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Dine Out: Broken pack with lost potential?
Raevyn
Posts: 428 Member
Can we take a moment to discuss how amazing the Sims 4 Dine Out could be? The potential? Be a manager who runs the restaurant, work as the head chef, host or waiter? Or struggle to do all 3!
Oh what could've been!!
Now let's take ankther moment to discuss the reality of the Dine Out pack.
My Sim is running a restaurant & I've tried everything to turn a decent profit. It's a 5 star restaurant, we have 3 waiters, 1 host & 2 chefs per max.
* Often only 2/3 waiters will arrive, despite paying for 3.
* The waiters will deliver food to tables & do the animation to place it down, yet nothing appears on the table & no money is given. The waiter then retakes their order & starts again.
* The host sometimes idles rather than seating customers
* Waiters also idle randomly or will gitch & reset
* Customers also occasionally glitch & reset losing the star over their heads.
* Customers walk all around the dinning room causing chaos, lag & waiters to idle while waiting for them to move.
Because of all this, my 5 star restaurant gets an average of 5-8 customers & makes about $3000 a night but only about $500-800 is PROFIT! Despite having the most expensive foods listed.
Currently playing with NO MODS, new save file & a repaired game with mods turned off in game.
I'm shocked at the state of Dine Out & that these basic issues haven't been fixed still all these years later 😐😐
So what do you think? Does Dine Out need to be improved and completeled finally?
In my opinion ESSENTIAL FIXES & IMPROVEMENTS to Dine Out include:
* Stop random idling
* customers once shown their table, stay seated until leaving
* bug fixes including waiter glitching, customer resets, & waiter resets
* workers arrive when hired & show up on the lot to work
* raises to food prices overall
NON ESSENTIAL IMPROVEMENTS TO GAME PLAY
* Ability to work as the chef, host, or waiter to save on wages by any active family member teen to elder
* improved perks, including larger tips
* more realistic pricing
* ability to stock own kitchen with home grown & harvested fruits, vege & fish to save on ingredient costs & improve meal prices
* customers who line up for the host station rather than scrambling all around the dining room or host area.
Oh what could've been!!
Now let's take ankther moment to discuss the reality of the Dine Out pack.
My Sim is running a restaurant & I've tried everything to turn a decent profit. It's a 5 star restaurant, we have 3 waiters, 1 host & 2 chefs per max.
* Often only 2/3 waiters will arrive, despite paying for 3.
* The waiters will deliver food to tables & do the animation to place it down, yet nothing appears on the table & no money is given. The waiter then retakes their order & starts again.
* The host sometimes idles rather than seating customers
* Waiters also idle randomly or will gitch & reset
* Customers also occasionally glitch & reset losing the star over their heads.
* Customers walk all around the dinning room causing chaos, lag & waiters to idle while waiting for them to move.
Because of all this, my 5 star restaurant gets an average of 5-8 customers & makes about $3000 a night but only about $500-800 is PROFIT! Despite having the most expensive foods listed.
Currently playing with NO MODS, new save file & a repaired game with mods turned off in game.
I'm shocked at the state of Dine Out & that these basic issues haven't been fixed still all these years later 😐😐
So what do you think? Does Dine Out need to be improved and completeled finally?
In my opinion ESSENTIAL FIXES & IMPROVEMENTS to Dine Out include:
* Stop random idling
* customers once shown their table, stay seated until leaving
* bug fixes including waiter glitching, customer resets, & waiter resets
* workers arrive when hired & show up on the lot to work
* raises to food prices overall
NON ESSENTIAL IMPROVEMENTS TO GAME PLAY
* Ability to work as the chef, host, or waiter to save on wages by any active family member teen to elder
* improved perks, including larger tips
* more realistic pricing
* ability to stock own kitchen with home grown & harvested fruits, vege & fish to save on ingredient costs & improve meal prices
* customers who line up for the host station rather than scrambling all around the dining room or host area.
Post edited by EA_Leeloo on
Dine Out: Broken pack with lost potential? 124 votes
Yes, Dine Out is glitchy and needs improvements
73%
91 votes
No, Dine Out works fine for me
25%
31 votes
I don't own Dine Out,
1%
2 votes
4
Comments
But i think that they won't go back and fix the issues that people that own restaurants often talk about. They won't. There are big bugs in this game, bugs that are more than annoying, bugs that take away the fun. I think that people that has bought all dlc are plagued with bugs and they don't come back. They fix a dozen of small bugs per month... the game wilk never be fixed. Specially what is so old as Dine Out.
one bug in dine out that is most glaring is when you order something to eat, there are times where it's like the order was not even acknowledged and every other sim that comes to dine gets something to eat, half a day can go by before you finally run out of patience and leave, worse still when you go back to try order before you leave, the game recognised you ordered from the menu but the food still isn't coming to the table.
that one bug is really annoying. so when i have a sim who made it through the other side of that and learned all the experimental food, i then save the sim for a new save, and then if i need to get another sim to learn the recipes, i have that sim who learned them to cook them at home from the chef station and send the food across to that sim i want to learn. This is just to get around that bug.
Oh, 100% When I saw the trailer I thought we'd be able to run our own restaurants and be the chef, waiter, host etc Or have our family members (as a family run restaurant) working their with the OPTION of hiring. NOT only being able to hire
Yeah I agree! The amount of time customers spend at the Restaurant OR even as a player sim eating at one - it just takes too long to get your meal & eat etc. Same with the customers in a player-run restaurant, one sim can be there 4 hours!! And STILL be eating... Far too long.
Yup 100% agree! I doubt they will go back and fix the buggy content! At this point I think its push as much content out as possible to bring in the $$$ and forget the old content. I think this game needs a YEAR of bug fixes and content upgrades to existing packs before bringing out more content. But it seems theyre working on the Sims 5 now - so lets PRAY they actually FIX the bugs and issues with the content on TS4 prior to release & continue after release. I think I'll give up on the Sims as a franchise entirely if they manage to ruin the Sims 5.
With some mods I have managed to make Dine Out pretty playable, I have also noticed that how successful your restaurant is depends a lot on how your restaurant is built, I occasionally see the bugs you listed though and my waiters fail constantly at cleaning up the tables. I agree about the profit part, I make barely any money, and I can't have my restaurant open while I am on another lot either, I get no customers and I get a message that says that my restaurant is working at a loss.
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A lot of problems occur if there is too much clutter in the space especially decor that takes up floor space, not enough empty tiles around/between tables (you need at least one full tile, two is ideal). Not leaving enough space near the hostess station, sims will bottle neck if it’s too cramped. Over decorating the kitchen and having too many tables also causes routing issues and bottle necks.
There is a limit to how many sims will show up in a restaurant at one time. I think it’s around 12 not including staff so 6-8 tables maximum should do. Mods that increase this limit also foul things up badly because the game mechanics don’t know what to do with all those extra sims. Bathrooms having at least 2 toilets and sinks helps too, but isn’t mandatory.
There is a lot of back and forth floor traffic in restaurants which can cause massive routing issues and simulation lag if your build isn’t designed for it, or you insist on cluttering up floor space with decor or unnecessary tables, or by trying to mod your game in a way that overwhelms the capacity the game was designed to handle.
Thank you for this helpful advice!
However no clever design fixes the worst bug: that Sims stop eating after having finished their drinks.
I do sometimes download player built restaurants and have had no problems. But I am careful to pick simple builds and have modified things myself. The latest one was a lovely Japanese themed restaurant. It had an upstairs bar area and apartment which I deleted. I don't want extra stuff like that to entice Sims away from ordering food and eating it. Instead I added extra tables upstairs including an 8 seater for my largest families.
The only problem I've ever had is an EA built restaurant where I never got my food because the waitress kept dropping it. This had happened repeatedly. Finally I deleted her from Manage Households and it solved my problem. She must have had the clumsy trait. So don't hire clumsy Sims!
The only other thing lately the waiters and waitresses don't clear your table, so sometimes I have had to make one of my Sims do it if dessert is wanted. This is fairly recent though.
http://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/924539/features-that-needs-depth-and-ways-to-improve
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That's very intresting! As a story-driven player I rarely make my own builds, usually opting to save time and download one from the gallery. Curious now as to whether i made one using the base game dine-out venue if it would be less buggy/glitchy.
Definitely, something I'll have to try myself.
Perhaps the bugs come in the process of uploading lots to the gallery and then downloading them & playing, perhaps that changes routing or somehow creates some bugs in the lot which makes dine out buggy.
Thank you for this. I was having issues a few years ago until I learned it's all about how you set up things and how you play. I think they should include a tutorial with dine out because it's a learning experience. I don't think it's broken mine work fine when played correctly.
I know they can't stop making content to focus on fixing this broken game but maybe they should hire another team just to do bug fixes on this game. If they did that maybe they'd eventually catch up.
I do remember a time where dine out worked fine but as more content has been added it's caused the pack to bug out. Also it would be really nice to add the option for your sims to work any position. I don't see why I shouldn't be able to have my own household work the restaurant instead of hiring people to do it.
Keeping the restaurant small along with having two chef stations usually helps keep everything running smoothly. Right now Dine Out is a lot better than it was, maybe in the best shape it has been since it's release. But it could use some fine tuning so we could create larger restaurants, choose to have family members work as employees, or have our main Sim in the role of owner and head chef. That little improvement would provide the incentive for me to tackle the grind of leveling up and running a five star restaurant. But it's just too difficult to do that with the way it is now.
Take musical chairs for instance, that's something that's been a problem since the base game, and can probably be blamed on the Sims having other needs--they LOVE computers, they LOVE drinking water, and they LOVE making mac and cheese whenever they're hungry. Any one of those things could explain why Sims keep standing up, it's a constant struggle between "I have needs I must fulfill, and there's an object nearby that can fill it" and "I am a patron at a restaurant, and I must sit".
We all know what Sims are like when they're hungry: somebody is preparing a group meal, but their AI is telling them to find food. The food doesn't exist yet (it's still being crafted) so for all intents and purposes they see no problem with preparing a meal. It's entirely possible that this is what is happening: they want to make a beeline for the restaurant's kitchen to make a meal, but the Dine Out system is asserting "no, sit down, FOOD IS COMING", so they sit back down at a different spot.
Likewise, they LOVE socializing, and they're talking to an NPC who's sitting at a different table, or standing up. So what do they want to do? They want to sit closer to them. So they give up their assigned seat.
The only way I can reasonably see a restaurant functioning is if all the Sims present have their AI severely reduced for the duration.
...because once they start talking, the AI is gonna want them to sit with the person they're socializing with, and if they're hungry, they're going to want to prepare food. And if they're (slightly) bored, they're gonna want to find a computer.
You can't really win here.
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It takes extremely long to eat a three-course meal. So I just make them eat a one course/two course meal.
I never had problems with owning restaurants though, they're working fine for me. I super enjoy running restaurants.
I love this pack because I love restaurants in real life too. Wish sims team will keep improving it, and also other older packs as well.
I download a lot of stuff from the gallery and assorted sites and yeah - almost every download should come with a time budget to basically remake the build until it works...
Quite a few will list themselves with tags like 'no CC' and yet they are clearly made to require certain CC to be complete (almost every CC I have downloaded from 'the sims resource' has had all the wallpaper fail despite me having all the required items) - both in objects that were not mentioned and script or lot traits or other mods to make things work.
Pathing issues too, yeah. I suspect a LOT of these mods are built to look really nice and maybe pose some sims for snapshots, but by builders that don't actually run them through playing the game. I am constantly finding pathing issues - and not things like the 'stairs / platform' issue that was the result of a patch, but just actual objects in spaces too small for them to be used... or restaurants with no counters so all the food gets dropped on the floor when workers try to cook...
There's a lot of great stuff out there to grab and add to your game, but just always assume it arrives broken or untested and needs work. You're downloading fixer-uppers even if they claim otherwise.
Would love to see your mod list for that and see if there's any I want to go grab.
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