I really wasn't sure where to post this but since this section is about game feedback I figured I would post it here. Let me start by prefacing that this is not an Anti-Sims4 thread or a Sims4 bashing thread. I just really need to vent I guess.
So, to start out I've been playing The Sims since I was around 7 years old. I remember watching my sister play it and I was soooo intrigued. I begged my mom for my first Sims game and then it started.... I played a few of TS1 games, followed that up with the entire TS2 series, and the entire TS3 series. There were days where I would stay up until 2am playing the game because I was just so friggin enraptured by the game. Now it's been.. what? 14 years.... I'm 21 now and the feeling is just not the same anymore. I've tried and tried to play TS4 and honestly I still do load up the game when a new pack comes out but I'm just so bored. Even the sheer mention of a new pack doesn't excite me or spark my interest. I watch the trailers and I'm like: "Okay, I guess that's it."
Maybe it's me... Maybe I'm too "old" now, but I'd much rather be with my friends or pursue my other hobbies instead of playing The Sims. Maybe I need a fun challenge to do.... Idk. I tried to do a challenge last time but I was just so bored I couldn't even finish it. Is it just me? It really makes me sad to feel this way. I love The Sims, I really do, but it just doesn't do it for me anymore. I find myself getting frustrated when I play it rather than entertained. I was thinking about skipping the rest of this iteration and waiting for TS5.... if that even interests me.
Anybody know of ways to spark up that interest again?
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But as it relates to your question regarding ways to spark interest again in TS4.....what I usually do is play different Save files with different themes or challenges & even different gameplay styles and I rotate between Saves. For example, I have two challenges that I'm playing....100 Baby Challenge and I'm doing the original legacy challenge by Pinstar with scoring. That scoring....wow, let me say that it's forced me to play TS4 in ways I've never played, experiencing different things such as completing collections, different careers, etc. For me this made the challenge fun, as I thought I had experienced everything that interested me in game, and found that I'd barely scratched the surface. I never focused on collections before & thought I didn't care, but after playing, and completing 6 collections, I'm on a mission to complete them all for those points LOL. I also have a supernatural Save.....I play rotational in that Save....it's very story based, so it allows me to be super creative & with vampires I can play a little dark and create some cool storylines. I've had the same vampire family since the Vampire GP came out, and I've added characters and grown the Save and rotational play allows me to switch things up.
So for me, switching it up between a hard challenge like 100 baby, or family play like a legacy challenge and a rotational supernatural save keeps me from getting too bored. I find myself playing 100 baby when I'm not in the mood to do any storytelling, but then when I want some fun drama or vampire/alien/mermaid play I switch to my supernatural rotational save, where I'm not tied to any rules and can just play the way I want.
So you can either do what @Sha2520032003 mentioned about finding a challenge to mix it up if you find yourself doing the same playthrough over and over or you can just let another game have your eye for awhile and soon you will find yourself wanting to binge sims again. Third option is to mod your game to heck, a certain violence mod (idk if the name of that mod is banned) can bring some fun or create sims based on fictional characters and have them interact in a stupid way (I literally had a house consisting of Link, a skeleton, an emo clown, and Leon while it was a zombie apocalypse. it was stupid fun)
It’s difficult to sandbox in an environment that seems a lot less attractive than TS1. There are rarely any random events, a large variety of NPCs, etc.
https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/956513/netz-a-porter-outfits-ready-to-wear-for-your-sims-no-cc-required
Twitter: NetzspannungTS
we all try ...
https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/948959/not-feeling-it-with-the-sims-4-anymore/p1
Well, if you've still got the previous games... Install them and try playing them, if you find you still enjoy playing them, then it isn't that you're too old.
But IMO the Sims really isn't what it used to be, The Sims used to be a life Simulator (which is where it got its name), there is no simulation in TS4, each action will produce a perfectly predictable and scripted reaction.
I can’t play this game for more than 30 min at a time unless I’m building. More recently I can’t even bring myself to play it at all. 5 years has not been kind to the base game which was weak 5 years ago and hasn’t seen a single improvement since. So many ideas rendered useless by a game that requires my imagination to fill in trivial gaps in the gameplay that my mind should not have to waste effort filling in. It takes too much mental work to play this game, and that’s not coming from someone who’s deficient in creativity. Like for real it is exhausting keeping track of 30+ households fictional details that I made up to make them not carbon copies of each other. Perhaps it’s because of the way I play this game, but I gave up my rotations because it dawned on me that there was nothing unique happening anywhere. Same Sims with a different coat of paint, same situations, same reactions, and a lot of the time the same background Sims! This game is repetitive, and predictable. I know what a sim is going to do when they are sad, it doesn’t matter what traits they have because their sadness controls their personality.
There are so many problems I personally have with Sims 4. I could fill this whole page, more than I already have lol. I don’t have any real suggestions for improving your experience with Sims 4. I personally am focusing my time and money on better games. Sims 4 will probably not get any better, but I do want to see if they redeem themselves with a sequel whenever that happens.
I can relate to this so much!
In the past games you can go in wondering, "What's going to happen today?"
In the Sims 4 it's mostly what you choose to do and the occasional fire, or broken appliance.
My disinterest seems to be growing with each pack.
I lost interest in Strangerville and I've already put the game aside after Island Living to play Skyrim again and Cities Skylines.
My advice is if you are not feeling it... don't force it. Go do something else you enjoy, play another game, enjoy another hobby. It's all good.
Now and then I really want to play a game but nothing is calling me so for this game I'll usually try a challenge (sometimes modified by me) or read about others game play and it can inspire me to try something out. Sometimes I just fire it up and try to play a different way than whatever has gotten normal for me at that time and it can take off from there. New packs also can spur on game play for quite awhile because more ideas come to me .. like right now I'm planning out my photographer based on one of the Stardew characters for that save. She's going to get more of a life soon (hobby and career) and that's exciting to me since I've invested so much time in certain characters in that save. It spurred me to rebuild 3 character houses from scratch to replace the ones I had previously downloaded for those characters. Since I'm not a builder I was getting a kick out of being so excited building this week. So right now I'm in an "enraptured" state and sometimes it goes way too many hours a day.
There is nothing wrong with having a life away from the sims also . Do what you enjoy.
As an elder I just wish I was your age sometimes. I wouldn't be playing computer games much! Good luck.
This exactly!
I can also relate to OP very well, as I have been playing The Sims since its first iteration as well and am now finding it harder and harder to stay invested in my sims' lives. Whenever I do play the Sims 4 I mainly spend a lot of time in CAS and decorating my houses, but as soon as I hit the "Live" button I don't know what to do anymore...
Even so, I am scared to try The Sims 2 again (my all time favourite) because I don't want it to not live up to my expectations/memories and thereby ruin our beautiful relationship
I would love to be able to spend a whole day playing The Sims again without even noticing any time has passed ^^
You right. I'm not gonna lie, but that is also a problem in the game. It's waaay too controlling, the only surprises I can think of is what you said plus vampire attacks. Which funnily enough they were going to gut that part due to a few complaining about it happening, so to satisfy everyone they made it so it hardly ever happens.
The team seem to like making the game super safe, my sims only die because I act like an idiot with them. There are alot of second chances they give your sim before dying.
That's exactly what happens to me all the time. Twice in this week, I turned on the game just to turn it off again. The game's for children, not for adults who aren't easily fooled by things children would be. Think about it, people in this forum have reported leaving the game on for hours only to come back with their Sims going about their "lives" just fine. I'm also one of those people, I accidentally left my game on and came back with my Sims doing fine.
There's no challenge, no reason to care about your Sims. They improve on their own, get along on their own, and maintain their way of living on their own. Even when they starve, they'll just pull out a fruitcake and stuff it into their mouths, giving no reason to feed your Sims at all.
So why should we care?
I tried this a couple of times in Sims 3, only to come back and find a sim dead from starvation or some other cause. There is ZERO challenge in Sims 4, and that makes for a very boring game.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=WbRQP-PXDpA
You're right of course. If you're bored it is best to stop for a while and yes, the world is full of exciting things to do. However, I don't think this is quite what they had in mind when they created the game. The whole idea of game creation is to pull the customers in and if it's not doing that, then the game isn't quite living up to expectations!
For me, while I think it is very good that they have managed to create sims with emotions, it means that the player is playing someone else, rather than playing themselves. The player might feel happy but the sim is angry, or depressed, or unhappy about something that the player might not be. The mood of the sim, in other words, doesn't always match the player's mood.
For example, I might create a family with something in mind, but as soon as I get in the game, something might happen to turn the mood of the sim in a completely different direction from what I had in mind. When this happens, my reason for playing the game (ie. what I had in mind that actually inspired me to turn on the game) diminishes pretty quickly because the family is not going down the route I planned. At this point, I lose interest. Imagination about what I might create is what inspires me to turn on the game. If that initial idea is thwarted the minute I enter the game, what reason is there to continue? I don't want to watch someone else's life play out - I want to watch my life, or the sims life that I just created, play out the way I planned. I don't want someone else's version of that life. I want MY version. And that is where the game fails me personally.
I was in quite a good mood the other night, and turned on Sims 4 to play a couple of sims but unfortunately I forgot that my sim had not cooked anything before, being new to the game, and instantly set the cooker on fire which put her in a bad mood for a full 24 hours. Watching my newly created sim stomp about was not what I had in mind. My own mood changed as a result. This was not what I intended. Not only that, from my own perspective, I wouldn't stomp around like that after a fire. I might have some other emotion, but that's my point. I want to direct my own sim in a way that matches my idea of how a sim should react. I don't want to watch someone's idea of how my sim might react. The result is that I'm not in control. I'm just watching a movie play out of sims I don't have any control over and sims I don't feel attached to because they don't follow my own idea of how to react. This is particularly important to me and one reason why I can't attach any feelings whatsoever towards my sims. I don't like them and I don't like how they react!
Another problem, for me personally, is that no matter what household I play, they are all EXACTLY the same. They react the same, they do the same things, and there is a limit to how many times you can watch the very same thing occur over and over and over and over again. In situations like this, I would agree. Life is too short to watch repetitive actions. There is far more to do in real life! Which brings me back to the whole point of creating a game. A game is supposed to be addictive; it's supposed to make you want to play it. That is not the case with Sims 4. It was with Sims 3 - the sims were different, and they would do exactly what you wanted them to do. Not like the sims I was playing the other night who kept fighting each other after they just got married because of some festival or something which I haven't seen before. Worse, they fought for no reason other than to satisfy the festival requirements but then they carried on laughing and talking as if nothing had happened. I'm like - What the ....?
If they want to make sims with their own emotions, it would be better to use them for telling stories to play out like a movie. It's not really the best thing for players who want to feel attached to their sims and become involved with them on a personal level. If you can't get personal with your sims, there is no way you will feel any attachment to them whatsoever.
If TS4 isn't the only sims game that makes bored, than your interest may have expired. It just happens, like with any game, you played enough of it that your interest (hobby for) slowly died and might return. It does happen, where I stopped playing and after quite some time has (week,s months or even years) my interest either returns or has of yet doesn't. If a game is engaging to keep my interesting playing more than one day try, that simply means it's good.
From what I understood of your post, the previous three games last time you played where prior to 2014. I think you know what the problem is and how you can regain the interest back (hint: return to TS3, 2 or 1 and see that helps?) If that doesn't help, I'm sure you the interest for any/few of the four sims games will spark again naturally after time gets past when you take a break. I think this would apply to any passion-able hobby you had really, not just in gaming.