jedi (haters must have been misogynists), Captain Marvel (same again), ETC... I guarantee if Black Panther had been really badly written and a lousy film, causing it to fail, it would've been blamed on racists and not writers.
3 - Shoehorned in, decimating established lore and/or story, or otherwise just being a tokenist addition, TLJ, Star Trek Discovery, Marvel, DC, ETC all do this. If I am playing an online first person shooter, my character has no needed story or campaign, no worthwhile background nor identity other than their physical appearance, dress and voice... Do I really need to know who they'd sleep with or what they was born as?
Sims 4 has gotten a lot better since launch. The sims are still very shallow, imo, but who can forget the saga of Mr Sausage?
https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/817854/an-obnoxious-psychosausage-tests-the-boundaries-of-the-sims-4-emotions/p1
Prove I don't hate the game? How? What would prove that besides that I am playing, I'm very much enjoying building AND gameplay, have spent hours upon hours in the game (and lost track of time so many times because I got lost in it.
Prove that more development is worth it? Again, how, besides that there are many people who still love it, many people who have ideas for what can be added to the game from base game additions and expanding of existing features to packs not seen before.
If you look around the forums and elsewhere (though yeah, I agree, it's hard to see the good through the walls of "this isn't the game I want so it sucks" sometimes) you'll see plenty of Simmers sharing their wishes for the game, asking the gurus about bugs (and yes, getting them fixed), helping make TS4 better. Instead of "why bother adding anything else?"
re: the bolded part: precisely where you're saying it's not worthwhile. Why wouldn't it be, if people still love the game and want to see more added to it, want to see it continue? Passion isn't only "I want the next thing".
For what it's worth, I've never once called TS4 any of those things. It IS a sandbox game though, it's a "create your own story" game. By design. And I don't know why that's seen as such a horrible thing.
🤔🤔🤔🤔, I can't believe I missed that... Really does show smarter Sims™.
I'm glad you think the Sims 4 is more than a toy to sink money into. I agree that Sims should keep its sandbox game roots and it isn't a bad thing either. It reaches more players that way.
But yes don't worry not expecting just you to show your love, but others as well reaching out to the Gurus sharing ideas have and I love the ideas that were shared by another Simmer for the Sims future. I could see how passionate they were about the Sims future instead of just living in the moment. Five years of fights gets tiresome, I want them to talk about the game for a change. I want them to share ideas with the Gurus and get bugs fixed by the QA Gurus, and welcome new Simmers into the Sims community. I agree passion isn't just one thing but many things. I am quite sad seeing the recent community positions opening up I admit. SimGuruFrost has been doing a really good job as our CM and I have been enjoying the community polls.
All of this I absolutely agree with.
It's a sign of the times, unfortunately, where saying what one doesn't like seems more cool or whatever than saying what one does like. (I'm honestly too old for all that kinda stuff. I just want to enjoy my game and do whatever I can as a player to help it grow). The best kinda place seems to be some of the threads in the Ideas part of the forum, always great to see the kinda things SImmers come up with. Oh and the challenges section, that's always a fun place.
I get that some people who have been with this game since the start (I wasn't, for many reasons, none because I wouldn't have wanted to) have grown tired of not seeing the things that *they* wanted to see. Others had to wait a long time (occult players, those who wanted university gameplay...). Added to that the general state of the world that just makes everyone miserable, it all resonates and people group with those who agree with them (unfortunately in places like twitter, that kinda stuff tends to explode rapidly). But yeah, I do see how feeling like one is shouting into the void can feel exhausting and make someone go the "I give up, this is not gonna change" way.
Honestly though, for me personally, regardless of what happens next for TS4- whether any of the things I'd still love to see in the game (and man, do I ever have a long list
As far as my theme/patch ideas just to keep it confined to 10:
1) Farm pack
2) RV/tiny home/retirement pack
3) School pack
4) Werewolves, satyrs, genies, robots, zombies, fairies, and changeling life states
5) AI/Emotion system upgrade with fear emotion and nerfing of environment buffs
6) Revamping the trait and lot trait system
7) Adding NPCs firefighters, burglars, cops, social workers and NPC vehicles
8) Cars/transportation systems
9) Individual Sim descriptions
10) Upgrades to life stages from freeing babies, improving children, teens, and elders, and more activities for all life stages to do together including taking toddlers and babies to community lots
I doubt that these will be done too and yes why I've lost hope in the Sims 4 future. There are some activities like going to aquariums or the zoo and playing family sports I wouldn't mind either. Sims in Sims 4 are too much of hermits currently with the main focus of indoor activities only.
I have my wishlist things (well, the ones I could think of at the time) over in a thread here, priorities and all. I'm not counting on all of them being added but some of them would be great for sure. (it's a long post
Your list is awesome and quite a few of those are on my wishlist too. Not quite sure if I want the burglar to come back but I wouldn't be opposed to it (for major TS1 nostalgia reasons) as long as we also have a security system though!.
The thing about fears: we already have a version of it for pets, so it would be great to have those expanded to Sims too. I wouldn't even mind if they're silly things at times, it would still add to the game.
In a way, I think the game's improvements (we did get quite some over the years, and yes, some of them should've been in base game but since we don't have a time machine that's the best solution: terrains, toddlers, glass roofs etc, it all adds up) got a little stalled by the development of packs that a big amount of players expected, the ones that are repeats of previous ones from TS2 and TS3 like Seasons and pets and now university. I wish it wasn't as much of a case of "okay, what's a priority" on more levels than just "what do people want" but it is what it is.
With the major ones pretty much out of the way now (what's left that's already been done? more occults, a futuristic pack, hobbies), hopefully, instead of it meaning the end, it means we're going to get packs with things not seen before.
Since the team doesn't seem to be anywhere near done, I'm not willing to throw in the towel yet either.
Here's to tons more happy Simming
Inclusivity isn't the problem. The problem is that someone at EA/Maxis with the power to make decisions thinks that inclusivity takes precedence over everything else. The Sims is a game, players have always made representative characters in their own games, even if they required CC to do it. It's nice of EA/Maxis to include more skin tones and different cultural items. Yet, in the end, the most important aspect of TS4 shouldn't be that. It should be to make sure that the company is producing a great game that people actually want to play.
The article that I read made it seem as if that person wanted to build a self-soothing simulator to help people to work through their issues and/or to 'get even'. If that is how some folk are using the game, more power to them. Yet, that's not how this series started and I really, really hope that's not where it will continue to go. For me, it's just about wanting to play a game.
For example, EA/Maxis spent an entire year revamping CAS so that clothes could be used with either gender. I appreciate the effort, but that time could have been spent on, say, an attraction system, likes/dislikes, fixing whims, or fixing the many bugs that keep cropping up in the game. After all of that effort, most of the clothing doesn't even look that good on the opposite gender.
My apologies, I didn't include a "not all Simmers" disclaimer as I was talking about a general trend in the world, especially social media.
When you have people who talk about being 'woke' for changing their tack from focusing on the positive to being critical (and not particularly constructive), when you have people who make it a point to answer "what do you enjoy about X" with "I don't" or "nothing", when people who do enjoy something are lumped into a group called childish and naive and simple, then it's not hard to see that those people see a level of coolness in being negative. But again, *not all people*.
And yes, there definitely are those who act like something is useless and objectively bad because it doesn't fit their wants. Again, not everyone.
I'm not dismissing people with genuine constructive ways of how they'd want to see the game be different. I have, however, very little time for those who come into any conversation that's constructive with "I deserve to be heard and my take is that this is beyond helping, why bother". I love threads with people's ideas, ways that things could work better, ways that the game could cater to more than just one type of player. Which unfortunately is less common than (again, not applying to every single person) the attitude of "it's not gonna change, time to make sure everyone agrees".
Veering off topic a little: those kind of attitudes, on the grand scale of things, are definitely an ongoing trend, especially online. A significant amount of people (still not everyone) took "think critically" and took it to mean "cancel everything that has the slightest issue". It doesn't only apply to games, it's not every single person out there as many do indeed think critically in terms of seeing issues and looking for ways to fix them, but social media can be an echo chamber for people like the ones I mentioned. Final disclaimer: general trends, not applicable to every single person.
And to be clear, my criticisms about the Sims 4 are not because it's trendy to criticize the sims 4. I think most people aren't hating on a game to fit in with their online communities. There are always trolls, and there are some people who like to jump on the "hate train" so to speak, but on the forums here, I really haven't seen that. What I do see is long-time simmers who really, really want the game to be more engaging for them, and want to have some influence into what Sims 5 becomes.
I linked it somewhere earlier in some thread, but when the game first launched the forums were in an uproar. The devs totally ignored criticism until someone made a story about an evil guy in a hotdog outfit named Mr. Sausages which highlighted many of the problems. And yes, the devs read and acknowledged it and made changes to the game, though many of the underlying issues just can't be fixed.
I wish I were artistic enough to do something similar. Using humor, no hyperbole, just highlighting what I see are flaws but in a way that doesn't make people completely defensive.
I’m currently not active in the Sims 3 section by the way, because I love the totally closed off experience I enjoy in that game now for a change. I love to share, but right now I’m enjoying the game the way I did the first 8 months I played it in 2010, when I had no idea there were forums for the game. Later, when I became active on a forum and shared my stories and experiences and read other people’s stories and experiences, though I very much enjoyed that, I sometimes missed those first 8 months. So, at this moment I’m back to that: Sims 3 in my own bubble, Feedback and PM here to socialize with simmers and exchange opinions about the franchise.
Discussing the current development of the franchise in that respect is inevitable and believe it or not, I also enjoy that. Not because I like to be negative (the few times I did enjoy, really enjoy, Sims 4 made me realize how much I crave that) but because I like to discuss this franchise and share thoughts how things could and should be better. At the same time it is a sad given for me personally that Sims 4 is a lost case. For me it really is. Only ROM had me considering for a minute because of the theme, but not anymore. I could lie about that to spare people’s feelings, but when asked (like in the topic “should they end Sims 4 and start focusing on Sims 5”) my response is that yes, I genuinely feel that Sims 4 has had its chance and the latest developments don’t support the feeling that it’s going to get better. The game is older than the predecessors ever were, I think we have every right to express the want for it to end, to express a longing for a successor. Not that I’m totally confident that successor will be great (for me), because I’m not, but because I want to be hopeful again. I can’t help I lost all hope for Sims 4, on a personal level. I am never going to love and enjoy that game (unless they do manage to make basegame adjustments like Carl’s recently suggested in his video; I’m very sceptical about that but if they can will pull that off, nobody will be more enchanted to be proved wrong than me).
As much as I enjoyed your post the other day this^ was an absolute mess.
Repetition doesn't equate to passion.
First of all how many who play the game post on Social Media?
Is your opinion worth more than someone who never expresses themselves on forums?
Whatever happened to voting with your wallet?
I'm on my 3rd Stratocaster. should I be sending open letters to Fender expressing my love and dedication to them for their wonderful product?
And what would happen if that product went down hill? Should I seek out the forums and post about my displeasure on a daily basis?
Or just go out and buy a Les Paul?
When someone does create a post listing the things they like about the game, it's not seen as someone posting their opinion.
It's seen as as opportunity for the same cast of characters to tear it down point by point until that person just goes away
I don't see the need to prove anything to this franchise.
You basically just said your opinion counts more because you care more. smh