1. The Slow Roll-Out of Supernatural Content: In TS2, basically every EP came with some new magical or sci-fi element to it. In TS4, they want most occult sims to be put out in their own GP...but those GP's come out at an absolute snail's pace!! Not only that, but EP occults not only are rare, but when we do get them, they're also incredibly stripped-down in terms of both powers and customization compared to GP occults. And let's not even get me started on how poorly designed the magic system is (not fun to grind your magic levels [grinding can be a fun and enjoyable experience in a game, but ROM's magic system misses the mark by a country mile], worthless elemental spells, etc.) or all of the missed opportunities for some truly awesome mad science and space travel features (no customizable personal ships in the coming Star Wars pack, can't live on Sixam, no genetic engineering in Discover University, only one possible storyline progression path with the Mother Plant in Strangerville, etc.). They advertised "Weirder Stories," but they mostly just put out tiresomely tame content for realism-based players, while family players have taken over both community stuff pack votes because they want a "Generations" pack by any means necessary...
2. The Emotions System: I've posted about this a lot, but it's just plain unbalanced, with too big an emphasis on positive and productive emotions and not enough emphasis on negative emotions. Negative emotions can easily be overridden by positive ones with environmental buffs, buffs from having physical needs fulfilled, and buffs from watching T.V. Positive emotions are all boosted by "Happy" moodlets, while there is no booster for negative emotions. Because "Happy" moodlet buffs are so plentiful, the "Cheerful," "Gloomy," and "Hot-Headed" traits completely pointless from a gameplay standpoint, while the "Active," "Romantic," "Self-Assured," and "Genius" traits are over-supported. Even though we have ghosts and vampires in the game, we have no "Fear" emotion at all. It's just plain poor game design for a game that's supposed to center around storytelling.
3. No Difficulty: Look, games that seek greater accessibility and a broader appeal traditionally had difficulty settings for a reason--so players of different skill levels and levels of patience can all get a good experience out of the same piece of software. Instead, in the name of "accessibility," TS4's difficulty has been nerfed numerous times. They've nerfed alien abductions, vampire break-ins, career difficulty...all in the name of making the game more appealing to more "casual audiences." They need to stop these across the board nerfs and implement some difficulty settings instead, because the lack of difficulty not only makes short-term play too easy, but it also discourages long-term play by making every career, every relationship, every family, every generation feel bland and samey to the point of a player not even wanting to think about going past generation 2 or 3 here. Difficulty is not bad. Difficulty is what allows players to set long-term goals in open-ended games like this which keep them playing longer in order to achieve them. Not being able to do everything or see everything or max everything on "Normal" lifespan settings encourages players to try again next generation or next save and explore new strategies and game mechanics, which keeps them invested in the game more strongly and for longer periods of time. No difficulty might be nice for players with little patience and short attention spans...but it's not good for EVERYONE. That's why difficulty settings exist.
4. They Broke the Memories System: This happened all the way back in the GTW patch, but I'm still mad about it. At launch, TS4 had a memories system where you took a screenshot in game, you assigned it as a memory, you chose which sims that memory applied to, and you chose an emotion to be associated with that memory. When you pulled up memories with the "Reminisce" option that appeared when clicking on your active sim, you went into a menu that only contained memories from that sim on that save and picked the memory you wanted to get an extra moodlet of whatever emotion you wanted. When you went into the "Memories" menu through the UI bar on the bottom of the screen, in any given save, only memories associated with that save would pop up. In the GTW patch, to make way for photography and painting from reference, they totally destroyed the memories system with their infernal cluttered, laggy, disorganized screenshot manager and made memories have randomized emotions based on a random moodlet from a sim's moodlet bar (which is always a jumbled mess of active and repressed moodlets because of how many random things can cause those things to latch onto your sims in this game). This not only ruins the system from a storytelling standpoint (not being able to use the memories system to keep your saves' storylines in order anymore) but also from a gameplay perspective (destroying probably the best mechanic attached to the emotion system and turning it into an unusable mess). They need to go back and fix this, because it's totally unusable now to the point where people who haven't been playing since launch think this game doesn't even have a memories system of any kind at all! They dun goofed!
5. Personalities and Relationships Don't Matter: It doesn't matter whether you choose "Loner" or "Outgoing" or don't use either one at all, all of the sims are autonomously extroverted little chatterboxes. It doesn't matter whether two sims are best friends or mortal enemies, whether they've been having a nice chat or just got done with a marriage-destroying argument, they'll still have a bunch of autonomously friendly interactions when talking to each other. A lover will be caught cheating one minute, and the next, the cheating lover, the cheated-on lover, and the side-dish will all be chattering happily with each other live nothing just happened!! What the actual Flux?!! No. That's broken. Fix it.
6. The Away System is Jacked Up: So, you leave the house at 10:00 PM on a Monday night with your vampire dude so he can go feed downtown at the bar. The kids are in bed, the wife's tiredness is in the orange, everyone is set to "Take care of self." Things should be fine, right? WRONG! You come home at 3:00 AM to total chaos! Mom is in the kids' room playing on their computer, Suzy's downstairs watching T.V., Bobby's in the back yard on the monkey bars, it's 2 hours until the kids have to get up for school and their energy is only half full...and you have to pause the game and manually put all of these heathens to bed where they should be, because the game does not place sims logically based on time of day or even whose bedroom is where when one sim leaves the rest of the household at home and returns some time later. I would rather have TS2's at-home time freeze system than this garbage. At least that made SENSE!! This? This right here? Is the absolute worst.
7. No Functional Free-Build Community Lots: The "General" lot type is the only community lot type that doesn't restrict you with a checklist...but it also doesn't attract NPC sims. Other lot types do attract NPC sims, but they have an annoying checklist of required items (Heaven forbid some klepto sim steals one if you don't have extras, or the whole functionality of the lot breaks) and sims won't use items that aren't on the requirements checklist (they won't use a Foosball table at a public pool, a bar at a museum won't be populated with a bartender, etc.). In TS2, I loved building community lots, because I could throw together all kinds of crazy things and they'd WORK. NPC's would work the counters and bars, sims would come and use anything you put down there, failing to put in a trashcan didn't mean you couldn't open your nightclub. The community lot mechanics in TS4 are really restrictive and annoying and feel like something Corporate came up with to get people to buy new packs for new functioning venue types. Two thumbs so far down they come out of the other side of the planet.
8. A General Identity Crisis: TS4's biggest flaw, in my opinion, is that it's just...a game that doesn't know what it is or it wants to be. Is it a general life simulator, or does it want to focus on families or single life? Does it want to be totally realistic, a parody of reality, or allow for fleshed-out fantasy and sci-fi elements? Does it want to be a visual story engine for people who can't draw or do 3D modeling, or does it want to be a game with mechanics to master and strategic elements (no matter how light they may be)? Does it want to be a virtual safe space for people who need a safety bubble to escape to or does it want to be a true sandbox where people can make the world and the lives of their digital people as lovely or horrible as they darn well please? Is it a game for tween girls who usually don't play video games except for maybe one of those endless clicker phone games when they're on their way home from school, or a AAA title for people who actually have some basic gaming skills? Is it an advertising vehicle or a piece of entertainment media? This game tries being all of these things, but does none of them particularly well, and that's a problem. At the end of the day, there is no clear vision for the direction of this game except for "Make Packs, Make Stacks," and that's resulting in a mediocre game that doesn't hold up when compared to earlier games in the franchise. TS4 is all over the place, a jack of all trades and master of none...and if the franchise doesn't course-correct either by fixing TS4 or doing a much better job with TS5, it won't survive the 2020's.
I hate that every time you have a guest come to your house they get out ingredients to make cakes and leave them everywhere. It’s really frustrating. Also you can’t have a bbq when people come over because they start make potions. It’s so annoying. It need to be fixed ASAP
1. The Slow Roll-Out of Supernatural Content: In TS2, basically every EP came with some new magical or sci-fi element to it. In TS4, they want most occult sims to be put out in their own GP...but those GP's come out at an absolute snail's pace!! Not only that, but EP occults not only are rare, but when we do get them, they're also incredibly stripped-down in terms of both powers and customization compared to GP occults. And let's not even get me started on how poorly designed the magic system is (not fun to grind your magic levels [grinding can be a fun and enjoyable experience in a game, but ROM's magic system misses the mark by a country mile], worthless elemental spells, etc.) or all of the missed opportunities for some truly awesome mad science and space travel features (no customizable personal ships in the coming Star Wars pack, can't live on Sixam, no genetic engineering in Discover University, only one possible storyline progression path with the Mother Plant in Strangerville, etc.). They advertised "Weirder Stories," but they mostly just put out tiresomely tame content for realism-based players, while family players have taken over both community stuff pack votes because they want a "Generations" pack by any means necessary...
2. The Emotions System: I've posted about this a lot, but it's just plain unbalanced, with too big an emphasis on positive and productive emotions and not enough emphasis on negative emotions. Negative emotions can easily be overridden by positive ones with environmental buffs, buffs from having physical needs fulfilled, and buffs from watching T.V. Positive emotions are all boosted by "Happy" moodlets, while there is no booster for negative emotions. Because "Happy" moodlet buffs are so plentiful, the "Cheerful," "Gloomy," and "Hot-Headed" traits completely pointless from a gameplay standpoint, while the "Active," "Romantic," "Self-Assured," and "Genius" traits are over-supported. Even though we have ghosts and vampires in the game, we have no "Fear" emotion at all. It's just plain poor game design for a game that's supposed to center around storytelling.
3. No Difficulty: Look, games that seek greater accessibility and a broader appeal traditionally had difficulty settings for a reason--so players of different skill levels and levels of patience can all get a good experience out of the same piece of software. Instead, in the name of "accessibility," TS4's difficulty has been nerfed numerous times. They've nerfed alien abductions, vampire break-ins, career difficulty...all in the name of making the game more appealing to more "casual audiences." They need to stop these across the board nerfs and implement some difficulty settings instead, because the lack of difficulty not only makes short-term play too easy, but it also discourages long-term play by making every career, every relationship, every family, every generation feel bland and samey to the point of a player not even wanting to think about going past generation 2 or 3 here. Difficulty is not bad. Difficulty is what allows players to set long-term goals in open-ended games like this which keep them playing longer in order to achieve them. Not being able to do everything or see everything or max everything on "Normal" lifespan settings encourages players to try again next generation or next save and explore new strategies and game mechanics, which keeps them invested in the game more strongly and for longer periods of time. No difficulty might be nice for players with little patience and short attention spans...but it's not good for EVERYONE. That's why difficulty settings exist.
4. They Broke the Memories System: This happened all the way back in the GTW patch, but I'm still mad about it. At launch, TS4 had a memories system where you took a screenshot in game, you assigned it as a memory, you chose which sims that memory applied to, and you chose an emotion to be associated with that memory. When you pulled up memories with the "Reminisce" option that appeared when clicking on your active sim, you went into a menu that only contained memories from that sim on that save and picked the memory you wanted to get an extra moodlet of whatever emotion you wanted. When you went into the "Memories" menu through the UI bar on the bottom of the screen, in any given save, only memories associated with that save would pop up. In the GTW patch, to make way for photography and painting from reference, they totally destroyed the memories system with their infernal cluttered, laggy, disorganized screenshot manager and made memories have randomized emotions based on a random moodlet from a sim's moodlet bar (which is always a jumbled mess of active and repressed moodlets because of how many random things can cause those things to latch onto your sims in this game). This not only ruins the system from a storytelling standpoint (not being able to use the memories system to keep your saves' storylines in order anymore) but also from a gameplay perspective (destroying probably the best mechanic attached to the emotion system and turning it into an unusable mess). They need to go back and fix this, because it's totally unusable now to the point where people who haven't been playing since launch think this game doesn't even have a memories system of any kind at all! They dun goofed!
5. Personalities and Relationships Don't Matter: It doesn't matter whether you choose "Loner" or "Outgoing" or don't use either one at all, all of the sims are autonomously extroverted little chatterboxes. It doesn't matter whether two sims are best friends or mortal enemies, whether they've been having a nice chat or just got done with a marriage-destroying argument, they'll still have a bunch of autonomously friendly interactions when talking to each other. A lover will be caught cheating one minute, and the next, the cheating lover, the cheated-on lover, and the side-dish will all be chattering happily with each other live nothing just happened!! What the actual Flux?!! No. That's broken. Fix it.
6. The Away System is Jacked Up: So, you leave the house at 10:00 PM on a Monday night with your vampire dude so he can go feed downtown at the bar. The kids are in bed, the wife's tiredness is in the orange, everyone is set to "Take care of self." Things should be fine, right? WRONG! You come home at 3:00 AM to total chaos! Mom is in the kids' room playing on their computer, Suzy's downstairs watching T.V., Bobby's in the back yard on the monkey bars, it's 2 hours until the kids have to get up for school and their energy is only half full...and you have to pause the game and manually put all of these heathens to bed where they should be, because the game does not place sims logically based on time of day or even whose bedroom is where when one sim leaves the rest of the household at home and returns some time later. I would rather have TS2's at-home time freeze system than this garbage. At least that made SENSE!! This? This right here? Is the absolute worst.
7. No Functional Free-Build Community Lots: The "General" lot type is the only community lot type that doesn't restrict you with a checklist...but it also doesn't attract NPC sims. Other lot types do attract NPC sims, but they have an annoying checklist of required items (Heaven forbid some klepto sim steals one if you don't have extras, or the whole functionality of the lot breaks) and sims won't use items that aren't on the requirements checklist (they won't use a Foosball table at a public pool, a bar at a museum won't be populated with a bartender, etc.). In TS2, I loved building community lots, because I could throw together all kinds of crazy things and they'd WORK. NPC's would work the counters and bars, sims would come and use anything you put down there, failing to put in a trashcan didn't mean you couldn't open your nightclub. The community lot mechanics in TS4 are really restrictive and annoying and feel like something Corporate came up with to get people to buy new packs for new functioning venue types. Two thumbs so far down they come out of the other side of the planet.
8. A General Identity Crisis: TS4's biggest flaw, in my opinion, is that it's just...a game that doesn't know what it is or it wants to be. Is it a general life simulator, or does it want to focus on families or single life? Does it want to be totally realistic, a parody of reality, or allow for fleshed-out fantasy and sci-fi elements? Does it want to be a visual story engine for people who can't draw or do 3D modeling, or does it want to be a game with mechanics to master and strategic elements (no matter how light they may be)? Does it want to be a virtual safe space for people who need a safety bubble to escape to or does it want to be a true sandbox where people can make the world and the lives of their digital people as lovely or horrible as they darn well please? Is it a game for tween girls who usually don't play video games except for maybe one of those endless clicker phone games when they're on their way home from school, or a AAA title for people who actually have some basic gaming skills? Is it an advertising vehicle or a piece of entertainment media? This game tries being all of these things, but does none of them particularly well, and that's a problem. At the end of the day, there is no clear vision for the direction of this game except for "Make Packs, Make Stacks," and that's resulting in a mediocre game that doesn't hold up when compared to earlier games in the franchise. TS4 is all over the place, a jack of all trades and master of none...and if the franchise doesn't course-correct either by fixing TS4 or doing a much better job with TS5, it won't survive the 2020's.
1. The Slow Roll-Out of Supernatural Content: In TS2, basically every EP came with some new magical or sci-fi element to it. In TS4, they want most occult sims to be put out in their own GP...but those GP's come out at an absolute snail's pace!! Not only that, but EP occults not only are rare, but when we do get them, they're also incredibly stripped-down in terms of both powers and customization compared to GP occults. And let's not even get me started on how poorly designed the magic system is (not fun to grind your magic levels [grinding can be a fun and enjoyable experience in a game, but ROM's magic system misses the mark by a country mile], worthless elemental spells, etc.) or all of the missed opportunities for some truly awesome mad science and space travel features (no customizable personal ships in the coming Star Wars pack, can't live on Sixam, no genetic engineering in Discover University, only one possible storyline progression path with the Mother Plant in Strangerville, etc.). They advertised "Weirder Stories," but they mostly just put out tiresomely tame content for realism-based players, while family players have taken over both community stuff pack votes because they want a "Generations" pack by any means necessary...
2. The Emotions System: I've posted about this a lot, but it's just plain unbalanced, with too big an emphasis on positive and productive emotions and not enough emphasis on negative emotions. Negative emotions can easily be overridden by positive ones with environmental buffs, buffs from having physical needs fulfilled, and buffs from watching T.V. Positive emotions are all boosted by "Happy" moodlets, while there is no booster for negative emotions. Because "Happy" moodlet buffs are so plentiful, the "Cheerful," "Gloomy," and "Hot-Headed" traits completely pointless from a gameplay standpoint, while the "Active," "Romantic," "Self-Assured," and "Genius" traits are over-supported. Even though we have ghosts and vampires in the game, we have no "Fear" emotion at all. It's just plain poor game design for a game that's supposed to center around storytelling.
3. No Difficulty: Look, games that seek greater accessibility and a broader appeal traditionally had difficulty settings for a reason--so players of different skill levels and levels of patience can all get a good experience out of the same piece of software. Instead, in the name of "accessibility," TS4's difficulty has been nerfed numerous times. They've nerfed alien abductions, vampire break-ins, career difficulty...all in the name of making the game more appealing to more "casual audiences." They need to stop these across the board nerfs and implement some difficulty settings instead, because the lack of difficulty not only makes short-term play too easy, but it also discourages long-term play by making every career, every relationship, every family, every generation feel bland and samey to the point of a player not even wanting to think about going past generation 2 or 3 here. Difficulty is not bad. Difficulty is what allows players to set long-term goals in open-ended games like this which keep them playing longer in order to achieve them. Not being able to do everything or see everything or max everything on "Normal" lifespan settings encourages players to try again next generation or next save and explore new strategies and game mechanics, which keeps them invested in the game more strongly and for longer periods of time. No difficulty might be nice for players with little patience and short attention spans...but it's not good for EVERYONE. That's why difficulty settings exist.
4. They Broke the Memories System: This happened all the way back in the GTW patch, but I'm still mad about it. At launch, TS4 had a memories system where you took a screenshot in game, you assigned it as a memory, you chose which sims that memory applied to, and you chose an emotion to be associated with that memory. When you pulled up memories with the "Reminisce" option that appeared when clicking on your active sim, you went into a menu that only contained memories from that sim on that save and picked the memory you wanted to get an extra moodlet of whatever emotion you wanted. When you went into the "Memories" menu through the UI bar on the bottom of the screen, in any given save, only memories associated with that save would pop up. In the GTW patch, to make way for photography and painting from reference, they totally destroyed the memories system with their infernal cluttered, laggy, disorganized screenshot manager and made memories have randomized emotions based on a random moodlet from a sim's moodlet bar (which is always a jumbled mess of active and repressed moodlets because of how many random things can cause those things to latch onto your sims in this game). This not only ruins the system from a storytelling standpoint (not being able to use the memories system to keep your saves' storylines in order anymore) but also from a gameplay perspective (destroying probably the best mechanic attached to the emotion system and turning it into an unusable mess). They need to go back and fix this, because it's totally unusable now to the point where people who haven't been playing since launch think this game doesn't even have a memories system of any kind at all! They dun goofed!
5. Personalities and Relationships Don't Matter: It doesn't matter whether you choose "Loner" or "Outgoing" or don't use either one at all, all of the sims are autonomously extroverted little chatterboxes. It doesn't matter whether two sims are best friends or mortal enemies, whether they've been having a nice chat or just got done with a marriage-destroying argument, they'll still have a bunch of autonomously friendly interactions when talking to each other. A lover will be caught cheating one minute, and the next, the cheating lover, the cheated-on lover, and the side-dish will all be chattering happily with each other live nothing just happened!! What the actual Flux?!! No. That's broken. Fix it.
6. The Away System is Jacked Up: So, you leave the house at 10:00 PM on a Monday night with your vampire dude so he can go feed downtown at the bar. The kids are in bed, the wife's tiredness is in the orange, everyone is set to "Take care of self." Things should be fine, right? WRONG! You come home at 3:00 AM to total chaos! Mom is in the kids' room playing on their computer, Suzy's downstairs watching T.V., Bobby's in the back yard on the monkey bars, it's 2 hours until the kids have to get up for school and their energy is only half full...and you have to pause the game and manually put all of these heathens to bed where they should be, because the game does not place sims logically based on time of day or even whose bedroom is where when one sim leaves the rest of the household at home and returns some time later. I would rather have TS2's at-home time freeze system than this garbage. At least that made SENSE!! This? This right here? Is the absolute worst.
7. No Functional Free-Build Community Lots: The "General" lot type is the only community lot type that doesn't restrict you with a checklist...but it also doesn't attract NPC sims. Other lot types do attract NPC sims, but they have an annoying checklist of required items (Heaven forbid some klepto sim steals one if you don't have extras, or the whole functionality of the lot breaks) and sims won't use items that aren't on the requirements checklist (they won't use a Foosball table at a public pool, a bar at a museum won't be populated with a bartender, etc.). In TS2, I loved building community lots, because I could throw together all kinds of crazy things and they'd WORK. NPC's would work the counters and bars, sims would come and use anything you put down there, failing to put in a trashcan didn't mean you couldn't open your nightclub. The community lot mechanics in TS4 are really restrictive and annoying and feel like something Corporate came up with to get people to buy new packs for new functioning venue types. Two thumbs so far down they come out of the other side of the planet.
8. A General Identity Crisis: TS4's biggest flaw, in my opinion, is that it's just...a game that doesn't know what it is or it wants to be. Is it a general life simulator, or does it want to focus on families or single life? Does it want to be totally realistic, a parody of reality, or allow for fleshed-out fantasy and sci-fi elements? Does it want to be a visual story engine for people who can't draw or do 3D modeling, or does it want to be a game with mechanics to master and strategic elements (no matter how light they may be)? Does it want to be a virtual safe space for people who need a safety bubble to escape to or does it want to be a true sandbox where people can make the world and the lives of their digital people as lovely or horrible as they darn well please? Is it a game for tween girls who usually don't play video games except for maybe one of those endless clicker phone games when they're on their way home from school, or a AAA title for people who actually have some basic gaming skills? Is it an advertising vehicle or a piece of entertainment media? This game tries being all of these things, but does none of them particularly well, and that's a problem. At the end of the day, there is no clear vision for the direction of this game except for "Make Packs, Make Stacks," and that's resulting in a mediocre game that doesn't hold up when compared to earlier games in the franchise. TS4 is all over the place, a jack of all trades and master of none...and if the franchise doesn't course-correct either by fixing TS4 or doing a much better job with TS5, it won't survive the 2020's.
OMG! Thank you so much for taking the time to type that all out! EVERY SINGLE THING YOU SAID is how I feel! I'm so glad it's not just me being overly cynical about TS4 versus the other iterations.
The whole let's not upset players with too much drama and keep it a happy puppies and rainbow filled space has driven me insane from the beginning! And the stupid joker smiles and head tilting while looking up seriously grates on my nerves!
1. The Slow Roll-Out of Supernatural Content: In TS2, basically every EP came with some new magical or sci-fi element to it. In TS4, they want most occult sims to be put out in their own GP...but those GP's come out at an absolute snail's pace!! Not only that, but EP occults not only are rare, but when we do get them, they're also incredibly stripped-down in terms of both powers and customization compared to GP occults. And let's not even get me started on how poorly designed the magic system is (not fun to grind your magic levels [grinding can be a fun and enjoyable experience in a game, but ROM's magic system misses the mark by a country mile], worthless elemental spells, etc.) or all of the missed opportunities for some truly awesome mad science and space travel features (no customizable personal ships in the coming Star Wars pack, can't live on Sixam, no genetic engineering in Discover University, only one possible storyline progression path with the Mother Plant in Strangerville, etc.). They advertised "Weirder Stories," but they mostly just put out tiresomely tame content for realism-based players, while family players have taken over both community stuff pack votes because they want a "Generations" pack by any means necessary...
2. The Emotions System: I've posted about this a lot, but it's just plain unbalanced, with too big an emphasis on positive and productive emotions and not enough emphasis on negative emotions. Negative emotions can easily be overridden by positive ones with environmental buffs, buffs from having physical needs fulfilled, and buffs from watching T.V. Positive emotions are all boosted by "Happy" moodlets, while there is no booster for negative emotions. Because "Happy" moodlet buffs are so plentiful, the "Cheerful," "Gloomy," and "Hot-Headed" traits completely pointless from a gameplay standpoint, while the "Active," "Romantic," "Self-Assured," and "Genius" traits are over-supported. Even though we have ghosts and vampires in the game, we have no "Fear" emotion at all. It's just plain poor game design for a game that's supposed to center around storytelling.
3. No Difficulty: Look, games that seek greater accessibility and a broader appeal traditionally had difficulty settings for a reason--so players of different skill levels and levels of patience can all get a good experience out of the same piece of software. Instead, in the name of "accessibility," TS4's difficulty has been nerfed numerous times. They've nerfed alien abductions, vampire break-ins, career difficulty...all in the name of making the game more appealing to more "casual audiences." They need to stop these across the board nerfs and implement some difficulty settings instead, because the lack of difficulty not only makes short-term play too easy, but it also discourages long-term play by making every career, every relationship, every family, every generation feel bland and samey to the point of a player not even wanting to think about going past generation 2 or 3 here. Difficulty is not bad. Difficulty is what allows players to set long-term goals in open-ended games like this which keep them playing longer in order to achieve them. Not being able to do everything or see everything or max everything on "Normal" lifespan settings encourages players to try again next generation or next save and explore new strategies and game mechanics, which keeps them invested in the game more strongly and for longer periods of time. No difficulty might be nice for players with little patience and short attention spans...but it's not good for EVERYONE. That's why difficulty settings exist.
4. They Broke the Memories System: This happened all the way back in the GTW patch, but I'm still mad about it. At launch, TS4 had a memories system where you took a screenshot in game, you assigned it as a memory, you chose which sims that memory applied to, and you chose an emotion to be associated with that memory. When you pulled up memories with the "Reminisce" option that appeared when clicking on your active sim, you went into a menu that only contained memories from that sim on that save and picked the memory you wanted to get an extra moodlet of whatever emotion you wanted. When you went into the "Memories" menu through the UI bar on the bottom of the screen, in any given save, only memories associated with that save would pop up. In the GTW patch, to make way for photography and painting from reference, they totally destroyed the memories system with their infernal cluttered, laggy, disorganized screenshot manager and made memories have randomized emotions based on a random moodlet from a sim's moodlet bar (which is always a jumbled mess of active and repressed moodlets because of how many random things can cause those things to latch onto your sims in this game). This not only ruins the system from a storytelling standpoint (not being able to use the memories system to keep your saves' storylines in order anymore) but also from a gameplay perspective (destroying probably the best mechanic attached to the emotion system and turning it into an unusable mess). They need to go back and fix this, because it's totally unusable now to the point where people who haven't been playing since launch think this game doesn't even have a memories system of any kind at all! They dun goofed!
5. Personalities and Relationships Don't Matter: It doesn't matter whether you choose "Loner" or "Outgoing" or don't use either one at all, all of the sims are autonomously extroverted little chatterboxes. It doesn't matter whether two sims are best friends or mortal enemies, whether they've been having a nice chat or just got done with a marriage-destroying argument, they'll still have a bunch of autonomously friendly interactions when talking to each other. A lover will be caught cheating one minute, and the next, the cheating lover, the cheated-on lover, and the side-dish will all be chattering happily with each other live nothing just happened!! What the actual Flux?!! No. That's broken. Fix it.
6. The Away System is Jacked Up: So, you leave the house at 10:00 PM on a Monday night with your vampire dude so he can go feed downtown at the bar. The kids are in bed, the wife's tiredness is in the orange, everyone is set to "Take care of self." Things should be fine, right? WRONG! You come home at 3:00 AM to total chaos! Mom is in the kids' room playing on their computer, Suzy's downstairs watching T.V., Bobby's in the back yard on the monkey bars, it's 2 hours until the kids have to get up for school and their energy is only half full...and you have to pause the game and manually put all of these heathens to bed where they should be, because the game does not place sims logically based on time of day or even whose bedroom is where when one sim leaves the rest of the household at home and returns some time later. I would rather have TS2's at-home time freeze system than this garbage. At least that made SENSE!! This? This right here? Is the absolute worst.
7. No Functional Free-Build Community Lots: The "General" lot type is the only community lot type that doesn't restrict you with a checklist...but it also doesn't attract NPC sims. Other lot types do attract NPC sims, but they have an annoying checklist of required items (Heaven forbid some klepto sim steals one if you don't have extras, or the whole functionality of the lot breaks) and sims won't use items that aren't on the requirements checklist (they won't use a Foosball table at a public pool, a bar at a museum won't be populated with a bartender, etc.). In TS2, I loved building community lots, because I could throw together all kinds of crazy things and they'd WORK. NPC's would work the counters and bars, sims would come and use anything you put down there, failing to put in a trashcan didn't mean you couldn't open your nightclub. The community lot mechanics in TS4 are really restrictive and annoying and feel like something Corporate came up with to get people to buy new packs for new functioning venue types. Two thumbs so far down they come out of the other side of the planet.
8. A General Identity Crisis: TS4's biggest flaw, in my opinion, is that it's just...a game that doesn't know what it is or it wants to be. Is it a general life simulator, or does it want to focus on families or single life? Does it want to be totally realistic, a parody of reality, or allow for fleshed-out fantasy and sci-fi elements? Does it want to be a visual story engine for people who can't draw or do 3D modeling, or does it want to be a game with mechanics to master and strategic elements (no matter how light they may be)? Does it want to be a virtual safe space for people who need a safety bubble to escape to or does it want to be a true sandbox where people can make the world and the lives of their digital people as lovely or horrible as they darn well please? Is it a game for tween girls who usually don't play video games except for maybe one of those endless clicker phone games when they're on their way home from school, or a AAA title for people who actually have some basic gaming skills? Is it an advertising vehicle or a piece of entertainment media? This game tries being all of these things, but does none of them particularly well, and that's a problem. At the end of the day, there is no clear vision for the direction of this game except for "Make Packs, Make Stacks," and that's resulting in a mediocre game that doesn't hold up when compared to earlier games in the franchise. TS4 is all over the place, a jack of all trades and master of none...and if the franchise doesn't course-correct either by fixing TS4 or doing a much better job with TS5, it won't survive the 2020's.
Spot on! Wish I could give a dozen awesomes! Have quite had it with their fake all's sweetness and light approach. Nobody can please everybody, so they really need to stop trying to do the impossible.
One thing that I don't like is the game puts decorations on your house and venues. With the venues, I have to make them residental to remove them, then put them back to the setting I had. On some lots you can't do that, and I'm stuck with these decorations. Whose stupid idea was this?
1. The Slow Roll-Out of Supernatural Content: In TS2, basically every EP came with some new magical or sci-fi element to it. In TS4, they want most occult sims to be put out in their own GP...but those GP's come out at an absolute snail's pace!! Not only that, but EP occults not only are rare, but when we do get them, they're also incredibly stripped-down in terms of both powers and customization compared to GP occults. And let's not even get me started on how poorly designed the magic system is (not fun to grind your magic levels [grinding can be a fun and enjoyable experience in a game, but ROM's magic system misses the mark by a country mile], worthless elemental spells, etc.) or all of the missed opportunities for some truly awesome mad science and space travel features (no customizable personal ships in the coming Star Wars pack, can't live on Sixam, no genetic engineering in Discover University, only one possible storyline progression path with the Mother Plant in Strangerville, etc.). They advertised "Weirder Stories," but they mostly just put out tiresomely tame content for realism-based players, while family players have taken over both community stuff pack votes because they want a "Generations" pack by any means necessary...
2. The Emotions System: I've posted about this a lot, but it's just plain unbalanced, with too big an emphasis on positive and productive emotions and not enough emphasis on negative emotions. Negative emotions can easily be overridden by positive ones with environmental buffs, buffs from having physical needs fulfilled, and buffs from watching T.V. Positive emotions are all boosted by "Happy" moodlets, while there is no booster for negative emotions. Because "Happy" moodlet buffs are so plentiful, the "Cheerful," "Gloomy," and "Hot-Headed" traits completely pointless from a gameplay standpoint, while the "Active," "Romantic," "Self-Assured," and "Genius" traits are over-supported. Even though we have ghosts and vampires in the game, we have no "Fear" emotion at all. It's just plain poor game design for a game that's supposed to center around storytelling.
3. No Difficulty: Look, games that seek greater accessibility and a broader appeal traditionally had difficulty settings for a reason--so players of different skill levels and levels of patience can all get a good experience out of the same piece of software. Instead, in the name of "accessibility," TS4's difficulty has been nerfed numerous times. They've nerfed alien abductions, vampire break-ins, career difficulty...all in the name of making the game more appealing to more "casual audiences." They need to stop these across the board nerfs and implement some difficulty settings instead, because the lack of difficulty not only makes short-term play too easy, but it also discourages long-term play by making every career, every relationship, every family, every generation feel bland and samey to the point of a player not even wanting to think about going past generation 2 or 3 here. Difficulty is not bad. Difficulty is what allows players to set long-term goals in open-ended games like this which keep them playing longer in order to achieve them. Not being able to do everything or see everything or max everything on "Normal" lifespan settings encourages players to try again next generation or next save and explore new strategies and game mechanics, which keeps them invested in the game more strongly and for longer periods of time. No difficulty might be nice for players with little patience and short attention spans...but it's not good for EVERYONE. That's why difficulty settings exist.
4. They Broke the Memories System: This happened all the way back in the GTW patch, but I'm still mad about it. At launch, TS4 had a memories system where you took a screenshot in game, you assigned it as a memory, you chose which sims that memory applied to, and you chose an emotion to be associated with that memory. When you pulled up memories with the "Reminisce" option that appeared when clicking on your active sim, you went into a menu that only contained memories from that sim on that save and picked the memory you wanted to get an extra moodlet of whatever emotion you wanted. When you went into the "Memories" menu through the UI bar on the bottom of the screen, in any given save, only memories associated with that save would pop up. In the GTW patch, to make way for photography and painting from reference, they totally destroyed the memories system with their infernal cluttered, laggy, disorganized screenshot manager and made memories have randomized emotions based on a random moodlet from a sim's moodlet bar (which is always a jumbled mess of active and repressed moodlets because of how many random things can cause those things to latch onto your sims in this game). This not only ruins the system from a storytelling standpoint (not being able to use the memories system to keep your saves' storylines in order anymore) but also from a gameplay perspective (destroying probably the best mechanic attached to the emotion system and turning it into an unusable mess). They need to go back and fix this, because it's totally unusable now to the point where people who haven't been playing since launch think this game doesn't even have a memories system of any kind at all! They dun goofed!
5. Personalities and Relationships Don't Matter: It doesn't matter whether you choose "Loner" or "Outgoing" or don't use either one at all, all of the sims are autonomously extroverted little chatterboxes. It doesn't matter whether two sims are best friends or mortal enemies, whether they've been having a nice chat or just got done with a marriage-destroying argument, they'll still have a bunch of autonomously friendly interactions when talking to each other. A lover will be caught cheating one minute, and the next, the cheating lover, the cheated-on lover, and the side-dish will all be chattering happily with each other live nothing just happened!! What the actual Flux?!! No. That's broken. Fix it.
6. The Away System is Jacked Up: So, you leave the house at 10:00 PM on a Monday night with your vampire dude so he can go feed downtown at the bar. The kids are in bed, the wife's tiredness is in the orange, everyone is set to "Take care of self." Things should be fine, right? WRONG! You come home at 3:00 AM to total chaos! Mom is in the kids' room playing on their computer, Suzy's downstairs watching T.V., Bobby's in the back yard on the monkey bars, it's 2 hours until the kids have to get up for school and their energy is only half full...and you have to pause the game and manually put all of these heathens to bed where they should be, because the game does not place sims logically based on time of day or even whose bedroom is where when one sim leaves the rest of the household at home and returns some time later. I would rather have TS2's at-home time freeze system than this garbage. At least that made SENSE!! This? This right here? Is the absolute worst.
7. No Functional Free-Build Community Lots: The "General" lot type is the only community lot type that doesn't restrict you with a checklist...but it also doesn't attract NPC sims. Other lot types do attract NPC sims, but they have an annoying checklist of required items (Heaven forbid some klepto sim steals one if you don't have extras, or the whole functionality of the lot breaks) and sims won't use items that aren't on the requirements checklist (they won't use a Foosball table at a public pool, a bar at a museum won't be populated with a bartender, etc.). In TS2, I loved building community lots, because I could throw together all kinds of crazy things and they'd WORK. NPC's would work the counters and bars, sims would come and use anything you put down there, failing to put in a trashcan didn't mean you couldn't open your nightclub. The community lot mechanics in TS4 are really restrictive and annoying and feel like something Corporate came up with to get people to buy new packs for new functioning venue types. Two thumbs so far down they come out of the other side of the planet.
8. A General Identity Crisis: TS4's biggest flaw, in my opinion, is that it's just...a game that doesn't know what it is or it wants to be. Is it a general life simulator, or does it want to focus on families or single life? Does it want to be totally realistic, a parody of reality, or allow for fleshed-out fantasy and sci-fi elements? Does it want to be a visual story engine for people who can't draw or do 3D modeling, or does it want to be a game with mechanics to master and strategic elements (no matter how light they may be)? Does it want to be a virtual safe space for people who need a safety bubble to escape to or does it want to be a true sandbox where people can make the world and the lives of their digital people as lovely or horrible as they darn well please? Is it a game for tween girls who usually don't play video games except for maybe one of those endless clicker phone games when they're on their way home from school, or a AAA title for people who actually have some basic gaming skills? Is it an advertising vehicle or a piece of entertainment media? This game tries being all of these things, but does none of them particularly well, and that's a problem. At the end of the day, there is no clear vision for the direction of this game except for "Make Packs, Make Stacks," and that's resulting in a mediocre game that doesn't hold up when compared to earlier games in the franchise. TS4 is all over the place, a jack of all trades and master of none...and if the franchise doesn't course-correct either by fixing TS4 or doing a much better job with TS5, it won't survive the 2020's.
I'm quoting you like those before me.
With this list you identified the core issues in the Sims 4. And it deserves to be read. Mostly by EA/Maxis of course. In my opinion this is everything that is wrong with the game. I could even forgive TS4 for the lack of open, more customizable neighborhoods, swimmable oceans and cars, if every single item on this list was adjusted or incorporated.
I enjoy TS4 and I'm all for an experimental approach, but the game could and should be so so much better than what it currently is.
JayGlover
Posts: 60 Member
Comments
2. The Emotions System: I've posted about this a lot, but it's just plain unbalanced, with too big an emphasis on positive and productive emotions and not enough emphasis on negative emotions. Negative emotions can easily be overridden by positive ones with environmental buffs, buffs from having physical needs fulfilled, and buffs from watching T.V. Positive emotions are all boosted by "Happy" moodlets, while there is no booster for negative emotions. Because "Happy" moodlet buffs are so plentiful, the "Cheerful," "Gloomy," and "Hot-Headed" traits completely pointless from a gameplay standpoint, while the "Active," "Romantic," "Self-Assured," and "Genius" traits are over-supported. Even though we have ghosts and vampires in the game, we have no "Fear" emotion at all. It's just plain poor game design for a game that's supposed to center around storytelling.
3. No Difficulty: Look, games that seek greater accessibility and a broader appeal traditionally had difficulty settings for a reason--so players of different skill levels and levels of patience can all get a good experience out of the same piece of software. Instead, in the name of "accessibility," TS4's difficulty has been nerfed numerous times. They've nerfed alien abductions, vampire break-ins, career difficulty...all in the name of making the game more appealing to more "casual audiences." They need to stop these across the board nerfs and implement some difficulty settings instead, because the lack of difficulty not only makes short-term play too easy, but it also discourages long-term play by making every career, every relationship, every family, every generation feel bland and samey to the point of a player not even wanting to think about going past generation 2 or 3 here. Difficulty is not bad. Difficulty is what allows players to set long-term goals in open-ended games like this which keep them playing longer in order to achieve them. Not being able to do everything or see everything or max everything on "Normal" lifespan settings encourages players to try again next generation or next save and explore new strategies and game mechanics, which keeps them invested in the game more strongly and for longer periods of time. No difficulty might be nice for players with little patience and short attention spans...but it's not good for EVERYONE. That's why difficulty settings exist.
4. They Broke the Memories System: This happened all the way back in the GTW patch, but I'm still mad about it. At launch, TS4 had a memories system where you took a screenshot in game, you assigned it as a memory, you chose which sims that memory applied to, and you chose an emotion to be associated with that memory. When you pulled up memories with the "Reminisce" option that appeared when clicking on your active sim, you went into a menu that only contained memories from that sim on that save and picked the memory you wanted to get an extra moodlet of whatever emotion you wanted. When you went into the "Memories" menu through the UI bar on the bottom of the screen, in any given save, only memories associated with that save would pop up. In the GTW patch, to make way for photography and painting from reference, they totally destroyed the memories system with their infernal cluttered, laggy, disorganized screenshot manager and made memories have randomized emotions based on a random moodlet from a sim's moodlet bar (which is always a jumbled mess of active and repressed moodlets because of how many random things can cause those things to latch onto your sims in this game). This not only ruins the system from a storytelling standpoint (not being able to use the memories system to keep your saves' storylines in order anymore) but also from a gameplay perspective (destroying probably the best mechanic attached to the emotion system and turning it into an unusable mess). They need to go back and fix this, because it's totally unusable now to the point where people who haven't been playing since launch think this game doesn't even have a memories system of any kind at all! They dun goofed!
5. Personalities and Relationships Don't Matter: It doesn't matter whether you choose "Loner" or "Outgoing" or don't use either one at all, all of the sims are autonomously extroverted little chatterboxes. It doesn't matter whether two sims are best friends or mortal enemies, whether they've been having a nice chat or just got done with a marriage-destroying argument, they'll still have a bunch of autonomously friendly interactions when talking to each other. A lover will be caught cheating one minute, and the next, the cheating lover, the cheated-on lover, and the side-dish will all be chattering happily with each other live nothing just happened!! What the actual Flux?!! No. That's broken. Fix it.
6. The Away System is Jacked Up: So, you leave the house at 10:00 PM on a Monday night with your vampire dude so he can go feed downtown at the bar. The kids are in bed, the wife's tiredness is in the orange, everyone is set to "Take care of self." Things should be fine, right? WRONG! You come home at 3:00 AM to total chaos! Mom is in the kids' room playing on their computer, Suzy's downstairs watching T.V., Bobby's in the back yard on the monkey bars, it's 2 hours until the kids have to get up for school and their energy is only half full...and you have to pause the game and manually put all of these heathens to bed where they should be, because the game does not place sims logically based on time of day or even whose bedroom is where when one sim leaves the rest of the household at home and returns some time later. I would rather have TS2's at-home time freeze system than this garbage. At least that made SENSE!! This? This right here? Is the absolute worst.
7. No Functional Free-Build Community Lots: The "General" lot type is the only community lot type that doesn't restrict you with a checklist...but it also doesn't attract NPC sims. Other lot types do attract NPC sims, but they have an annoying checklist of required items (Heaven forbid some klepto sim steals one if you don't have extras, or the whole functionality of the lot breaks) and sims won't use items that aren't on the requirements checklist (they won't use a Foosball table at a public pool, a bar at a museum won't be populated with a bartender, etc.). In TS2, I loved building community lots, because I could throw together all kinds of crazy things and they'd WORK. NPC's would work the counters and bars, sims would come and use anything you put down there, failing to put in a trashcan didn't mean you couldn't open your nightclub. The community lot mechanics in TS4 are really restrictive and annoying and feel like something Corporate came up with to get people to buy new packs for new functioning venue types. Two thumbs so far down they come out of the other side of the planet.
8. A General Identity Crisis: TS4's biggest flaw, in my opinion, is that it's just...a game that doesn't know what it is or it wants to be. Is it a general life simulator, or does it want to focus on families or single life? Does it want to be totally realistic, a parody of reality, or allow for fleshed-out fantasy and sci-fi elements? Does it want to be a visual story engine for people who can't draw or do 3D modeling, or does it want to be a game with mechanics to master and strategic elements (no matter how light they may be)? Does it want to be a virtual safe space for people who need a safety bubble to escape to or does it want to be a true sandbox where people can make the world and the lives of their digital people as lovely or horrible as they darn well please? Is it a game for tween girls who usually don't play video games except for maybe one of those endless clicker phone games when they're on their way home from school, or a AAA title for people who actually have some basic gaming skills? Is it an advertising vehicle or a piece of entertainment media? This game tries being all of these things, but does none of them particularly well, and that's a problem. At the end of the day, there is no clear vision for the direction of this game except for "Make Packs, Make Stacks," and that's resulting in a mediocre game that doesn't hold up when compared to earlier games in the franchise. TS4 is all over the place, a jack of all trades and master of none...and if the franchise doesn't course-correct either by fixing TS4 or doing a much better job with TS5, it won't survive the 2020's.
I would love to be able to use less mods and not be frustrated when I play. Plus, less mods would improve my performance.
You couldn't say it better. To make the game work properly we need mods.
All of that!
OMG! Thank you so much for taking the time to type that all out! EVERY SINGLE THING YOU SAID is how I feel! I'm so glad it's not just me being overly cynical about TS4 versus the other iterations.
The whole let's not upset players with too much drama and keep it a happy puppies and rainbow filled space has driven me insane from the beginning! And the stupid joker smiles and head tilting while looking up seriously grates on my nerves!
Spot on! Wish I could give a dozen awesomes! Have quite had it with their fake all's sweetness and light approach. Nobody can please everybody, so they really need to stop trying to do the impossible.
I'm quoting you like those before me.
With this list you identified the core issues in the Sims 4. And it deserves to be read. Mostly by EA/Maxis of course. In my opinion this is everything that is wrong with the game. I could even forgive TS4 for the lack of open, more customizable neighborhoods, swimmable oceans and cars, if every single item on this list was adjusted or incorporated.
I enjoy TS4 and I'm all for an experimental approach, but the game could and should be so so much better than what it currently is.