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My grievances with each game in the franchise
Magnezone
Posts: 212 Member
Ive been playing a lot recently, but losing the motivation to stick with any one family or sim or group of sims long term. The issue is, there's no such thing as the "perfect" sims game and it's because they all have issues which can't be circumvented (as far as I can tell). Most franchises take aspects of the prior games and improve on them. The Sims randomly takes things away, on the other hand, and each game has positives and negatives which makes choosing what to play difficult.
The Sims 2:
-can't visit a sim's friend's house without the use of mods. The mod that used to exist for this, as far as I know, isn't available to download anymore. This makes doing certain stories and scenarios hard. If I want two sims to know each other for story purposes, I either have to edit them in SimPE (a hassle) or pray that they happen to stumble upon each other in a community lot, usually flooded with townies.
-Occults just plainly suck, especially vampires, no pun intended.
**these next two are relevant now, but not upon the games release, so they may be an unfair judgement, but I'm basing this upon deciding which game to play now, in 2020**
-Skills and aspirations are fairly shallow compared to later installments but Freetime helped with this
-limited cas and build mode compared to later installments
The Sims 3
-No option to turn off aging for currently unplayed sims. Not great for rotational players. To top this off, story progression sucks, and sims spawn babies from thin air or just die without achieving anything.
-Ugly, ugly sims. Nothing you do makes them look nice. They're just uncanny, very hard to make unique and have really weird puffy facial features. Alpha CC only makes them worse imo.
-The Sims 3, whilst full of content, most just isn't applicable to daily life. I like every pack in TS3 except Island Paradise, which includes Into the Future, World Adventures, Showtime and Supernatural but they're all so niche and aimed at specific scenarios and playstyles, and in family play I tend to turn them off. Whereas no Freetime equivalent (ambitions/generations are closest), no open for business and no real holiday pack even though they're all much more normal day to day things? Weird choice, EA.
The Sims 4
-the absolute ton of features missing that were available in prior installments of the franchise
-lack of world customisation and small neighborhoods you can't even really do anything with
-boring kids with only the 4 base game aspirations and 4 base game skills and next to nothing to do 6 years on.
-speaking of 6 years on, still less content than the other games despite having a longer development cycle thus far.
-story progression still sucks by default. I made a child of mine marry Johnny Zest and I left the two of them with the played check OFF. Even with that, the two never did anything. They never had children or improved in their careers. They just slowly aged and died off. story progression is supposed to be something unique and interesting about The Sims 3 and 4 that's not in 2, but it doesn't function at all without mods. I just end up playing them myself rotational style now.
-most if not all of the systems feel shallow and worse than their predecessors, but emotions are the epitome of this.
-if you have Island Living or City Living installed, expect random white blonde townies with Asian, Polynesian or Middle Eastern names to flood your save!
If all of these issues were fixed in one sims game, it would be just about perfect. The Sims 4 has build mode down. Just wish it had everything else down.
The Sims 2:
-can't visit a sim's friend's house without the use of mods. The mod that used to exist for this, as far as I know, isn't available to download anymore. This makes doing certain stories and scenarios hard. If I want two sims to know each other for story purposes, I either have to edit them in SimPE (a hassle) or pray that they happen to stumble upon each other in a community lot, usually flooded with townies.
-Occults just plainly suck, especially vampires, no pun intended.
**these next two are relevant now, but not upon the games release, so they may be an unfair judgement, but I'm basing this upon deciding which game to play now, in 2020**
-Skills and aspirations are fairly shallow compared to later installments but Freetime helped with this
-limited cas and build mode compared to later installments
The Sims 3
-No option to turn off aging for currently unplayed sims. Not great for rotational players. To top this off, story progression sucks, and sims spawn babies from thin air or just die without achieving anything.
-Ugly, ugly sims. Nothing you do makes them look nice. They're just uncanny, very hard to make unique and have really weird puffy facial features. Alpha CC only makes them worse imo.
-The Sims 3, whilst full of content, most just isn't applicable to daily life. I like every pack in TS3 except Island Paradise, which includes Into the Future, World Adventures, Showtime and Supernatural but they're all so niche and aimed at specific scenarios and playstyles, and in family play I tend to turn them off. Whereas no Freetime equivalent (ambitions/generations are closest), no open for business and no real holiday pack even though they're all much more normal day to day things? Weird choice, EA.
The Sims 4
-the absolute ton of features missing that were available in prior installments of the franchise
-lack of world customisation and small neighborhoods you can't even really do anything with
-boring kids with only the 4 base game aspirations and 4 base game skills and next to nothing to do 6 years on.
-speaking of 6 years on, still less content than the other games despite having a longer development cycle thus far.
-story progression still sucks by default. I made a child of mine marry Johnny Zest and I left the two of them with the played check OFF. Even with that, the two never did anything. They never had children or improved in their careers. They just slowly aged and died off. story progression is supposed to be something unique and interesting about The Sims 3 and 4 that's not in 2, but it doesn't function at all without mods. I just end up playing them myself rotational style now.
-most if not all of the systems feel shallow and worse than their predecessors, but emotions are the epitome of this.
-if you have Island Living or City Living installed, expect random white blonde townies with Asian, Polynesian or Middle Eastern names to flood your save!
If all of these issues were fixed in one sims game, it would be just about perfect. The Sims 4 has build mode down. Just wish it had everything else down.
My blog full of things that never get finished!
Magnezone, the lover of Calientes, Lotharios, Landgraabs and Curiouses everywhere.
Magnezone, the lover of Calientes, Lotharios, Landgraabs and Curiouses everywhere.
4
Comments
That being said, my biggest grievances:
In Sims 2 i don't like at all how going out stops time. It makes no sense at all for me that my sim stays out all afternoon shopping until it gets dark and comes back to home to find that it's still bright day, the time he left...
The lack of story progression is also a negative for me. Im a legacy player. I focus on my family and i like that the game can hold the story progression for the lifes of the other families.
In Sims 3 i don't like the sims. I find it very hard to make unique sims in cas. They all look the same in my eyes. And while i still play the game with very few crashes, i wish that it was better programmed from the beginning. I had to stop playing for years until last year when i noticed here at the forum that a lot of people was still playing and taught me ways of making it possible. (Thank you very nice people
In Sims 4... well, i do like a lot of things... but while i find that all grievances are manageable in other iterations... with sims 4 i find the worst of all: sim's personality. Or the lack of it. Having the sims act all the same for me is a killer. (But like i said before, it may be good for others, for instance for storytellers that want the complete control of their sims...but then, why include traits? It can deceive us to think that they actually do something...).
I would also prefer that the game had story progression. And that there were more depth on several features (for example, i would have loved if we could go underwater with our sims as they're diving and so...).
One thing to add about ugly TS3 sims; I agree with you about their uncanniness, there's no way to fight it. The facial animations, interactions with each other, they are no way close to TS2 in terms of quality. However you really can fight the "ugliness" and "puddingness" of their faces by using custom sliders, custom make-up and better lighting mods. I use a lot of Maxis-match cc (not Alpha) and I believe they make a huge difference in playability. They don't however save the ultimate uncanniness of the sims themselves...
Each version has its fans and detractors. For those who tend to pan the older versions, remember they came out many years ago when gaming technology was less advanced. Can't criticize a game for not having what was then impossible. When a version takes step(s) backwards, they are fair game.
But removed features or omitted features going forward in time is a different matter and worth griping about as far as my feedback that I give to developers. Such as TS4 not having toddlers.. or so many other things all others had in them. (like pools)
Edited to Add: Such as TS1 had the Sim Creator (separate from game) where we photoskinned our own photos onto Sims. Supplied tool from Maxis and could layer clothes etc. TS2 had Bodyshop and Home Crafter supplied by Maxis.
TS3 had Create A Style (In game) and CAW supplied by Maxis...TS4..nothing supplied by Maxis. Now, that's worth griping about.
My Sims house burning down
The Sims 2
My kids got taken off me because I couldn't keep up with their homework
The Sims 3
Save Error 12. The game was ahead of it's time and cannot be played on 64bit
The Sims 4
Rushed and not a real Sims game and moving in a direction that makes it too 'woke' for me to be interested in
The Sims 5
Not even announced yet!
> No option to turn off aging for currently unplayed sims. Not great for rotational players. To top this off, story progression sucks, and sims spawn babies from thin air or just die without achieving anything.
I use mods for SP in sims3, it's not great (still a lot of dynasties dying childless) but it's much better than the base game where stuff like emigration happen under the carpet and you got no control on the target population. Also, it means the game is pretty well moddable, which isn't self evident (I haven't heard good echoes from TS4).
> Whereas no Freetime equivalent (ambitions/generations are closest), no open for business and no real holiday pack even though they're all much more normal day to day things? Weird choice, EA.
I may be off, but I think the line of reasoning is very sound and is the following:
if you add everyday stuffs, you have to cram them into the main town. And the main town were already near the limit of what could reasonably run, despite being not that big nor that populous.
In open for buiseness, you could only run one buiseness at once, and the whole town + townies was obsessed by it and provided decent customer base. Imagine in TS3 rolling 8 buiseness at once with 4 employees each and the necessary rolling pool of 15 customers each. Imagine the huge number of townies needed and the strain put on the computer. IRL I grew up in a small 400 people village. At its peak, it had third of an elementary school and a travelling baker. It is now 750 people big and still no more activity. Sims towns are not 400 pop big. They do manage to barely but credibly fake a minimum of activity, but for open buiseness, you'd likely need twice bigger towns (even if you had them, god helps you when 20 sims try to path, say, in front of the Theater).
So while open for buisiness is among my best simming experience all time and I was very disapointed and sad at how community lots had been treated in 3, I can totally understand it and think it may have been necessary.
I'm not entirely convinced though, an inactive Sim's life isn't really much more complex than the life of a Tropico citizen, and Tropico3 in 2020 can handle 500 people without breaking a sweat (beyond that you have congestion problems, but no hardware limitation that I'm aware of).
I'm fully aware the way it currently is, inactive sims probably require a lot more computation than tropiceans, but I don't think it's necessarilly put to good use. A typical tropicean choses the most paying and satisfying work according to his qualification; said work is meaningfull, integrated in a fully fledge economy; he pays a rent (or build a shack), goes to the restaurant (paying the bill), to the doctor, to the church, to the market; he marries, have children, send them at school; and he has a political affilinities and need preferences for a personality. Compare with a TS3 inactive who stares at wall, goes into rabbit holes and erratically get random skill and job boosts; the only things they do better is stalking the actives, get random relationships with each other, being rendered in 3D and flushing the toilets.
>
> In Sims 2 i don't like at all how going out stops time. It makes no sense at all for me that my sim stays out all afternoon shopping until it gets dark and comes back to home to find that it's still bright day, the time he left...
Well, it makes sense given the closed world (if you leave but your children stay at home, is he somehow put in a vortex and jumps forward in time?), and given the loading times, I don't think they could have managed open world at that time.
> The lack of story progression is also a negative for me. Im a legacy player. I focus on my family and i like that the game can hold the story progression for the lifes of the other families.
I think that also fit into the things improved in more recent games for which it's unfair to criticize them. Compared to TS, TS2 do have a story progression, it's just for the active household. It's only logic they didn't try to do all at once when close world lends itself more for rotational play anyway.
But yeah, not being much of a rotational myself, my prefered sims is 3 and lack of SP is what keeps me back from jumping back into TS2, despite all the love I have for open for buiseness, the sims and their wardrobe.
I don't think I can list every grievance I have, but off the top of my head:
Sims 2
Sims 3
Sims 4
This one is my least favorite. I still like it, but it's the one I have the most grievances with.
And for all of them: aliens. I've never liked aliens. I know I said above I love mythical creatures, but I didn't say all mythical creatures.