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Get Famous Owners: Would you buy it again? Pros? Cons? [Decision made]
Karababy52
Posts: 5,952 Member
My birthday is Wednesday and one of my daughters got me an Amazon giftcard. They're having a similar sale to Origin right now on TS4 packs, I can purchase Get Famous for 50% off. This is the only EP I don't own so I'm seriously thinking about getting it. I have a few questions though for those who own the pack.
The biggest reason I have not bought this EP is reports of celebrities taking over at venues while your Sims are on dates or just hanging out there. For instance; DJs will stop playing music to run away and fan over a celebrity that has entered the club, your date in a restaurant will get up and run away to fan over a visiting celebrity, your Sim might do this as well and you can't stop them.
Also, I've read that family members won't or can not talk to another family member because they're a celebrity and that quirks sometimes stick and you can't get rid of them.
Are you experiencing these things in your game? Do you find it merely annoying and enjoy the pack anyway? Or does it make you want to tear your hair out in frustration and wish you'd never bought the pack?
If you're also a builder or bought the pack only for the build/buy, was it worth getting the pack?
Do you use elements of the pack in other gameplay besides the celebrity feature? Does it have enough of this to be fun without playing celebrities at all? I do have Sims I'd love to make celebrities though, so I would use that aspect, of course.
Are there any other bugs/glitches I should know about?
I've wanted to get this pack for a long time, a lot of the gameplay looks like it's fun and the build/buy, especially the Mid-Century items has me drooling as a builder. But the above problems with celebrity invasions has made me seriously hesitate. I'm a micromanager and play most of the time with autonomy off. Sims running off to do things that I didn't tell them to do and/or canceling my orders, is frustrating and stressful to me, no fun.
BTW, my normal gameplay involves playing a lot of challenges, starting most of my Sims out Rags to Riches style and a little family play here and there. I enjoy taking my Sims from nothing to a successful life. I also LOVE to build, but only micro/tiny/small houses, usually one or maybe two floors. I've never built a mansion.
So...what do you think based on your experience with the pack and what I've shared about my qualms and playstyle? Should I get it or save my giftcard for a future EP/GP/SP I might enjoy better?
Thank you for reading, have a great rest of your week and...
Happy Simming!
The biggest reason I have not bought this EP is reports of celebrities taking over at venues while your Sims are on dates or just hanging out there. For instance; DJs will stop playing music to run away and fan over a celebrity that has entered the club, your date in a restaurant will get up and run away to fan over a visiting celebrity, your Sim might do this as well and you can't stop them.
Also, I've read that family members won't or can not talk to another family member because they're a celebrity and that quirks sometimes stick and you can't get rid of them.
Are you experiencing these things in your game? Do you find it merely annoying and enjoy the pack anyway? Or does it make you want to tear your hair out in frustration and wish you'd never bought the pack?
If you're also a builder or bought the pack only for the build/buy, was it worth getting the pack?
Do you use elements of the pack in other gameplay besides the celebrity feature? Does it have enough of this to be fun without playing celebrities at all? I do have Sims I'd love to make celebrities though, so I would use that aspect, of course.
Are there any other bugs/glitches I should know about?
I've wanted to get this pack for a long time, a lot of the gameplay looks like it's fun and the build/buy, especially the Mid-Century items has me drooling as a builder. But the above problems with celebrity invasions has made me seriously hesitate. I'm a micromanager and play most of the time with autonomy off. Sims running off to do things that I didn't tell them to do and/or canceling my orders, is frustrating and stressful to me, no fun.
BTW, my normal gameplay involves playing a lot of challenges, starting most of my Sims out Rags to Riches style and a little family play here and there. I enjoy taking my Sims from nothing to a successful life. I also LOVE to build, but only micro/tiny/small houses, usually one or maybe two floors. I've never built a mansion.
So...what do you think based on your experience with the pack and what I've shared about my qualms and playstyle? Should I get it or save my giftcard for a future EP/GP/SP I might enjoy better?
Thank you for reading, have a great rest of your week and...
Happy Simming!
Post edited by Karababy52 on
3
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
And yes, celebrities do take over and ruin venues, and if you are a celebrity, you honestly can't do anything in public without being mobbed by paparazzi and fans. Even when you are taking a vacation, you will be mobbed, which really just ruins the whole vacation. And if you have Dine Out, that pack is already broken as it is, and when there is a celebrity in the restaurant, you can count on nobody doing their job and no one sitting down and eating.
Del Sol Valley is a decent world, but isn't my favorite. Too small, and unremarkable.
Celebrities aren't fun for me to play because as I said, you will be mobbed wherever you go and that will annoy you. And it just takes way too much work to play as a celebrity in my opinion, and just get's extinguishing, repetitive, and boring.
Besides celebrities, Get Famous isn't anything special. The acting career is fun for the first few weeks (in game), but then you get the same gigs over and over again, which get's boring. The Create-a-Sim items just aren't my style, and the build mode items don't really interest me, and even if you like them they don't justify 40 dollars.
There aren't as many glitches as there are with other packs, but there are some minor ones here and there.
Overall, as you can see, my opinion is unfavorable about this pack. Out of all the expansion packs, I would rate Get Famous the lowest because the game play just does not interest me, and everything else about the pack doesn't justify the price. If you would like a more in depth review, I would recommend watching LGR's (Lazy Game Review) review on the pack. He would do a better job giving a non one sided opinionated review than me.
Howeverrr, it was true that for a long time it was really almost impossible to go to a restaurant. A celebrity would show up and everyone would stand up and stop eating. It drove me up the wall, but I don't notice as much now. Maybe a patch improved it. Actually I can't remember the last time it happened. Most of my celebrities stick to the celebrity world now. Also, you can turn the fame off for the whole game in the settings menu if you don't like it. And then if you just want your Sim to gain fame you can click on "Step in the spotlight" and that Sim will be able to start gaining fame. I turned it off in my current game, but I still love doing the acting career and choosing the options that used to gain fame, but I'm not really interested in making my Sims famous anyway. It won't turn off fame for the existing celebrities though, so if those still bother you, you can just stick them in a lot, turn their fame off from their personality screen, and then evict them back to the bin. That's what I did when I accidentally moved two Sims into another world without realizing they were famous and they created mobs at my gym.
I would say overall the celebrity / fans / paparazzi thing I don't really like, but I figured out how to turn it off / manage it, so it doesn't bother me at all now.
And Happy Birthday!!
In terms of CAS, there's a lot of nice items, especially if you like historical/fantasy play (from the acting career), or simply want your sims looking like they belong in this century (unlike what's in the base game lol).
Gameplay-wise, I do run into celebrities regularly, but restaurants, provided you have a good kitchen, and a small number of (working) tables (the restaurant I use has 3 tables with four chairs, using couches and coffee tables to act as 'set dressing'), celebs come in, but non-famous sims'll get food okay. You can turn off fame for your played sim/family, and unless you directly approach a celebrity, you shouldn't be affected with the fainting etc.
If you are a celebrity, the negative traits add challenge/fun - unfortunately, the papparazzi can be super annoying. It's hard to go out (eg. to a restaurant) if you're famous, because they're continually taking pictures. When you level up in fame, you can influence sims to do things, like make paparazzi leave, though another one always seems to pop up after.
Re non-celebrity gameplay items (recording station, drone, media station) help storytelling, but you unfortunately can't view or listen to what your sim has created. I haven't tried the acting career yet (although I've had the pack for a while...), so I can't really comment on it, but a lot of people, (including @Elliandre in the comment above
I personally think $24.99/w/ever the us price is isn't bad, but it depends what you want
The acting career is fun for an active career and the starlight accolades are great especially when your sim.wins one.
It also adds the rabbithole of drama club for teens which they can win awards for too.
Charity benefit partiesxare another feature of the pack I like.
The celebrity premade sims are fun string characters. I enjoy them as they dp feel fully fleshed out.
There is also a new death and woohoo in the pack
Get famous can be pretty annoying to play if you are not a celebrity though, they will show up on lots and interrupt sims and have paparazzi around the lot, I would recommend bienchens mods lesscelebreact and nocelebritywalkstyle. The second disables the walkstyle that sims who have a certain fame will walk. It is a slow walk that for some reason Maxis did not add as a walkstyle you pick in CAS, it turns on and off all the time and is super annoying. Just disable this awful design with a mod. I think there are mods that makes the paparazzi less annoying as well. I found out that I could disable some of their annoying animations with mc tuner.
Celebrities also have fame quirks that they can get, some people find them fun because they add some challenge and personality to the sims. Some quirks are just bad though and occurs way too often. Octavia is a premade sim who has the juice enthusiast quirk and it triggers everyday and gives her an angry buff constantly.
The actor career is surprisingly well made...until level 7, then everything new just ends... and you will do the same old gigs over and over again to reach level 10. It feels like they cut some content there in the end.
The world in my opinion is really nicely made, but there is a neighborhood missing. There is a neighborhood when you are a new, poor actor, and then there is a neighborhood when you are a famous, rich celebrity. There is no neighborhood for sims who are something in between.
Speaking of rich, unless you are creating a celebrity who focuses on social media and making music and videos you are not going to earn that much money. You get paid surprisingly little for every gig and every gig takes three days to do. In the beginning you will think this is a fun challenge because the gigs require skill and preparation but when you are a skilled actor this is way too much time and you have to find something else to do between gigs.
I think Get Famous is an okay pack, but it requires a lot from the player to have fun with it, the devs made no effort when it came to the houses and they made some bad design decisions. But if you replace or change their houses, use mods and play with the celebrities and come up with fun things to do with them then you wont find these things that annoying.
And finally, there is right now a bug where you can't play the actor career properly because their completed tasks reset on traveling...so yeah...a pack that is fun to play but has a lot of bad design.
About your concern I do have celebrities to show up in my restaurants and other community lots, but they haven't been major problem for me. At first it bothered me more when I didn't know who those celebrities were. The more I've seen them around and my sims have became their fans the more tolerant I find myself. I sort of accept their status and that sims go crazy sometimes. Here as well I'm wondering what it will be like when it's my own sims that are causing the chaos.
I must confess I haven't lived in Del Sol Valley with any sim. The world looks nice to me and the size doesn't bother me too much. The poor neighbourhood fits my taste quite nicely. I have redone the whole commercial disctrict and really like visiting there. There's a gym, arts center, restaurant, cafe (with a movie theatre) and a lounge.
What I don't really like about the pack is that it's quite easy to make it to one star celebrity and that the sims who have reached that level are instantly harder to communicate with. In rotational play it's a little bit weird when half of my played sims are suddendly impossible to get to know... Yes they can always step out of the spotlight and that's the choice I will have to make for some.
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Okay, again, I didn't buy it for the fame, so I really didn't care much about that aspect of the pack. And honestly, I can live without the CAS and BB. Still, I felt the need to try the fame stuff out at least once, so I did.
Gonna be honest, the celebrity gameplay is very repetitive and can be downright boring. Unless you're playing an actress or actor, it's very hard to earn fame. Usually you'll just end up doing the same thing over and over and over until you slowly build up your fame bar to get more perks to make becoming famous slightly easier. Once you do become a maxed out worldwide famous celebrity, there's pretty much nothing left to aspire to, and once I reached that point I dropped the family I was playing and never touched them again. It's basically a tedious grind to get to the end and once you reach it, there's nothing left to do. You can only have so many celebrity events and parties and buy so many golden furniture items before it becomes dull.
Keeping your fame is also really annoying, especially at the lower levels and I don't like how it's basically programmed that if you're not constantly streaming online or performing out in public, your fame can just drop like a rock. I get it, we're in the tech savy 21st century, but c'mon not every celebrity sits on a computer 20/7 and they don't become instantly forgotten when they aren't online.
The acting career itself is also very glitchy and became boring and repetitive after like 6 gigs. Seriously, once you've done one, you've done them all.
Celebrities are everywhere and crowds of people ALWAYS stop to fangirl over them. There's no way to turn this off and its annoying as all heck.
Del Smol Valley is utterly useless as a world. There's very few lots and the sizes are really ridiculous.
Overall, I don't recommend Get Famous unless you REALLY want celebrities and plan to play them a lot. Even still, I'd get it at half off. I don't regret buying it, since again, I think half off was okay for the CAS and BB. But if I could go back in time, I'd probably be fine sacrificing those things since I don't really need any of it and the rest of the pack doesn't appeal to me at all.
My other sims not being able to introduce themselves to him is a minor annoyance I have had for a while. I can introduce him to anyone I want when I'm playing him though. So far his family hasn't lost the ability to talk to him or anything.
It does take a long time to build fame for anything but acting, especially in rotational play. But I find it pretty fun. I do use the drone a lot to stream so that my sims can use their online presence to get fame without always having to be sitting at the computer to do it. I enjoy the open mic nights and the award ceremony. I haven't tried the meet and greet yet.
Celebrities have very rarely gotten in my way on community lots. It is annoying when it happens, but I've had a lot less trouble with it than others appear to. At 2.5 fame stars my actor is getting a small number of fans when he goes out in public, but no paparazzi yet so I can't say how annoying that will be.
I rarely pay attention to the little pack icons in build mode or in CAS but I do know that a couple of my favorite hairstyles came with GF. I also use the costumes a lot because I like to throw costume parties by making everyone's party outfit a costume of my choice, using all the options from every pack that comes with costumes.
I bought it at 50% off last year and would do it again for that price without hesitation.
I play in a rotation too, 7 Sims day to be precise. I can do at leasts 2 gigs (every Sun & Sat).
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I normally get my Sims to start painting & sell it. Regardless of what their chosen profession, this is how I increase their fame. Other than that, I will publish some books too. Since your Sims is a musician, why don't you get him to write a song & get it license? It will be better if he can play different type of instruments.
I like a lot of the build mode and CAS options, and I personally don't find the Actor career repetitive to the point I get bored of it (It could use better payouts at top fame levels...) But, as I said, I'm a theater person.
That said, I hardly use the world at all.
The biggest reason I have not bought this EP is reports of celebrities taking over at venues while your Sims are on dates or just hanging out there. For instance; DJs will stop playing music to run away and fan over a celebrity that has entered the club, your date in a restaurant will get up and run away to fan over a visiting celebrity, your Sim might do this as well and you can't stop them.
This happened a lot when it first came out, but I've read that it was allegedly supposed to be fixed in later updates. I haven't played in a year, so I can't confirm if it's truly fixed or not.
Also, I've read that family members won't or can not talk to another family member because they're a celebrity and that quirks sometimes stick and you can't get rid of them.
That happens too. It's basically them looking down on someone who isn't a celeb and for some reason the game does't exclude family members or spouses from this. Idk if this was ever fixed or not. I'm pretty sure quirks can be removed through some specific item, but I can't recall the name off the top of my head.
If you're also a builder or bought the pack only for the build/buy, was it worth getting the pack?
Like I said, I bought it primarily for the BB. I think it was worth it for the price I paid, but I can still live without it.
Do you use elements of the pack in other gameplay besides the celebrity feature? Does it have enough of this to be fun without playing celebrities at all? I do have Sims I'd love to make celebrities though, so I would use that aspect, of course.
I mean, in terms of gamelay, the fame takes up most of that. If you're not playing celebs frequently, you're not experiencing much of what's being offered. The only specific things would be objects like the drone, music station, and video station. Those can be used without the desire to become famous, but that is what their main purpose is, to keep your fame from falling. And on that note, be aware, don't try to use these objects to become famous on their own. They add very little fame overall and things like the record label and video advertisements overall don't do much.
Are there any other bugs/glitches I should know about?
Like I mentioned, the acting career in general has a lot of bugs. Gigs not being completed. Gigs switching.
BTW, my normal gameplay involves playing a lot of challenges, starting most of my Sims out Rags to Riches style and a little family play here and there. I enjoy taking my Sims from nothing to a successful life.
You might enjoy GF then if you enjoy doing this frequently.
Personally I only really use the BB and CAS items from the pack and ignore the celebrities. They're not massively invasive as far as I'm concerned and I've turned the setting to my played Sims starting opted out of fame. So for me, the pack isn't worth the full value but on a sale, sure. I did play through a Rags to Riches challenge focused on Fame and it was fun, just not enough (for me) to go back to that again. Since you're interested in those aspects though, I think you'll find it a good purchase.
Does anyone know how long the Origin sale will last? The reason I ask is a free packs giveaway to hundreds of Simmers is currently in effect for the next 24 hrs. by EA/Maxis for the 20th Anniversary of The Sims. They'll randomly pick winners from our wish lists on Origin. Thinking I might wait to see if I win Get Famous, would be a nice birthday gift eh? Depends on if the sale will still be going afterward though. I'd be disappointed if I didn't win, the sale was over and then I'd have to pay full price for Get Famous.
IF, I decide to get it. I'm leaning that way though. I took another look at the build/buy and CAS for this pack and half price to me would be worth paying just to have those items. Plus, since I do love playing Rags to Riches, it would be fun taking Sims to fame that way, and satisfying. Not necessarily with the acting career though. Y'all say it takes a long time to get fame and then a lot of work to keep it. Honestly, that doesn't bother me in the least, I don't see it as a negative. I'm not an instant gratification kind of person, delayed gratification can be just as satisfying, if not more, to me.
Thank you also to those that wished me a Happy Birthday, very sweet of you!
Happy Simming and Happy 20th Anniversary of The Sims too!