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Is Maxis finally giving us better personalities?
Jordan061102
Posts: 3,918 Member
From the new survey it sounds promising! I really hope they'll include everything they listed! I promise if they improve personalities (not just one idea they shared) i'm gonna replay this game again. I'm so excited eventho I shouldn't lol. What are your thoughts?
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Comments
I like how "improved personalities" is simply the standards set by The Sims 2 over a decade ago. Non mutual relationships, preferences, fury, interests - literally all of that was in 2.
We've been told time and time again as players to stop bringing up past games, to the point they made it a forum rule that bringing them up outside of exclusive threads is derailing, and now they've asked us if we want to see features from a past game return.
Well, when you put it like that... lol
Would it add a spark of life that’s missing from the game? Definitely! But it’s still contingent on being implemented in a useful way. Adding in preferences, likes and dislikes, etc is not going to do much if they don’t ALSO do something to alleviate the Stepford moodlets.
Allowing sims to hate each other isn’t going to do a thing for the game if they walk into a room and instantly start drooling from happiness because the room is pretty.
Being attracted to the sim next to you because they have a trait you prefer does nothing if you’re still going to flirt with anything that walks by because someone left the tv on the romance channel.
This is pretty much how I feel about it. To get all of the features working together in a cohesive way that isn't just swallowed by the emotions system would take a lot of work and thought, they'd have to alter a great deal of how Sims function for any of it to mean anything.
To make Emotions a thing, they really needed to start off with fully fleshed out personalities and Sim individuality, then go back and start adding emotional reactions to situations.
It might have seemed more like previous Sims at the start, but I would have preferred to get a new emotional reaction or 3 added with each patch, SP, GP, and EP, to build on to sims, than to start out with zero personality sims that mindlessly bounce from one wildly exaggerated emotion to the next and nothing else to make them unique.
But I would love anything that made a real positive addition the interaction complicity the Sims NPC AI.
Imagine, you will have a harder time to become friends with your arch enemy, that guy you have beaten up just to get the friendship bar all to the red will refuse to talk to your sim
Also I would like to see that your sims children will get traits after events that happened, like a child that have divorced parents will have a possibility to get the gloomy trait, when it ages up, or a toddler that learned every skill to the fullest can become a genius or children can get a trait from their parents or grandparents.
This is a real issue and worry for me too. They did it in TS2 and it worked just fine. That said, they did a lot of things in the past that worked fine in the other games that don't work fine now sooo...
I'm going to choose to remain hopeful. Personalities are the one thing that is really lacking in this game for me and I would just love to see my sims be more like the sims they advertised in 2014.
That was never a problem in TS2!! It worked amazing and made the gameplay superb...! But I could understand why you'd be worried in a TS4 context, since somethings haven't been exactly tweaked to work 100% well, like multitasking and sims constantly trying to talk to you.
All I ask for is that when I go up to someone, beat them up, make their kid cry, and make out with their spouse in front of them that they don't turn to look at me and go "Nice weather today"
Sims 2. If Sims gossiped, the game pulled from the stored memories, and created a new gossip memory that could then continue to be passed around.
Each gossip memory contained a file fragment from the Sim doing the gossiping and whoever they were gossiping about. So, it added up to a lot of stored information after awhile. On top of that, if you deleted Sims, deleted their gravestones, or if the game did either of those on it's own, you severed the link between the file fragment in the memory of any remaining Sims who had it and the Sim you just deleted. A lot of unlinked Sim data could cause your game to become corrupted and start having errors. (And anyone who has dug around in the files knows they already left plenty of unlinked Sim data when they released the game.) Additionally, if you now place the Sim from the bin into a new neighborhood, you've just put that Sim and their unlinked data into a new neighborhood.
Even if you had no unlinking issues, it would get to a point where anyone could know anything and it was annoying. Like, why is Mortimer gossiping about my Sim kissing Angela Pleasant (completely in private) with PollinationTech#9 Smith??
After cleaning up the mess in SimPe, I installed Batbox (not it's actual name, which escapes me at the moment) which cleans up garbage memories. I also never used the gossip interaction with my own Sims.
Besides, with a major personality overhaul, it will change & improve a lot of our gameplay across all packs. Although whims are great, but it's nothing but a random thought of what Sims wants at that particular moment. However, say if the Sims have fear or favourite, their whims should be inclined towards that instead of randomly asking for a box of bee or 1x1 pool.
I wish non mutual relationships had been listed but it does seem like they are planning some kind of update
That was the one with the zodiac system, wasn't it? All my Sims were Libra to ensure that their zodiac signs wouldn't interfere with whatever I planned to do with them.
I wouldn't mind if incompatibility were based on traits - it seems logical that a slob and a neat freak would have issues, for example.
If we get a personality and social overhaul, that might make me interested in the game again.