I would guess most likely a glitch. Either that, or the traits were put into play. What are the traits for each person? is one hot headed? That could be it.
I love video games because of the things that I could never do in real life... For instance, in the sims you can get a job and a house.
Origin ID: Mainmanvs100
I would guess most likely a glitch. Either that, or the traits were put into play. What are the traits for each person? is one hot headed? That could be it.
No, in fact Smokey is Friend to the World and really loves Lyss. I thought there was something strange going on when she wouldn't compliment his art numerous times, until I forced it. Could it be that it's because he's mentoring her in Painting and she's only level 6? But why would a teacher be insulted if his student said they liked his art? That makes NO sense! I loved it when my students complimented me!
I would guess most likely a glitch. Either that, or the traits were put into play. What are the traits for each person? is one hot headed? That could be it.
No, in fact Smokey is Friend to the World and really loves Lyss. I thought there was something strange going on when she wouldn't compliment his art numerous times, until I forced it. Could it be that it's because he's mentoring her in Painting and she's only level 6? But why would a teacher be insulted if his student said they liked his art? That makes NO sense! I loved it when my students complimented me!
What can I say... This entire game makes no sense at all. It's so frustrating trying to play this half baked game.
I would guess most likely a glitch. Either that, or the traits were put into play. What are the traits for each person? is one hot headed? That could be it.
No, in fact Smokey is Friend to the World and really loves Lyss. I thought there was something strange going on when she wouldn't compliment his art numerous times, until I forced it. Could it be that it's because he's mentoring her in Painting and she's only level 6? But why would a teacher be insulted if his student said they liked his art? That makes NO sense! I loved it when my students complimented me!
What can I say... This entire game makes no sense at all. It's so frustrating to play this half baked game.
It's like every subroutine was written by a different person and the coders never coordinated with the others, more than superficially anyway, it's not cohesive (sort of like this buggy website). The only reason it's SO frustrating is that it's really interesting at times, then you get into that new thing and it leads you to boring/infuriating/frustrating nowhere, with so many poor choices made by the designers as to directions of play and logical outcomes. That's one reason sandbox is better than amusement park. With sandbox, you find your own fun, with amusement park the designers have to really be on the ball to keep the customers having fun, that's much harder to accomplish. If you don't have what the people want down pretty much pat, don't go for amusement park.
However, the CAS function is fantastic, so is Build. It's just that when it comes to interpersonal relationships... which is supposedly what TS4 is all about... people who must be totally clueless about that subject seem to have been the ones who coded it.
I would guess most likely a glitch. Either that, or the traits were put into play. What are the traits for each person? is one hot headed? That could be it.
No, in fact Smokey is Friend to the World and really loves Lyss. I thought there was something strange going on when she wouldn't compliment his art numerous times, until I forced it. Could it be that it's because he's mentoring her in Painting and she's only level 6? But why would a teacher be insulted if his student said they liked his art? That makes NO sense! I loved it when my students complimented me!
What can I say... This entire game makes no sense at all. It's so frustrating to play this half baked game.
It's like every subroutine was written by a different person and the coders never coordinated with the others, more than superficially anyway, it's not cohesive (sort of like this buggy website). The only reason it's SO frustrating is that it's really interesting at times, then you get into that new thing and it leads you to boring/infuriating/frustrating nowhere, with so many poor choices made by the designers as to directions of play and logical outcomes. That's one reason sandbox is better than amusement park. With sandbox, you find your own fun, with amusement park the designers have to really be on the ball to keep the customers having fun, that's much harder to accomplish. If you don't have what the people want down pretty much pat, don't go for amusement park.
However, the CAS function is fantastic, so is Build. It's just that when it comes to interpersonal relationships... which is supposedly what TS4 is all about... people who must be totally clueless about that subject seem to have been the ones who coded it.
Yup this game was terribly made. Nothing but a lacking bug fest. I'm not sure what you mean by frustration that can be interesting at times. The things in this game don't interest or excite me like the older Sims game did. The game just doesn't feel natural and just feels so forced. It's not a sandbox anymore. It's not a life simulation. It's some cartoon RPG drama. Add that with all the missing content, bugs, broken emotions, etc and there is where my frustrations lie.
I would guess most likely a glitch. Either that, or the traits were put into play. What are the traits for each person? is one hot headed? That could be it.
No, in fact Smokey is Friend to the World and really loves Lyss. I thought there was something strange going on when she wouldn't compliment his art numerous times, until I forced it. Could it be that it's because he's mentoring her in Painting and she's only level 6? But why would a teacher be insulted if his student said they liked his art? That makes NO sense! I loved it when my students complimented me!
What can I say... This entire game makes no sense at all. It's so frustrating to play this half baked game.
It's like every subroutine was written by a different person and the coders never coordinated with the others, more than superficially anyway, it's not cohesive (sort of like this buggy website). The only reason it's SO frustrating is that it's really interesting at times, then you get into that new thing and it leads you to boring/infuriating/frustrating nowhere, with so many poor choices made by the designers as to directions of play and logical outcomes. That's one reason sandbox is better than amusement park. With sandbox, you find your own fun, with amusement park the designers have to really be on the ball to keep the customers having fun, that's much harder to accomplish. If you don't have what the people want down pretty much pat, don't go for amusement park.
However, the CAS function is fantastic, so is Build. It's just that when it comes to interpersonal relationships... which is supposedly what TS4 is all about... people who must be totally clueless about that subject seem to have been the ones who coded it.
Yup this game was terribly made. Nothing but a lacking bug fest. I'm not sure what you mean by frustration that can be interesting at times. The things in this game don't interest or excite me like the older Sims game did. The game just doesn't feel natural and just feels so forced. It's not a sandbox anymore. It's not a life simulation. It's some cartoon RPG drama. Add that with all the missing content, bugs, broken emotions, etc and there is where my frustrations lie.
Not "frustration that can be interesting at times," something that's interesting at first becoming frustrating, like the Herbalism skill. In order to make the more exotic remedies you need insects that must be caught by searching for them all over Granite Falls. I've never come close to finding them all, or even half of them. The last two times I went to Granite Falls the only insects I could find were bees and a Dragon Dragonfly. WHY are elements needed to complete a skill's function impossible to gather?!
And what's with the useless Playful dolls you dig up? (And the weird little dance that goes with them, it's vicariously embarrassing for a big, hulking guy to do that dance.) Who thought up THAT winner? Besides the Comedy career, when do you need Playful decor? The odd date? On top of that, one of the patches almost did away with digging up crystals (which bump energy, something actually useful). Catch a "treasure" chest while fishing and it's an apple, strawberry, sage or such. Once a cowplant seed, that's about it. Yippee.
Then there are the career unlocks that have emotion auras that are more often than not useless to the career they're supposed to be for, like the Energy items for Entertainers. Astronauts' optimum mood is energized, so ALL the astronaut stuff boosts Focus or Confidence. Gee, thanks. Did the coders for the objects not talk to the career coders and vice versa... like... EVER?!
hm ... there are literally - T O N S - of things in TS4 making no sense,
maybe you just discover them now one by one cause you started to care for Smokey - i am sorry that it is happening to you & Smokey
that's why i stoped playing sims i care about, cause their life would be just ruined by the current state of the game
that would be no fun for me at all to see the story i created for those sims to become shattered because this game doesn't deliver any consistent tools to be able to tell a player's story
as a TS4 player you are being grabbed by the hand & told what to do & told to stop finally to care for things you care about
that's why this game has most of the sandbox from previous iterations removed
that's why i'm waiting for a Family EP,
in the hope that the devs are forced to at least create islands of illusion of sims' relationships that matter
i am really curious if they'll succeed
i won't be participating in the forums & the gallery anymore - thanks EA
I had Smokey's new wife compliment his art and he took it as a huge insult! Why?!
It makes as much sense as two Sims sitting inside their home who are roommates who have been friends for a very long time suddenly having an "Awkward Encounter"....causing relationship points to decrease. How can you encounter someone you are already sitting with, and already discussing whatever? And how is it awkward? when nothing happened? Wait, now that your eyes are open you will start to see more and more of how the game isn't living up to Will Wright's formula that a Sim has to react and or behave in ways we would expect them to behave. That entails quite a bit from covering how they would behave if someone cheated right in front of them in the same room, to saying 'I like your art work' doesn't it? This game shouldn't be called The Sims 4 for that very reason.
"Games Are Not The Place To Tell Stories, Games Are Meant To Let People Tell Their Own Stories"...Will Wright.
hm ... there are literally - T O N S - of things in TS4 making no sense,
maybe you just discover them now one by one cause you started to care for Smokey - i am sorry that it is happening to you & Smokey
that's why i stoped playing sims i care about, cause their life would be just ruined by the current state of the game
that would be no fun for me at all to see the story i created for those sims to become shattered because this game doesn't deliver any consistent tools to be able to tell a player's story
as a TS4 player you are being grabbed by the hand & told what to do & told to stop finally to care for things you care about
that's why this game has most of the sandbox from previous iterations removed
that's why i'm waiting for a Family EP,
in the hope that the devs are forced to at least create islands of illusion of sims' relationships that matter
i am really curious if they'll succeed
It's not that I just discovered them, a few weeks ago I commented on how brilliant I thought the comments in your thread critiquing TS4 were, guess you don't remember. I agreed with all the criticisms, I'm just hard-headed enough to try to push my way through anyway. Smokey WAS getting developed one way or another, no matter how hard the game worked against that happening. That's why I moved him so many times, choosing to go through the tedious process of rebuilding the town rather than give up on him. I didn't just want to figure out why he was unflirty, I wanted to discover how to build that quality into ALL my future sims without the need for mods to accomplish it.
A couple of months ago I made a great simulation of my son and his family, caught my son dead-on, looks just like him, but I couldn't bear to play them because the sim of my son, who's a meticulously faithful husband in real life, was running all over the map in a state of constant Flirty, and I couldn't keep it from happening any way except watching him every minute (rather hard to do when you're playing 4 sims at once). That was SO foreign to anything he would EVER do. So, when Smokey exhibited the unflirty qualities my son's sim should've had, my quest to unravel the emotion system of TS4 began. The deeper I dug the more I realized there IS NO emotion system, it's just thrown together emotional junk without any rhyme or reason behind it past "get it on" with anyone and everyone all the time if you can, no matter the emotional devastation inherent in that philosophy should anyone actually operate that way in real life.
The TS4 people came out with an ad touting the fact sims in TS4 stay married and hardly ever divorce. They very carefully avoided the accompanying fact the only reason that's possible is that the spouses cheat on each other and don't seem to care if they're being cheated on. I'll bet there are a lot of sim couples that the players didn't have divorce, but just stopped playing them instead. Smokey's got two such relationships where I stopped playing their game when his wife started cheating. There were a couple of times I saved single Smokey first then had him marry, only to discover his new wife was a cheater, so reverted back to the single Smokey save.
This game is a puzzle that reveals a consistency, not in gameplay but in the minds who designed the gameplay. The entire game is designed to drive a wedge between interpersonal relationships, shattering fidelity and family, and have players, over time, accept that as the norm. Psychologically, what we accept as okay, even if it's fantasy, maybe especially if it's fantasy, because our guards are down, slips past our conscious emotional barriers and embeds in our unreasoning subconscious that accepts anything as true that makes it there. You are not really ever one way in a game and another way in real life. It's YOU playing, and it's YOU accepting. It's dangerously naive to believe otherwise.
When a game tries to FORCE you into a playstyle that's particularly damaging in that it attempts to desensitize you into accepting what you know is wrong, warning sirens should scream in your head. Mature adults have trouble handling such things, think what damage it can do to young people just beginning to figure interpersonal relationships out.
That, in way too long a post, is what bothers me more than the bugs in TS4. It's not the stuff that glitches, it's the stuff that seems to be working exactly the way the designers intended... and that's a very bad way. The game teaches that you can't ever have what you want or do what you want, that no one is ever faithful, and that no one cares about anything much anyway. ALL damaging messages that are blatantly untrue in the real world.
hm ... there are literally - T O N S - of things in TS4 making no sense,
maybe you just discover them now one by one cause you started to care for Smokey - i am sorry that it is happening to you & Smokey
that's why i stoped playing sims i care about, cause their life would be just ruined by the current state of the game
that would be no fun for me at all to see the story i created for those sims to become shattered because this game doesn't deliver any consistent tools to be able to tell a player's story
as a TS4 player you are being grabbed by the hand & told what to do & told to stop finally to care for things you care about
that's why this game has most of the sandbox from previous iterations removed
that's why i'm waiting for a Family EP,
in the hope that the devs are forced to at least create islands of illusion of sims' relationships that matter
i am really curious if they'll succeed
It's not that I just discovered them, a few weeks ago I commented on how brilliant I thought the comments in your thread critiquing TS4 were, guess you don't remember. I agreed with all the criticisms, I'm just hard-headed enough to try to push my way through anyway. Smokey WAS getting developed one way or another, no matter how hard the game worked against that happening. That's why I moved him so many times, choosing to go through the tedious process of rebuilding the town rather than give up on him. I didn't just want to figure out why he was unflirty, I wanted to discover how to build that quality into ALL my future sims without the need for mods to accomplish it.
A couple of months ago I made a great simulation of my son and his family, caught my son dead-on, looks just like him, but I couldn't bear to play them because the sim of my son, who's a meticulously faithful husband in real life, was running all over the map in a state of constant Flirty, and I couldn't keep it from happening any way except watching him every minute (rather hard to do when you're playing 4 sims at once). That was SO foreign to anything he would EVER do. So, when Smokey exhibited the unflirty qualities my son's sim should've had, my quest to unravel the emotion system of TS4 began. The deeper I dug the more I realized there IS NO emotion system, it's just thrown together emotional junk without any rhyme or reason behind it past "get it on" with anyone and everyone all the time if you can, no matter the emotional devastation inherent in that philosophy should anyone actually operate that way in real life.
The TS4 people came out with an ad touting the fact sims in TS4 stay married and hardly ever divorce. They very carefully avoided the accompanying fact the only reason that's possible is that the spouses cheat on each other and don't seem to care if they're being cheated on. I'll bet there are a lot of sim couples that the players didn't have divorce, but just stopped playing them instead. Smokey's got two such relationships where I stopped playing their game when his wife started cheating. There were a couple of times I saved single Smokey first then had him marry, only to discover his new wife was a cheater, so reverted back to the single Smokey save.
This game is a puzzle that reveals a consistency, not in gameplay but in the minds who designed the gameplay. The entire game is designed to drive a wedge between interpersonal relationships, shattering fidelity and family, and have players, over time, accept that as the norm. Psychologically, what we accept as okay, even if it's fantasy, maybe especially if it's fantasy, because our guards are down, slips past our conscious emotional barriers and embeds in our unreasoning subconscious that accepts anything as true that makes it there. You are not really ever one way in a game and another way in real life. It's YOU playing, and it's YOU accepting. It's dangerously naive to believe otherwise.
When a game tries to FORCE you into a playstyle that's particularly damaging in that it attempts to desensitize you into accepting what you know is wrong, warning sirens should scream in your head. Mature adults have trouble handling such things, think what damage it can do to young people just beginning to figure interpersonal relationships out.
That, in way too long a post, is what bothers me more than the bugs in TS4. It's not the stuff that glitches, it's the stuff that seems to be working exactly the way the designers intended... and that's a very bad way. The game teaches that you can't ever have what you want or do what you want, that no one is ever faithful, and that no one cares about anything much anyway. ALL damaging messages that are blatantly untrue in the real world.
I applaud your courage in pointing out what I see this game doing. Thank you. Not many will agree, and won't see it, but it no longer challenges our own values, as that was the basis for The Sims in the beginning. If a Sim cheated somebody was going to be upset and get slapped. Anything goes in this game isn't the type of game I want to play. I want one like we had in the past that challenges me to make a decision, should I allow that Sim to continue slapping the other Sim for being unfaithful (and depending on the traits I would expect it) or do I just let it go (the cheating) and my Sim let's it go and just keeps on going for the sake of goaling in the game?
Failure states (such as an unhappy relationship) is part of what made The Sims a challenge not how many hours I have logged. They have seriously lost the heart of the game with this one.
ETA: I will just add this and not get on my soap box, but Will Wright is the one who said his game challenged people's values, with the gameplay whether they would feel guilty about the torture or the cheating or whatever. And I have to say I like his games better.
"Games Are Not The Place To Tell Stories, Games Are Meant To Let People Tell Their Own Stories"...Will Wright.
You know, I'm thinking about that long post that @pax1sw wrote. And you know, that is an issue -- the throw-away relationships. I'm not sure if it's an insidious plot or anything, but it's just the complete lack of depth to interpersonal relationships that makes it difficult for me to connect to the sims. They're all emotion driven, and those emotions are so transient.
For instance, trying to seduce a married sim -- it's not always easy, but if you get them flirty, it suddenly is. The emotions themselves are shallow, which makes their reactions and relationships similarly shallow.
I had Smokey's new wife compliment his art and he took it as a huge insult! Why?!
It makes as much sense as two Sims sitting inside their home who are roommates who have been friends for a very long time suddenly having an "Awkward Encounter"....causing relationship points to decrease. How can you encounter someone you are already sitting with, and already discussing whatever? And how is it awkward? when nothing happened? Wait, now that your eyes are open you will start to see more and more of how the game isn't living up to Will Wright's formula that a Sim has to react and or behave in ways we would expect them to behave. That entails quite a bit from covering how they would behave if someone cheated right in front of them in the same room, to saying 'I like your art work' doesn't it? This game shouldn't be called The Sims 4 for that very reason.
TS4 is definitely not like any of the previous sims games. Wish there was some way to have TS4's CAS and Build added to TS3, that would be the perfect game. The rest of TS4 is a minefield full of carrots on sticks you can never have, leading you to where you don't want to go.
hm ... there are literally - T O N S - of things in TS4 making no sense,
maybe you just discover them now one by one cause you started to care for Smokey - i am sorry that it is happening to you & Smokey
that's why i stoped playing sims i care about, cause their life would be just ruined by the current state of the game
that would be no fun for me at all to see the story i created for those sims to become shattered because this game doesn't deliver any consistent tools to be able to tell a player's story
as a TS4 player you are being grabbed by the hand & told what to do & told to stop finally to care for things you care about
that's why this game has most of the sandbox from previous iterations removed
that's why i'm waiting for a Family EP,
in the hope that the devs are forced to at least create islands of illusion of sims' relationships that matter
i am really curious if they'll succeed
It's not that I just discovered them, a few weeks ago I commented on how brilliant I thought the comments in your thread critiquing TS4 were, guess you don't remember. I agreed with all the criticisms, I'm just hard-headed enough to try to push my way through anyway. Smokey WAS getting developed one way or another, no matter how hard the game worked against that happening. That's why I moved him so many times, choosing to go through the tedious process of rebuilding the town rather than give up on him. I didn't just want to figure out why he was unflirty, I wanted to discover how to build that quality into ALL my future sims without the need for mods to accomplish it.
A couple of months ago I made a great simulation of my son and his family, caught my son dead-on, looks just like him, but I couldn't bear to play them because the sim of my son, who's a meticulously faithful husband in real life, was running all over the map in a state of constant Flirty, and I couldn't keep it from happening any way except watching him every minute (rather hard to do when you're playing 4 sims at once). That was SO foreign to anything he would EVER do. So, when Smokey exhibited the unflirty qualities my son's sim should've had, my quest to unravel the emotion system of TS4 began. The deeper I dug the more I realized there IS NO emotion system, it's just thrown together emotional junk without any rhyme or reason behind it past "get it on" with anyone and everyone all the time if you can, no matter the emotional devastation inherent in that philosophy should anyone actually operate that way in real life.
The TS4 people came out with an ad touting the fact sims in TS4 stay married and hardly ever divorce. They very carefully avoided the accompanying fact the only reason that's possible is that the spouses cheat on each other and don't seem to care if they're being cheated on. I'll bet there are a lot of sim couples that the players didn't have divorce, but just stopped playing them instead. Smokey's got two such relationships where I stopped playing their game when his wife started cheating. There were a couple of times I saved single Smokey first then had him marry, only to discover his new wife was a cheater, so reverted back to the single Smokey save.
This game is a puzzle that reveals a consistency, not in gameplay but in the minds who designed the gameplay. The entire game is designed to drive a wedge between interpersonal relationships, shattering fidelity and family, and have players, over time, accept that as the norm. Psychologically, what we accept as okay, even if it's fantasy, maybe especially if it's fantasy, because our guards are down, slips past our conscious emotional barriers and embeds in our unreasoning subconscious that accepts anything as true that makes it there. You are not really ever one way in a game and another way in real life. It's YOU playing, and it's YOU accepting. It's dangerously naive to believe otherwise.
When a game tries to FORCE you into a playstyle that's particularly damaging in that it attempts to desensitize you into accepting what you know is wrong, warning sirens should scream in your head. Mature adults have trouble handling such things, think what damage it can do to young people just beginning to figure interpersonal relationships out.
That, in way too long a post, is what bothers me more than the bugs in TS4. It's not the stuff that glitches, it's the stuff that seems to be working exactly the way the designers intended... and that's a very bad way. The game teaches that you can't ever have what you want or do what you want, that no one is ever faithful, and that no one cares about anything much anyway. ALL damaging messages that are blatantly untrue in the real world.
I applaud your courage in pointing out what I see this game doing. Thank you. Not many will agree, and won't see it, but it no longer challenges our own values, as that was the basis for The Sims in the beginning. If a Sim cheated somebody was going to be upset and get slapped. Anything goes in this game isn't the type of game I want to play. I want one like we had in the past that challenges me to make a decision, should I allow that Sim to continue slapping the other Sim for being unfaithful (and depending on the traits I would expect it) or do I just let it go (the cheating) and my Sim let's it go and just keeps on going for the sake of goaling in the game?
Failure states (such as an unhappy relationship) is part of what made The Sims a challenge not how many hours I have logged. They have seriously lost the heart of the game with this one.
ETA: I will just add this and not get on my soap box, but Will Wright is the one who said his game challenged people's values, with the gameplay whether they would feel guilty about the torture or the cheating or whatever. And I have to say I like his games better.
You hit it dead on! Though TS4 asserts it's all about sims relating to each other, that's completely untrue, though they could've designed it that way if that was their actual goal. In TS3, if a sim cheated on their spouse it got all over town and they wound up with a bad reputation that affected not just their spouse but their public persona. In reverse, in TS3 if both spouses were faithful for a period of time they got a public reputation of being faithful. The sims in the previous sims games were almost hyper-aware of the other sims in the game, to the point that while my sim was out at a restaurant and a notice of a huge sale of items he had on consignment came up, every sim in the place stopped, looked and him and cheered. Nothing like any of that will ever happen in TS4, at least not as it is now.
You know, I'm thinking about that long post that @pax1sw wrote. And you know, that is an issue -- the throw-away relationships. I'm not sure if it's an insidious plot or anything, but it's just the complete lack of depth to interpersonal relationships that makes it difficult for me to connect to the sims. They're all emotion driven, and those emotions are so transient.
For instance, trying to seduce a married sim -- it's not always easy, but if you get them flirty, it suddenly is. The emotions themselves are shallow, which makes their reactions and relationships similarly shallow.
With one of Smokey's failed marriages, the day after they were married, while he was at work, 3 of his friends came over to visit. That wasn't unusual, he's always had a lot of company because he has a lot of friends. His new wife invited them all in, and she knew two of the three, but not Smokey's BFF, Sean O'Shae. One was Smokey's married brother, Jake. When she started throwing off actively romantic actions toward Jake one after another, like flirt, embrace, kiss, etc., I checked her relationship panel and discovered she and Jake were already rather heavily romantically involved. I decided I could work through that, after all, she and Smokey had just gone from longtime good friends to married all in the space of a day. THEN she started having wishes about Sean, a guy she didn't even know, to cloudgaze, flirt, get to know, rather fixated on him in her longer-term whims. Nope. Not happening. Revert to single Smokey save.
I had Smokey's new wife compliment his art and he took it as a huge insult! Why?!
She probably said the wrong thing and completely misunderstood what he was trying to accomplish. This is a very realistic attitude from him from what I have known about artists in the past. Patronising?
An artist would accept compliments from a fellow artist he admires and looks up to. Maybe she had too low a grade?
TS4's failure states seem to be more like random punishments:
A Chance Card - sorry, "Adventure Moment" - slapping you with a lame and unfunny story of failure, as well as flushing your performance down the toilet, because there was no Ignore option like TS2.
Sims rejecting socials that should have been friendly.
The emotional deaths - 'nuff said.
Actually, the "Uncomfortable", "Tense", and "Embarrassed" "emotions" in general.
Dishonorable mentions:
The real stinker of a social being "Complain About Problems" that the Uncomfortable "emotion" unlocks. It's under Friendly, but usually is rejected and causes a relationship drop. Shouldn't it be under Mean? You're feeling lousy and are out to make others feel lousy with you.
Dying from a rejected proposal. I get that it's pretty traumatic, but they shouldn't be killing themselves over it. Yes, I always viewed the Embarrassed death as the Sim killing themselves to escape the shame.
Agree, agree and agree. I've notice the ones replying to this thread are those with a strong grasp of how things are really supposed to work emotionally. Wonder if the designers of TS4 actually want to make a public-pleasing game or if they have something else in mind, like shoving all their half-baked ideas about interpersonal relationships down our throats, whether we like it or not?
I had Smokey's new wife compliment his art and he took it as a huge insult! Why?!
She probably said the wrong thing and completely misunderstood what he was trying to accomplish. This is a very realistic attitude from him from what I have known about artists in the past. Patronising?
An artist would accept compliments from a fellow artist he admires and looks up to. Maybe she had too low a grade?
I'm an artist and used to teach art. My ego was big enough that ANY praise was welcomed. After all, you don't have to be an artist to know what you like, and artists paint what the public likes, if they plan to make any money at it. Of course, there are some who cater to the intelligentsia elitist snob crowd, but their art isn't... art, I mean... it's almost all gimmick and hype. Like the "artist" who sold his poop in a can at $10,000 a pop and the intelligentsia grabbed it up, just to show THEY know something about "real" art that we of the unwashed masses didn't.
I had Smokey's new wife compliment his art and he took it as a huge insult! Why?!
I dunno. The game does weird things sometimes. For example, every time my music lover Sim enthuses about music, it gets a negative relationship modifier. The only time it didn't was when she did it to another music lover.
Maybe Smokey just thinks his wife doesn't know plumb about art, and her opinions suck.
TS4's failure states seem to be more like random punishments:
A Chance Card - sorry, "Adventure Moment" - slapping you with a lame and unfunny story of failure, as well as flushing your performance down the toilet, because there was no Ignore option like TS2.
Sims rejecting socials that should have been friendly.
The emotional deaths - 'nuff said.
Actually, the "Uncomfortable", "Tense", and "Embarrassed" "emotions" in general.
Dishonorable mentions:
The real stinker of a social being "Complain About Problems" that the Uncomfortable "emotion" unlocks. It's under Friendly, but usually is rejected and causes a relationship drop. Shouldn't it be under Mean? You're feeling lousy and are out to make others feel lousy with you.
Dying from a rejected proposal. I get that it's pretty traumatic, but they shouldn't be killing themselves over it. Yes, I always viewed the Embarrassed death as the Sim killing themselves to escape the shame.
Agree, agree and agree. I've notice the ones replying to this thread are those with a strong grasp of how things are really supposed to work emotionally. Wonder if the designers of TS4 actually want to make a public-pleasing game or if they have something else in mind, like shoving all their half-baked ideas about interpersonal relationships down our throats, whether we like it or not?
They didn't even consult psychologists. I think they were trying to make a Disney preteen sitcom with a dash of reality show - mild, funny, and with a little drama.
Problem is, they're just not good at humor. It's either clumsy and heavy-handed (the huge machines, grating jingles, and dopey walks), mean-spirited (killing off our Sims with the emotions, making our Sims whiny with the punishment-state emotions, the Mischief skill), childish (the "Angry Poop"), or just lame (the Bro-tastic fist bump before WooHoo).
As for the drama, it should be up to the player to create drama if they wish. When the game creates the drama for the player, it feels artificial, not to mention that not everyone wants to ruin their Sims' lives.
That's exactly right. My son had a programmer friend who was so certain only he knew how something should be that he was finally fired from his managerial IT job because he ignored what his boss wanted and did what he decided was best instead. Think that's what's going on with TS4, a wad of clueless designers who are way too full of themselves.
pax1sw
Posts: 654 Member
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I love video games because of the things that I could never do in real life... For instance, in the sims you can get a job and a house.
Origin ID: Mainmanvs100
No, in fact Smokey is Friend to the World and really loves Lyss. I thought there was something strange going on when she wouldn't compliment his art numerous times, until I forced it. Could it be that it's because he's mentoring her in Painting and she's only level 6? But why would a teacher be insulted if his student said they liked his art? That makes NO sense! I loved it when my students complimented me!
It's like every subroutine was written by a different person and the coders never coordinated with the others, more than superficially anyway, it's not cohesive (sort of like this buggy website). The only reason it's SO frustrating is that it's really interesting at times, then you get into that new thing and it leads you to boring/infuriating/frustrating nowhere, with so many poor choices made by the designers as to directions of play and logical outcomes. That's one reason sandbox is better than amusement park. With sandbox, you find your own fun, with amusement park the designers have to really be on the ball to keep the customers having fun, that's much harder to accomplish. If you don't have what the people want down pretty much pat, don't go for amusement park.
However, the CAS function is fantastic, so is Build. It's just that when it comes to interpersonal relationships... which is supposedly what TS4 is all about... people who must be totally clueless about that subject seem to have been the ones who coded it.
Not "frustration that can be interesting at times," something that's interesting at first becoming frustrating, like the Herbalism skill. In order to make the more exotic remedies you need insects that must be caught by searching for them all over Granite Falls. I've never come close to finding them all, or even half of them. The last two times I went to Granite Falls the only insects I could find were bees and a Dragon Dragonfly. WHY are elements needed to complete a skill's function impossible to gather?!
And what's with the useless Playful dolls you dig up? (And the weird little dance that goes with them, it's vicariously embarrassing for a big, hulking guy to do that dance.) Who thought up THAT winner? Besides the Comedy career, when do you need Playful decor? The odd date? On top of that, one of the patches almost did away with digging up crystals (which bump energy, something actually useful). Catch a "treasure" chest while fishing and it's an apple, strawberry, sage or such. Once a cowplant seed, that's about it. Yippee.
Then there are the career unlocks that have emotion auras that are more often than not useless to the career they're supposed to be for, like the Energy items for Entertainers. Astronauts' optimum mood is energized, so ALL the astronaut stuff boosts Focus or Confidence. Gee, thanks. Did the coders for the objects not talk to the career coders and vice versa... like... EVER?!
Okay, I'm on a deep rant, going to stop now.
maybe you just discover them now one by one cause you started to care for Smokey - i am sorry that it is happening to you & Smokey
that's why i stoped playing sims i care about, cause their life would be just ruined by the current state of the game
that would be no fun for me at all to see the story i created for those sims to become shattered because this game doesn't deliver any consistent tools to be able to tell a player's story
as a TS4 player you are being grabbed by the hand & told what to do & told to stop finally to care for things you care about
that's why this game has most of the sandbox from previous iterations removed
that's why i'm waiting for a Family EP,
in the hope that the devs are forced to at least create islands of illusion of sims' relationships that matter
i am really curious if they'll succeed
It makes as much sense as two Sims sitting inside their home who are roommates who have been friends for a very long time suddenly having an "Awkward Encounter"....causing relationship points to decrease. How can you encounter someone you are already sitting with, and already discussing whatever? And how is it awkward? when nothing happened? Wait, now that your eyes are open you will start to see more and more of how the game isn't living up to Will Wright's formula that a Sim has to react and or behave in ways we would expect them to behave. That entails quite a bit from covering how they would behave if someone cheated right in front of them in the same room, to saying 'I like your art work' doesn't it? This game shouldn't be called The Sims 4 for that very reason.
It's not that I just discovered them, a few weeks ago I commented on how brilliant I thought the comments in your thread critiquing TS4 were, guess you don't remember. I agreed with all the criticisms, I'm just hard-headed enough to try to push my way through anyway. Smokey WAS getting developed one way or another, no matter how hard the game worked against that happening. That's why I moved him so many times, choosing to go through the tedious process of rebuilding the town rather than give up on him. I didn't just want to figure out why he was unflirty, I wanted to discover how to build that quality into ALL my future sims without the need for mods to accomplish it.
A couple of months ago I made a great simulation of my son and his family, caught my son dead-on, looks just like him, but I couldn't bear to play them because the sim of my son, who's a meticulously faithful husband in real life, was running all over the map in a state of constant Flirty, and I couldn't keep it from happening any way except watching him every minute (rather hard to do when you're playing 4 sims at once). That was SO foreign to anything he would EVER do. So, when Smokey exhibited the unflirty qualities my son's sim should've had, my quest to unravel the emotion system of TS4 began. The deeper I dug the more I realized there IS NO emotion system, it's just thrown together emotional junk without any rhyme or reason behind it past "get it on" with anyone and everyone all the time if you can, no matter the emotional devastation inherent in that philosophy should anyone actually operate that way in real life.
The TS4 people came out with an ad touting the fact sims in TS4 stay married and hardly ever divorce. They very carefully avoided the accompanying fact the only reason that's possible is that the spouses cheat on each other and don't seem to care if they're being cheated on. I'll bet there are a lot of sim couples that the players didn't have divorce, but just stopped playing them instead. Smokey's got two such relationships where I stopped playing their game when his wife started cheating. There were a couple of times I saved single Smokey first then had him marry, only to discover his new wife was a cheater, so reverted back to the single Smokey save.
This game is a puzzle that reveals a consistency, not in gameplay but in the minds who designed the gameplay. The entire game is designed to drive a wedge between interpersonal relationships, shattering fidelity and family, and have players, over time, accept that as the norm. Psychologically, what we accept as okay, even if it's fantasy, maybe especially if it's fantasy, because our guards are down, slips past our conscious emotional barriers and embeds in our unreasoning subconscious that accepts anything as true that makes it there. You are not really ever one way in a game and another way in real life. It's YOU playing, and it's YOU accepting. It's dangerously naive to believe otherwise.
When a game tries to FORCE you into a playstyle that's particularly damaging in that it attempts to desensitize you into accepting what you know is wrong, warning sirens should scream in your head. Mature adults have trouble handling such things, think what damage it can do to young people just beginning to figure interpersonal relationships out.
That, in way too long a post, is what bothers me more than the bugs in TS4. It's not the stuff that glitches, it's the stuff that seems to be working exactly the way the designers intended... and that's a very bad way. The game teaches that you can't ever have what you want or do what you want, that no one is ever faithful, and that no one cares about anything much anyway. ALL damaging messages that are blatantly untrue in the real world.
I applaud your courage in pointing out what I see this game doing. Thank you. Not many will agree, and won't see it, but it no longer challenges our own values, as that was the basis for The Sims in the beginning. If a Sim cheated somebody was going to be upset and get slapped. Anything goes in this game isn't the type of game I want to play. I want one like we had in the past that challenges me to make a decision, should I allow that Sim to continue slapping the other Sim for being unfaithful (and depending on the traits I would expect it) or do I just let it go (the cheating) and my Sim let's it go and just keeps on going for the sake of goaling in the game?
Failure states (such as an unhappy relationship) is part of what made The Sims a challenge not how many hours I have logged. They have seriously lost the heart of the game with this one.
ETA: I will just add this and not get on my soap box, but Will Wright is the one who said his game challenged people's values, with the gameplay whether they would feel guilty about the torture or the cheating or whatever. And I have to say I like his games better.
For instance, trying to seduce a married sim -- it's not always easy, but if you get them flirty, it suddenly is. The emotions themselves are shallow, which makes their reactions and relationships similarly shallow.
TS4 is definitely not like any of the previous sims games. Wish there was some way to have TS4's CAS and Build added to TS3, that would be the perfect game. The rest of TS4 is a minefield full of carrots on sticks you can never have, leading you to where you don't want to go.
You hit it dead on! Though TS4 asserts it's all about sims relating to each other, that's completely untrue, though they could've designed it that way if that was their actual goal. In TS3, if a sim cheated on their spouse it got all over town and they wound up with a bad reputation that affected not just their spouse but their public persona. In reverse, in TS3 if both spouses were faithful for a period of time they got a public reputation of being faithful. The sims in the previous sims games were almost hyper-aware of the other sims in the game, to the point that while my sim was out at a restaurant and a notice of a huge sale of items he had on consignment came up, every sim in the place stopped, looked and him and cheered. Nothing like any of that will ever happen in TS4, at least not as it is now.
Good grief! WHY did I ever stop playing TS3?!
If you play the game, it's not all that hidden.
With one of Smokey's failed marriages, the day after they were married, while he was at work, 3 of his friends came over to visit. That wasn't unusual, he's always had a lot of company because he has a lot of friends. His new wife invited them all in, and she knew two of the three, but not Smokey's BFF, Sean O'Shae. One was Smokey's married brother, Jake. When she started throwing off actively romantic actions toward Jake one after another, like flirt, embrace, kiss, etc., I checked her relationship panel and discovered she and Jake were already rather heavily romantically involved. I decided I could work through that, after all, she and Smokey had just gone from longtime good friends to married all in the space of a day. THEN she started having wishes about Sean, a guy she didn't even know, to cloudgaze, flirt, get to know, rather fixated on him in her longer-term whims. Nope. Not happening. Revert to single Smokey save.
She probably said the wrong thing and completely misunderstood what he was trying to accomplish. This is a very realistic attitude from him from what I have known about artists in the past. Patronising?
An artist would accept compliments from a fellow artist he admires and looks up to. Maybe she had too low a grade?
Agree, agree and agree. I've notice the ones replying to this thread are those with a strong grasp of how things are really supposed to work emotionally. Wonder if the designers of TS4 actually want to make a public-pleasing game or if they have something else in mind, like shoving all their half-baked ideas about interpersonal relationships down our throats, whether we like it or not?
I'm an artist and used to teach art. My ego was big enough that ANY praise was welcomed. After all, you don't have to be an artist to know what you like, and artists paint what the public likes, if they plan to make any money at it. Of course, there are some who cater to the intelligentsia elitist snob crowd, but their art isn't... art, I mean... it's almost all gimmick and hype. Like the "artist" who sold his poop in a can at $10,000 a pop and the intelligentsia grabbed it up, just to show THEY know something about "real" art that we of the unwashed masses didn't.
I dunno. The game does weird things sometimes. For example, every time my music lover Sim enthuses about music, it gets a negative relationship modifier. The only time it didn't was when she did it to another music lover.
Maybe Smokey just thinks his wife doesn't know plumb about art, and her opinions suck.
From Sunset Valley with Love (Tumblr)
My The Sims 4 Gallery
Hidden skills exist in previous sims games. In the Sims 4 you have a hidden reaper skill.
Carl's guide have a page on it http://www.carls-sims-4-guide.com/forum/index.php?topic=5755.0
Features can be hidden, so only the tech team would know them.
That's exactly right. My son had a programmer friend who was so certain only he knew how something should be that he was finally fired from his managerial IT job because he ignored what his boss wanted and did what he decided was best instead. Think that's what's going on with TS4, a wad of clueless designers who are way too full of themselves.