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Sims 4 feels exhausting to play.
silverfawn20
Posts: 172 Member
So after a few hours last night playing the with the new Sims 4 Wedding Stories pack it finally dawned on me why i don't enjoy playing The Sims 4. Gameplay is exhausting! But not in a good way. There are so many areas that you need to micro manage to have the game go as you want it to. And if you don't, literally nothing happens anyway. Your sims just like constantly switching seats and having endless group conversations. And then there are the bugs....or I assume they are bugs, for example the action queue cancelling out ALL THE TIME but when you do actually want to cancel an action it takes forever for your sim to stop what they are doing. And sims just getting up and doing what they like in the middle of an action, such as grabbing a glass of water! I'm forever cancelling actions and sending them back to continue the task i'm trying to get them to do! I have played for around 5 hours so far and i'm yet to execute an actual wedding that goes the way i wanted it to. Also you complete an event such as an engagement dinner and the timer expires and you get literally no reward or message to say you completed the event. Not even a moodlet!! After a while you just get bored of it. I'm sorry to the developers but Sims 4 is just a big old mess of a game and no amount of content will compensate for the frustrating gameplay.
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Your idea is creative, but not a substitute for a properly configured burglary system. To my knowledge, kleptomaniacs don't sneak. When I last used a kleptomaniac, they stole deco items, nothing of consequence for activities of daily living. There are no burglar alarms to alert a sleeping Sim (or the player) that their home is being invaded. Sims can't call the police because there aren't any police capable of a response. Sims are more likely to start up a conversation with a kleptomaniac than to be angry or afraid. At most, a Sim can start a fight with a kleptomaniac. Though, I don't know if winning will return the stolen items. Also, there would be no rewards.
I looked forward to some form of farming so much, but the game feels about as boring & bland as ever. I absolutely despise large open empty spaces like you have in the CL pack because walking anywhere is a pain, needs management is just getting worse (and not in the good TS2 way), multitasking, moodlet spam and canceled actions make nearly any sim day an absolute slug to get through. And I haven't really played the pack much or been back since or bought anything after. I've put many hours into this game but it's clear that it's slowly but surely reaching a state of being broken beyond repair, primarily because EA is not invested in repairing anything anyway.
I get what you’re saying about certain players actually enjoying micromanagement, but thats why there is the option for sim autonomy. That option might as well not exist in TS4… it’s not about drama that just happens by itself, (ignoring another huge problem being zero personality) the sims don’t feel alive or like they have any actual autonomy, other than persistently grabbing a glass of water.. And like the other faults op mentioned, actions cancelling constantly etc, micromanaging the sims is exhausting and buggy anyway. So either way it’s a mess 🤷♂️
You need a lot of patience for TS4, and not in a good way.
Sims4 is has nothing to truly discover. They are just smiling puppets in a perpetually peaceful world in which nothing surprising ever happens.perfect for players who just want barbies in their dreamhouse and for everything to be perfect all the time except that from what I hear, they are not even getting that because weddings won't go well, and not because of some wedding wrecking dragon, but just that the pack doesn't work as advertised.
Sims 4 is still good for producing adult videos I guess, though that wears thin fast, too.
I would say it's not even really in the same category as previous Sims games.
It's like buying a cool new robot toy that was advertised as having a personality and being able to adapt to its environment, only to find out that instead, it was really just one of those electronic toys that will do the same actions in response to the same stimulus, over and over, and that's all it would do. Like expecting a robotic toy that interacts with progressive learning, only to get a Tickle Me Elmo.
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Really?? Oh, that's disappointing.
I must have a lot more patience than others because while those things are annoying, yeah, I can live with them. And I play other games with annoying aspects that I've learnt to deal with, like the the "logging players out of RuneScape randomly for no apparent reason" Jagex issue.
Real life is frustrating enough though that these issues aren't in any way comparable. That's how I see it.
Even The Sims 1, as hard as it is to keep their motives in the green, is way more fun to play. The Sims 4 is just a frustrating game through and through because it simply doesn't work.
That said, that only makes the game even more of a sandbox, so it literally feels like I am moving Barbie and Ken around... Maxis are not adding enough changes to make it not feel like a sandbox or the same game I played since 2014 either.
When I saw the Bach Parties from my wedding stories I was immediately thinking about the house parties that I had back in 2014 in the base game.
LOL. YOU don't have those issues, but most players do. That's why the mods that supposedly fix simulation lag are so popular. The game barely functions for most players, and it has nothing to do with our PCs either. I have a custom built gaming PC that can run most modern AAA games. It's also not something I figured how to fix. Sims 3 doesn't run well out of the box, but can easily be fixed and it runs like a charm. There's simple no way to make The Sims 4 work as it should.
Maybe you didn't play previous Sims games, so you don't notice how bad the simulation runs, the facts actions are dropped, etc. But that's something that happens to most players nowadays, and mods are no longer good at fixing it. It just keeps getting worse and worse.
I'm not discounting your experience. I'm just saying that it's absolutely not mine, that a lot of people don't play with any mods, and that maybe there's a way to improve the game for you too. I'm also on an extremely powerful gaming desktop that can run all modern games (i9, top of the line SSD, my gpu has 11GB of ddr6 ram, etc.), so that probably helps me a bit. But I know that the Sims franchise is fickle. I had major issues with Island Paradise for Sims 3 despite being on a fairly powerful gaming computer back then too and despite trying every mod/workaround there was to fix it, it was impossible to fix on that computer. In the end, I had to uninstall that pack and then I was back to my lag-free high settings experience.
With Sims 4, I've been very fortunate and not had any big issues. My experiences with Sims 2 (corrupt saves and other bugs) and Sims 3 were so much worse. I've had minor issues with the Sims 4 behaving oddly in the past and repairing the game fixed those for me. My Sims don't stand around doing nothing and they don't drop actions. Your situation sounded extreme to me, so I tried to make suggestions. I don't know what you've tried to fix your game.
Sims 2 and 3 were far from perfect, but their issues were manageable. Isla Paradiso was super laggy like you said, but it was fixable following a guide to delete the problematic families. Sims 2's corruption was also manageable if you knew what to do and what not to do.
I've been dealing with simulation lag and Sims not doing what I command them to do since City Living came out, but in the past I was able to mitigate the problem with the Simulation Lag Fix mod. But since last year, the various Simulation Lag fixes don't seem to be working. I also tried the game without mods, and uninstall and reinstalled, etc. and nothing makes much of a difference. The game is broken beyond repair at this point. Maybe a patch will fix it, but patches have been making things worse and worse lately. I wish I could play one of the earlier versions of the game, before City Living came out.
I think I had the situation with Island Paradise that you're having now. It was not fixable for me. I tried everything that was suggested multiple times. I installed the map fixes. I deleted the families. I used mods. I looked into the routing. I did all fixes multiple times on multiple installs and in different combinations. It never worked. So I'm sorry your Sims 4 is so broken. If you've tried the mods and uninstalled/reinstalled, cleared your cache, repaired your game, tried different combinations of packs -- there's not much more that you can do (as you know). It's just unfortunate that the game isn't designed to be more stable. Too bad this is a live service game and there's no way for you to roll back to a stable version for your PC. I know the feeling from Sims 3 and I just lucked out this time and am stable without a need for the simulation lag fix mods. But at any time, a patch could come and ruin my experience, so I'm very careful about how I install patches.
No offence but the game is like this for everyone, even if to varying degrees, and especially if you own a lot of packs that all compete for your sims' extremely limited attention spans. People with 3-4x more than the recommend specs are having these issues because they're down to bad programming, not user error. Repairing the game won't fix it.
If you tried Sims3 these days you might be pleasantly surprised. I do use the suite of NRAAS mods designed to keep the game running smoothly, as well as clean out the 5 cache files that should be deleted after play each time to again, keep it running smoothly. And last but not least, I never overwrite a save, but do a new "save as" with a new unique name each time, often related to what is happening in the game at that point.
But following those simple rules, Sims3 runs better for me than Sims4.
Well, especially now: after this last Origin update, now, none of the keys for zooming in and out work, on the keyboard (arrow keys, + or -, and z or x all fail to zoom in or out) and shift+tab no longer opens first person view, just scoots my POV backward far and fast til I'm out of the lot. On that, I've now tried everything including game repair, uninstall and reinstall, switching camera modes, testing my keyboard on other games (it's not my keyboard) so my last hope is that if I uninstall and reinstall Origin, and then have to redownload all my Origin games, this will be fixed. But that's nothing to do with Sims3, which is still working fine, keyboard controls are fine, etc.
Just saying Sims3 runs better than it ever did in the past, now, for a lot of us, using those steps and mods, but it also depends what you're running. My laptop can run Sims3, all packs installed, max resolution and details, and it's pretty breathtaking for graphics, and the gameplay is smooth.
I do wish I could get Sims2 to work still, because that gameplay was the best of all. But Sims3 is still better than Sims4 for gameplay.
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You have to hunt for the one you are looking for. It could be buried very deep and it is exhausting to constantly dig for the social you want.
We need better groupings so it's faster and easier to find the social you want.
I can't speak to the newest wedding pack, though. That does look broken to me and I will not contaminate my saves with it until I can sort out a way to make it work smoothly. My intention with posting in this thread wasn't to belittle people's bad experiences but to help if possible so that others could hopefully get their game working as well as mine does (no dropped tasks and no Sims standing around for an hour doing nothing). Obviously, my suggestions won't work for everyone, but maybe they'll work for some.
I have not experienced simulation lag for a long time, I also recently cleaned out a lot of old CC that I had (and also fixed the load order by naming it correctly, don't have special characters, that messes up the load order), and I noticed that the game was running better, I got rid of a lot of mirrors and fountains as well and I'm experiencing very little lag, I do have the build/buy lag, but that disappears quickly if I press the pause menu.
I don't have any issues with sims interrupting or forgetting actions either, I'm not sure if it's because of my tuning mods, I have gotten rid of things like grabbing water from the sink or practice singing and things like that.
That said, I also have a gaming computer and I'm guessing that helps a bit.
I do wonder if people that are saying that they are experiencing a lot of lag have to either start removing stuff from their saves or start new saves because the game can't keep up with all lots, relationships and worlds.
Just how some people say sims 3 runs smooth for them and others don't. (It's a horror show for me full of glitches and crashes even with the fixes) I still truly believe ts4 is the best performing sims game yet. I can actually "play" it smoothly for long hours.
@hely0t If you set up the group chat yourself it should be fine. I mean when the Sims just start chatting autonomously. It boosts the social bar, but they won't officially greet each other and get to know each other. When I want to make sure it's working, I click on all the Sims in the group and just make one friendly social each to be sure and then it should start working after to build or decrease the relationship bar
p.s. I love Runescape!!!