I’ve been playing my game as usual since the update, but so far, no calls. I know MCCC didn’t break, but I’m wondering if there’s a setting that’s blocking it? My Sims get the other game initiated calls (come over and hang out, duel challenges, go to the festival, etc). I also have many of my sims best friends marked as played to prevent MCCC story progression from interfering, so I’m wondering if that’s affecting the calls. At any rate, it seems you can drastically curb the impact of this update,someway. I’m just not sure how, yet.
There are already reports of played sims having made neighborhood story calls, so that's probably not the reason. What are your Free Will and aging settings?
I’ve been playing my game as usual since the update, but so far, no calls. I know MCCC didn’t break, but I’m wondering if there’s a setting that’s blocking it? My Sims get the other game initiated calls (come over and hang out, duel challenges, go to the festival, etc). I also have many of my sims best friends marked as played to prevent MCCC story progression from interfering, so I’m wondering if that’s affecting the calls. At any rate, it seems you can drastically curb the impact of this update,someway. I’m just not sure how, yet.
There are already reports of played sims having made neighborhood story calls, so that's probably not the reason. What are your Free Will and aging settings?
I didn't have much play time yesterday. I plan to play a lot more next week when I'm totally free. But so far I like the calls. I don't know all that they might end up doing with this but I really hope to see more deeper integration. So far it seems like toggles will come and they will make sure rotational players are safe so I'm not that worried anymore.
On the side of story progression I'm not that good at explaining but they should make it more engaging on a personal level with consequences.
Like for example, a sim asks you about getting engaged, you give the okay, the sim gets rejected.
He's a hot head sim so he gets angry at you and comes to your house to destroy property. You have to repair the relationship or break it off altogether.
You get not just calls but rumors you can spread or engage in or dispel that affects your relationship if the sim finds out you started it. Letters in the mail or invitations.
This would even tie in nicely with newspapers and digital news.
Basically I'd like to see like a chain reaction of one thing leading to another according to the choices you make. Sims are not the smartest. So I don't know how deep they can go with this😅 but it would definitely bring neighborhood drama.
Plus I want to see way more ways to respond to different types of questions. The responses you can choose are pretty generic.
I feel like there are so many things in the game already that they could play on and make deeper to weave into stories. Like protesting for example.
We literally have sim politics in the game but it doesn't mean or do much.
Nope. Not going down that path with my game! What I want are better ways to tell MY stories. Not some scripted version of how Maxis wants my stories to be told. All this update will do is muck up my mods, add more bugs and try to take control of every storyline I have been working on for the past year. A glorified chance card system is all I see happening in this update so I politely decline relinquishing what little control I still have left over what happens in my game. Who wants even more annoying and useless phone calls? I sure as heck don't.
I'm not seeing how this update equates to "story progression." I have seen quite a few posts on other sites showing some of the problems with this system. Random NPC's calling your sim with questions like "should we have a baby?" Or "should I hang out with so-and-so?" Bella Goth calling sims she doesn't know to ask them to be her boyfriend. Unknown NPC's calling your sim to tell you to break up with your pregnant wife. Married sims calling their own daughter to ask if they should get involved with another sim. I'm just not getting it. I agree very much with the comment quoted above. A glorified "chance card" system. I suppose if you want to play along and wait for EA to tell you how to play your game then you will probably like this idea. And hey, to each his/her own. Doesn't work for me. If you're a rotational player I would guess this will be a disaster.
I am not a rotational player but by using MCCC, townies in my game get pregnant, get divorced and lots of other things. For me that is the definition of "story progression." The sims that my sim doesn't know, their lives progress without my input. It makes for a more "random" and fun experience as I check and see things happening that are a bit of a surprise. Random phone calls and picking selected responses that EA decided are "amusing" is not the way I want to play. MCCC is not that hard to use. If you take 10-15 minutes you can pretty much tune the settings where you want.
I will not be updating any time soon.
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain
I finally got my first Neighborhood Stories call after 3 days of play, so this hasn't been intrusive at all. Bigfoot called Morgyn Ember for advice about if he should get to know Doctor Who a little better. Tells you a little something about the nature of my game. LOL!
I've just got to say, I've been playing every day since the patch, with many different households and not only are my Sims not getting overwhelmed with calls, (yay!) but it seems like fewer calls are being made altogether from random Sims. In fact, I think all the calls I've gotten are from Sims that I've intended to be involved with the households in the first place. Maybe one call was one I didn't really need but it also wasn't completely out of line.
AND... I even found cause to use one of the new social interactions today. So I'm going to say at this point that I actually do like Neighborhood Stories so far and I feel a lot better about the implementation.
I think some of my trash barrels got bugged though, lol. Specifically in Vampire households so it's probably a Vampire issue. Vampires no longer throw away or take out the trash. Those messy monsters. I guess it's beneath them. 😆
I'm thinking this is a great addition to the game, for some time in the sims 4 the townies or unplayed sims were just there, I have actually finally turned aging on for everyone ( on long tho), I love they can have children themselves and I'm excited for the future of neighbours stories, I also like the pop ups gets you involved and know what's new happening in your game
There's one tiny... Tiny problem.. When I answered the neighborhood story progression call, it was about MY sim starting a family with another. I pressed yes... On accident. Now, two weeks after the call.. she's pregnant. No try for baby.. just preggers lol
There's one tiny... Tiny problem.. When I answered the neighborhood story progression call, it was about MY sim starting a family with another. I pressed yes... On accident. Now, two weeks after the call.. she's pregnant. No try for baby.. just preggers lol
I like the stories, but that’s the one flaw I see as well. I feel like since they are neighborhood stories they shouldn’t include your active Sim. I’m getting calls all the time from my Sims boyfriend saying he found a ring in her bag, I have to keep saying no which ruins immersion in their story.
It took quite a few hours of playing for me to start to get these. Since I have used MCCC to turn off relationship decay and culling, my Sims have quite a wide range of "friends" outside their household so the calls I have gotten seemed mostly really random, like not someone who had a really high friendship bar with them or someone they ever actually interacted with. Also, one of my played Sims called to ask her brother who lived in the household I was actively playing, if she should get engaged. That actually did make sense and I said yes, because I actually intended to get her engaged but didn't need to play that one out. It's not exactly bothering me. I don't mind the "immersion breaking" aspect because if it doesn't make sense in the story I just answer the way I want it to happen or not happen and then just pretend there was no call. But I have to say it's not really a well-designed system and is really shallow, if it can't tell the difference between a close friendship and someone random. A lot of others' stories are even more ridiculous and I expect to see a grandmother calling her grandchild who's still in grade school about whether she should start seeing someone new romantically. *eyeroll*
My username has been my internet handle for over 20 years since I was 16 and refers to when I had a crush on a very tall boy. I intend absolutely no violence toward beautiful giraffes.
If my sim's friend happens to get pregnant through Neighbourhood Stories will his/her kid grow up over time or will the kid got stuck in some life stage like baby or toddler or child...? Is aging included in the Neighbourhood Stories?
I haven't yet updated (and don't plan to any time soon), so I'll preface this by saying that my current impressions are based on all the stuff I've read from others' experiences and seeing the screenshots some have posted.
I don't know if it was intended this way, but I'm really get the feeling that everyone a player's sim knows at all is suddenly turned into clueless people who for whatever reason can't make decisions. That's not quite the same as friends asking friends for advice, or at least not always. Maybe at least part of the problem is the wording in the calls themselves. Even if I wanted to use this system, I wouldn't appreciate having my sims' words chosen for them; I'd rather the answer choices be more generic so that I the player can use my own imagination for the tone and reasoning in how the sim is answering, depending on the context of the actual relationship. The caller replies appear to need work, too. "Thanks for nothing" seems unnecessarily passive-aggressive to me, for instance. If someone answered me in real life that way, that might be one less so-called friend I'd be having.
FYI: Just because you can see my signature, don't assume that I can see yours.
Because I can't; I keep all sigs turned off.
I am maybe only one who likes that those sims call, I do not care so much of the wording of the calls, but so far I have used and use MCCC story progression, with very strict settings. BUT, there , still the mod desides who unplayed marries who, all I can do is to save before the day of the check and reroll if I am not fine with marriages
Also I do not take it personally to who sim gets the call. As I think the calls are more meant to me, as a watcher. Not to the whoever sim happens to be active atm.
I know, I am in very minority, but I just cannot take those calls so seriously, that they would be game/immersion breaking. Sims take mops out of their butts to clean the floor puddle, for crying it loud, always have done! Isn't that immersion breaking too?
I have other issues what I do take very seriously, but none of those have to do with the game.
Plus I very rarely even let my sims answer to calls anyway, if the phone ain't muted, I usually hit the red close button right away.
My love, my love, my fearless love, I will not say goodbye..
Sea may rise, sky may fall, My love will never die..
My heart, my heart, My drowning heart, Oh all the tears I've cried
Oh I may weep forevermore, My love will never die..
Do unplayed sims ever initiate romantic relationships with each other on their own? I'm thinking this would be the only way an unplayed sim would be making the "ring in bag" phone call in the first place?
(Or well I guess a played sim could encourage an unplayed sim to flirt with someone... or there could be club mechanics that encourage romance between unplayed sims... but I'm wondering more about whether/how romances would start between unplayed sims without the player setting it up somehow)
For those intending to install the patch tomorrow don't forget to disable your mods and backup your saves.
I'm copying my entire Sims 4 folder to an external flash drive. Just in case. 😄
Good idea to do anyways. If I didn't back up all my files on my SSD drive after spilling tea bye bye seven years worth of Sims 4 saves and longer for my other Sims games too. Good idea to double back up tray and save files on a cloud system too.
“Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.” –Helen Keller
I think that what bothers me too having story progression tied to phone calls. Only makes sense with modern stories but for a different time period it just breaks the immersion with real storytelling. It acts more like a choose your own adventure book that is simplified to predict the ending like a Hallmark movie rather than reading a series of fantasy or Sci-fi books where you can't predict the ending. It is just the most limited version of storytelling possible. I get they are going for the Sims 1 style of phone calls but I don't know feels like the series has gone backwards rather than forwards with storytelling. I think it offers only the limited storytelling of a game like Lake rather than like Minecraft where any time period or story can be told because it is the essence of a sandbox. Just with how creative DND game get with the Gurus I expected well better storytelling and story progression, that's all. The effort is appreciated, I just know the tool can be capable of so much more. Having an older alert system than just phones would help a lot too. I mean even Animal Crossing does message in a bottle.
I also support the above idea of consequences too which is something both SimCity and Sims 1 supported and what made storytelling less predictable, more fun, and challenging.
“Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.” –Helen Keller
My first experience.
I have two sims running my Prep School and they have offices and living spaces in the dorm, but separated from the students by indirect travel.
Well these two were close to begin with before they formed the school and may have dabbled.
I was playing other sims when the student counselor, which my sim knew, called saying she had found an engagement ring. This is a copy of my main save, so I said yes, go for it.
I have to decide what to do if they start thinking about children because six of the slots taken up at my prep school is for students, so there is no room for a child. I will most likely have them step down and continue their careers elsewhere and have new staff step in. I probably should have them step down before the question comes up.
Which means I should probably be training their replacements now because I need to have my sims hold a degree to staff these positions, or I could just have a temporary staff until better staff are found.
Well now, the story is progressing.
They probably would have stayed there single and graying if this had not come up.
If my sim's friend happens to get pregnant through Neighbourhood Stories will his/her kid grow up over time or will the kid got stuck in some life stage like baby or toddler or child...? Is aging included in the Neighbourhood Stories?
Aging will not happen unless you have aging on for unplayed Sims. So they would stay a baby until you have aging on.
My username has been my internet handle for over 20 years since I was 16 and refers to when I had a crush on a very tall boy. I intend absolutely no violence toward beautiful giraffes.
I am maybe only one who likes that those sims call, I do not care so much of the wording of the calls, but so far I have used and use MCCC story progression, with very strict settings. BUT, there , still the mod desides who unplayed marries who, all I can do is to save before the day of the check and reroll if I am not fine with marriages
Also I do not take it personally to who sim gets the call. As I think the calls are more meant to me, as a watcher. Not to the whoever sim happens to be active atm.
I know, I am in very minority, but I just cannot take those calls so seriously, that they would be game/immersion breaking. Sims take mops out of their butts to clean the floor puddle, for crying it loud, always have done! Isn't that immersion breaking too?
I have other issues what I do take very seriously, but none of those have to do with the game.
Plus I very rarely even let my sims answer to calls anyway, if the phone ain't muted, I usually hit the red close button right away.
I agree with you, I don't mind the "immersion-breaking" as there are lots of other things worded in ways I choose to ignore in the game. For me, saying "no" and pretending a call never happened is easy enough. I do like this as a way to have some control from afar, but I can see the issues others have with it and like I said I think it's pretty shallow (like most things in the design of this iteration of Sims). Again, that doesn't bother me because I'm just using my imagination to do whatever I want, and mods to tweak things the way I want them.
A note about MCCC: I never thought of saving before the checks and redoing them. I really don't care what MCCC does with most of my townies tbh, though once in awhile I get a pang of sadness when an NPC couple I particularly liked gets divorced. But, that feels true to life so I leave it alone. I do mark some of them to "never break up" if I feel really strongly. Another thing you could do is actually just delete the relationship between two Sims if it marries them and you don't want them married. I would just use MCCC to summon one of them to my lot, then go in and "delete relationship" or "divorce" and they will be single again! To me that seems easier than backing up to a save point.
My username has been my internet handle for over 20 years since I was 16 and refers to when I had a crush on a very tall boy. I intend absolutely no violence toward beautiful giraffes.
Do unplayed sims ever initiate romantic relationships with each other on their own? I'm thinking this would be the only way an unplayed sim would be making the "ring in bag" phone call in the first place?
(Or well I guess a played sim could encourage an unplayed sim to flirt with someone... or there could be club mechanics that encourage romance between unplayed sims... but I'm wondering more about whether/how romances would start between unplayed sims without the player setting it up somehow)
Even before this release, there was the option to have a Sim encourage another Sim to hook up with someone. I actually use this quite a bit with my teen and young adult Sims. It's a social interaction under "Other Sims," then say "Hook up With," and select the Sim you want them to start dating. I usually get a call a couple days later thanking me for setting them up and saying "we're dating now!" That does actually cause them to be boyfriend/girlfriend officially. Since I have MCCC, it also usually means that sooner or later they end up married too. I love it!
Edited to add: Sorry if you already knew that, I realized you did say "without the player setting it up somehow," but I took that to mean more directly by taking control of them temporarily.
My username has been my internet handle for over 20 years since I was 16 and refers to when I had a crush on a very tall boy. I intend absolutely no violence toward beautiful giraffes.
I am maybe only one who likes that those sims call, I do not care so much of the wording of the calls, but so far I have used and use MCCC story progression, with very strict settings. BUT, there , still the mod desides who unplayed marries who, all I can do is to save before the day of the check and reroll if I am not fine with marriages
Also I do not take it personally to who sim gets the call. As I think the calls are more meant to me, as a watcher. Not to the whoever sim happens to be active atm.
I know, I am in very minority, but I just cannot take those calls so seriously, that they would be game/immersion breaking. Sims take mops out of their butts to clean the floor puddle, for crying it loud, always have done! Isn't that immersion breaking too?
I have other issues what I do take very seriously, but none of those have to do with the game.
Plus I very rarely even let my sims answer to calls anyway, if the phone ain't muted, I usually hit the red close button right away.
I agree with you, I don't mind the "immersion-breaking" as there are lots of other things worded in ways I choose to ignore in the game. For me, saying "no" and pretending a call never happened is easy enough. I do like this as a way to have some control from afar, but I can see the issues others have with it and like I said I think it's pretty shallow (like most things in the design of this iteration of Sims). Again, that doesn't bother me because I'm just using my imagination to do whatever I want, and mods to tweak things the way I want them.
A note about MCCC: I never thought of saving before the checks and redoing them. I really don't care what MCCC does with most of my townies tbh, though once in awhile I get a pang of sadness when an NPC couple I particularly liked gets divorced. But, that feels true to life so I leave it alone. I do mark some of them to "never break up" if I feel really strongly. Another thing you could do is actually just delete the relationship between two Sims if it marries them and you don't want them married. I would just use MCCC to summon one of them to my lot, then go in and "delete relationship" or "divorce" and they will be single again! To me that seems easier than backing up to a save point.
I do agree about the "immersion-breaking" thing, as I'm quite accustomed to ignoring some things in games for the sake of some kind of continuity. I do generally enjoy the fact that sims get phone calls and texts in the game, so I don't want to get rid of them completely. But the Neighborhood Stories thing in general is more my issue. The breaking isn't immersion for me, but rather my flow of creative process.
From the very beginning (the first time I played this game, I mean) I've had to ignore a few things in order to pretend they never happened and I've also had to fill in the blanks with my imagination when game mechanics had no way to provide a reasonable facsimile. That doesn't bother me in general, because that's what using the game as a form of writing tool is pretty much about. But over time, more and more mechanics have been introduced (without options to toggle them off) that I had to pretend didn't exist, and I had to "overwrite" the meanings of the results to reflect my sims and my interpretations of their actions and stories.
I realize that probably relatively few play the game my way, and I'm very glad people do enjoy playing it in their way. But for me the results of having player control removed little by little means that I'm now spending more and more time fighting the game than playing it, as it were. It begins to be not-fun after a while, so I get discouraged from playing at all. Yes, there are mods that can handle some of the extra weight, and I do use some of them. Ok, lots of them. But that adds weight of its own in a different way. And there are some things that appear to be difficult for modders to deal with without nuking parts of the game that I don't want altered. This is the main reason I'm such an advocate of toggles. They can't handle every little annoyance (nor should they, in my opinion), but they can help give people with various play styles the options to play the game in their way.
Also, a note about MCCC that you may already know: You can delete relationships between two people by right clicking on the portrait of one of them in the relationship panel (assuming your active sim knows at least one, that is). Oh, and props to @Ellupelluellu for my favorite way of referring to sims' magical ability to produce things out of nowhere ("mops out of their butts").
Edited for spelling/clarity.
FYI: Just because you can see my signature, don't assume that I can see yours.
Because I can't; I keep all sigs turned off.
Several days after the update I started getting the new style phone calls today. One Sim phoned one of my kids while they were school to ask them if they should change career. That Sim phoned again the next day during school hours to say they had now become a writer.
Then the following day after that, the mother of my eldest daughter rang and asked her this:
Last time the mother rang her eldest son and asked him the same question but with different options and ended up producing another set of twins so this time i said no.
Also, a note about MCCC that you may already know: You can delete relationships between two people by right clicking on the portrait of one of them in the relationship panel (assuming your active sim knows at least one, that is). Oh, and props to @Ellupelluellu for my favorite way of referring to sims' magical ability to produce things out of nowhere ("mops out of their butts").
Edited for spelling/clarity.
Yes, I use that often but in this case with two NPCs if you don't know them they wouldn't be in your relationship panel but you can still delete their relationships by clicking on the Sim.
And I agree, toggles make the most sense! The more toggles, the more we could all customize to our play style without needing mods so much.
My username has been my internet handle for over 20 years since I was 16 and refers to when I had a crush on a very tall boy. I intend absolutely no violence toward beautiful giraffes.
Oh, and props to @Ellupelluellu for my favorite way of referring to sims' magical ability to produce things out of nowhere ("mops out of their butts").
[/i]
Haha Well I have never paid so much attention in TS4, but indeed in TS2 they really reach to their back pockets , to get that bloody mop
My love, my love, my fearless love, I will not say goodbye..
Sea may rise, sky may fall, My love will never die..
My heart, my heart, My drowning heart, Oh all the tears I've cried
Oh I may weep forevermore, My love will never die..
Comments
There are already reports of played sims having made neighborhood story calls, so that's probably not the reason. What are your Free Will and aging settings?
I have full autonomy on, but aging off.
Tales From The Myst
The Blue Moon Jukebox
On the side of story progression I'm not that good at explaining but they should make it more engaging on a personal level with consequences.
Like for example, a sim asks you about getting engaged, you give the okay, the sim gets rejected.
He's a hot head sim so he gets angry at you and comes to your house to destroy property. You have to repair the relationship or break it off altogether.
You get not just calls but rumors you can spread or engage in or dispel that affects your relationship if the sim finds out you started it. Letters in the mail or invitations.
This would even tie in nicely with newspapers and digital news.
Basically I'd like to see like a chain reaction of one thing leading to another according to the choices you make. Sims are not the smartest. So I don't know how deep they can go with this😅 but it would definitely bring neighborhood drama.
Plus I want to see way more ways to respond to different types of questions. The responses you can choose are pretty generic.
I feel like there are so many things in the game already that they could play on and make deeper to weave into stories. Like protesting for example.
We literally have sim politics in the game but it doesn't mean or do much.
I'm not seeing how this update equates to "story progression." I have seen quite a few posts on other sites showing some of the problems with this system. Random NPC's calling your sim with questions like "should we have a baby?" Or "should I hang out with so-and-so?" Bella Goth calling sims she doesn't know to ask them to be her boyfriend. Unknown NPC's calling your sim to tell you to break up with your pregnant wife. Married sims calling their own daughter to ask if they should get involved with another sim. I'm just not getting it. I agree very much with the comment quoted above. A glorified "chance card" system. I suppose if you want to play along and wait for EA to tell you how to play your game then you will probably like this idea. And hey, to each his/her own. Doesn't work for me. If you're a rotational player I would guess this will be a disaster.
I am not a rotational player but by using MCCC, townies in my game get pregnant, get divorced and lots of other things. For me that is the definition of "story progression." The sims that my sim doesn't know, their lives progress without my input. It makes for a more "random" and fun experience as I check and see things happening that are a bit of a surprise. Random phone calls and picking selected responses that EA decided are "amusing" is not the way I want to play. MCCC is not that hard to use. If you take 10-15 minutes you can pretty much tune the settings where you want.
I will not be updating any time soon.
― Mark Twain
Tales From The Myst
The Blue Moon Jukebox
AND... I even found cause to use one of the new social interactions today. So I'm going to say at this point that I actually do like Neighborhood Stories so far and I feel a lot better about the implementation.
I think some of my trash barrels got bugged though, lol. Specifically in Vampire households so it's probably a Vampire issue. Vampires no longer throw away or take out the trash. Those messy monsters. I guess it's beneath them. 😆
I don't know if it was intended this way, but I'm really get the feeling that everyone a player's sim knows at all is suddenly turned into clueless people who for whatever reason can't make decisions. That's not quite the same as friends asking friends for advice, or at least not always. Maybe at least part of the problem is the wording in the calls themselves. Even if I wanted to use this system, I wouldn't appreciate having my sims' words chosen for them; I'd rather the answer choices be more generic so that I the player can use my own imagination for the tone and reasoning in how the sim is answering, depending on the context of the actual relationship. The caller replies appear to need work, too. "Thanks for nothing" seems unnecessarily passive-aggressive to me, for instance. If someone answered me in real life that way, that might be one less so-called friend I'd be having.
Because I can't; I keep all sigs turned off.
Also I do not take it personally to who sim gets the call. As I think the calls are more meant to me, as a watcher. Not to the whoever sim happens to be active atm.
I know, I am in very minority, but I just cannot take those calls so seriously, that they would be game/immersion breaking. Sims take mops out of their butts to clean the floor puddle, for crying it loud, always have done!
I have other issues what I do take very seriously, but none of those have to do with the game.
Plus I very rarely even let my sims answer to calls anyway, if the phone ain't muted, I usually hit the red close button right away.
Sea may rise, sky may fall, My love will never die..
My heart, my heart, My drowning heart, Oh all the tears I've cried
Oh I may weep forevermore, My love will never die..
(Or well I guess a played sim could encourage an unplayed sim to flirt with someone... or there could be club mechanics that encourage romance between unplayed sims... but I'm wondering more about whether/how romances would start between unplayed sims without the player setting it up somehow)
I also support the above idea of consequences too which is something both SimCity and Sims 1 supported and what made storytelling less predictable, more fun, and challenging.
I have two sims running my Prep School and they have offices and living spaces in the dorm, but separated from the students by indirect travel.
Well these two were close to begin with before they formed the school and may have dabbled.
I was playing other sims when the student counselor, which my sim knew, called saying she had found an engagement ring. This is a copy of my main save, so I said yes, go for it.
I have to decide what to do if they start thinking about children because six of the slots taken up at my prep school is for students, so there is no room for a child. I will most likely have them step down and continue their careers elsewhere and have new staff step in. I probably should have them step down before the question comes up.
Which means I should probably be training their replacements now because I need to have my sims hold a degree to staff these positions, or I could just have a temporary staff until better staff are found.
Well now, the story is progressing.
They probably would have stayed there single and graying if this had not come up.
Aging will not happen unless you have aging on for unplayed Sims. So they would stay a baby until you have aging on.
I agree with you, I don't mind the "immersion-breaking" as there are lots of other things worded in ways I choose to ignore in the game. For me, saying "no" and pretending a call never happened is easy enough. I do like this as a way to have some control from afar, but I can see the issues others have with it and like I said I think it's pretty shallow (like most things in the design of this iteration of Sims). Again, that doesn't bother me because I'm just using my imagination to do whatever I want, and mods to tweak things the way I want them.
A note about MCCC: I never thought of saving before the checks and redoing them. I really don't care what MCCC does with most of my townies tbh, though once in awhile I get a pang of sadness when an NPC couple I particularly liked gets divorced. But, that feels true to life so I leave it alone. I do mark some of them to "never break up" if I feel really strongly. Another thing you could do is actually just delete the relationship between two Sims if it marries them and you don't want them married. I would just use MCCC to summon one of them to my lot, then go in and "delete relationship" or "divorce" and they will be single again! To me that seems easier than backing up to a save point.
Even before this release, there was the option to have a Sim encourage another Sim to hook up with someone. I actually use this quite a bit with my teen and young adult Sims. It's a social interaction under "Other Sims," then say "Hook up With," and select the Sim you want them to start dating. I usually get a call a couple days later thanking me for setting them up and saying "we're dating now!" That does actually cause them to be boyfriend/girlfriend officially. Since I have MCCC, it also usually means that sooner or later they end up married too. I love it!
Edited to add: Sorry if you already knew that, I realized you did say "without the player setting it up somehow," but I took that to mean more directly by taking control of them temporarily.
I do agree about the "immersion-breaking" thing, as I'm quite accustomed to ignoring some things in games for the sake of some kind of continuity. I do generally enjoy the fact that sims get phone calls and texts in the game, so I don't want to get rid of them completely. But the Neighborhood Stories thing in general is more my issue. The breaking isn't immersion for me, but rather my flow of creative process.
From the very beginning (the first time I played this game, I mean) I've had to ignore a few things in order to pretend they never happened and I've also had to fill in the blanks with my imagination when game mechanics had no way to provide a reasonable facsimile. That doesn't bother me in general, because that's what using the game as a form of writing tool is pretty much about. But over time, more and more mechanics have been introduced (without options to toggle them off) that I had to pretend didn't exist, and I had to "overwrite" the meanings of the results to reflect my sims and my interpretations of their actions and stories.
I realize that probably relatively few play the game my way, and I'm very glad people do enjoy playing it in their way. But for me the results of having player control removed little by little means that I'm now spending more and more time fighting the game than playing it, as it were. It begins to be not-fun after a while, so I get discouraged from playing at all. Yes, there are mods that can handle some of the extra weight, and I do use some of them. Ok, lots of them. But that adds weight of its own in a different way. And there are some things that appear to be difficult for modders to deal with without nuking parts of the game that I don't want altered. This is the main reason I'm such an advocate of toggles. They can't handle every little annoyance (nor should they, in my opinion), but they can help give people with various play styles the options to play the game in their way.
Also, a note about MCCC that you may already know: You can delete relationships between two people by right clicking on the portrait of one of them in the relationship panel (assuming your active sim knows at least one, that is). Oh, and props to @Ellupelluellu for my favorite way of referring to sims' magical ability to produce things out of nowhere ("mops out of their butts").
Edited for spelling/clarity.
Because I can't; I keep all sigs turned off.
Then the following day after that, the mother of my eldest daughter rang and asked her this:
Last time the mother rang her eldest son and asked him the same question but with different options and ended up producing another set of twins so this time i said no.
Yes, I use that often but in this case with two NPCs if you don't know them they wouldn't be in your relationship panel but you can still delete their relationships by clicking on the Sim.
And I agree, toggles make the most sense! The more toggles, the more we could all customize to our play style without needing mods so much.
Haha
Sea may rise, sky may fall, My love will never die..
My heart, my heart, My drowning heart, Oh all the tears I've cried
Oh I may weep forevermore, My love will never die..