I have been playing Angela Pleasant, now Smith, for a while. She's a happy mother of three children, two of which are about to turn into teenagers. With the current sale I have been considering buying High School years and turn my attention over to the twins for a while. I am, however, hesitant, because I have heard so many negative things about HSY, including people wishing they had never bought it, so now I'm asking. With the patches and fixes that has been so far - is it worth buying or is it like Dine out so riddled with bugs that I should give up on the idea?
What are your experiences? Good and bad, should I buy the pack?
Moreover, I advise that the cart button must be destroyed!
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Comments
Personally I think it fleshed out teens, had great CAS and build items and is one of the best packs for screenshots. Prom and graduation are nice albeit short. It has some great townies and theres a good ‘vibe’ to the pack like a tv teen drama. I didn’t try the thrift system but it’s apparently fun.
That being said gameplay can be a bit lacking and strangely the weakest part of it all is the school. It doesn’t look great and there’s not much to do there and what there is becomes very repetitive quite quickly. The world is good but not the best and some of the activities there are rabbitholes.
If you will decorate the school and make your own story and use the CAS and Build items then you can make this pack work well for you. The more you put in the more you get out with this pack.
I didn’t really see any major bugs on console and I think modders fixed most PC issues. I feel it’s safe to buy. I would buy it again personally, I really like it despite the flaws.
The pack provides many more opportunities for teen sims to meet other teens too, whether at school or a boba tea shop or prom.
Rabbithole school is still available when desired.
The premades are cool.
My real-life human teen loves the build/buy. And the boba.
A lot of the other stuff that came with the pack - Social Bunny, Trendi, the pier (what's a beach-style pier doing in an old mining town anyway?!), the whole influencer thing, pillow fights confined to one bed object - got old really fast.
Edit: For your question about bugs, you should see the current list of HSY bugs here.
https://answers.ea.com/t5/Bug-Reports/READ-FIRST-Compiled-list-of-reported-Issues/m-p/11673025#M223852
The truly objectionable ones (like adult-child romance bars developing) have been fixed.
People randomly wandering into my house to demand to be best friends or go to prom is something I find a little annoying, and is not fixed yet.
If the high school graduation event were important to me, I'd be annoyed, because it often just doesn't happen, and even the designed timing is odd-- it's like the first or second Sunday after the student ages up to young adult, which could easily be after the sim is already married with kids.
It’s just not as engaging. I use the build stuff frequently but since Cassandra Goth got expelled during a scanario I just haven’t played it again. If there’s a teen in the household I just select ‘send alone’.
On sale, I guess it's worth it, the pack does not have any larger bugs as far as I know. If you like to make outfits with trendi, use the gen z inspired clothing and also want more rabbit holes for your teens (jobs and after school activities) and maybe you would like to build some rooms for your teen sims and maybe build high schools then it's worth it.
But the actual high school gameplay is very simplified and repetitive and it doesn't help that prom is happening every week. The social bunny app is just posting the same messages over and over as well.
For me it's worth it but, if you're not a fan of active careers, you'll probably want to skip that one.
The pack is at better then the snooze fest of university. I think the team listened to us.
I haven’t experienced any bugs. Like most packs, I’ve played a few times and then got bored and went back to my regular play style.
I think it’s worth it on the current sale.
Before my teens would go to school, come home and do homework and maybe work on skill points. Their only free time was the weekends.
Now I can choose to spend more time with them during the week and often they go hang out at the Boba Tea shop after school and other teens show up there too.
There are a bunch of unfortunate game play decisions for high school though and I had to use mods to make it better.
My favorite is a mod that allows me to decided what other teens show up at high school instead of generic townies.
The way the game chooses which other students show up at Copperdale High with your played sim is actually an interesting design decision, BUT it could have been explained a lot better to make it less confusing to players. It took me a fair bit of time to figure out how this works, and I'm someone who will not use mods or custom content of any kind. (It lets me quickly get past the inevitable "try uninstalling your mods" response when I discuss game problems.)
When choosing which sims to bring onto the lot with your played sim, in large part the game looks for other sims which your active one holds strong sentiments and relationships with. What clued me in on this was the experience of a played sim named Cassie, and the fact that her ex-boyfriend and current boyfriend nearly always show up to school with her. Griffin (the ex, who turned out to be Mean and Evil, and was quickly dumped) seems to hold some strong and virtually permanent sentiments towards her as a result of being dumped. Stephen, her boyfriend, very consistently holds different very positive sentiments toward her. That got me curious, and I started looking at which other students were showing up more or less constantly, and it turned out all of them hold one or more sentiments toward her. Those she doesn't interact with much seem to get frequently rotated in and out of attendance.
Basically, the game is trying to populate the campus with both your best friends and worst enemies, and then just adds in some random teenagers from different households to fill out the rest, as background characters.
There are a couple other factors involved as well, but this seems to be the strongest influence.
For the social bunny I don't want to be forced to to spend time on this. I also dislike the fact that it can change my sims' relationship. If I turn it off for my current sim but not for other households I rotate to, will the social bunny have interfered in their relationships while I do not play them?
Hair growth is a part of reality I don't need in the game. It is bad enough that beauty standards force women to shave their legs in real life. My sims are fine in a world where there is no need for this. Will sims I don't play end up all hairy? Is there a difference between Sims in my household and other households? I don't want an entire sim population with hairy legs.
I could of course spend an entire real life day editing every single sim to turn these off but then it would still be on for newly generated sims...
My saves are weird places anyway, with plenty of occults and ghosts and strange happenings, so I feel like the extra-hairy sims fit in okay, but I do wonder why there isn't a global "disable for random" available on the body hair presets (or hair growth if that's what it is).
Social Bunny affects relationships of sims who are on each other's contact list in the app. If one sim has the app and not the other, or even if they both have the app but neither sim has added the other to their contact list, it won't affect their relationship.
It's turned off for active households by default, I believe. You can turn on facial hair growth only if you want, which is kind of nice... but it doesn't seem to work at all for me, sadly.
It's an interesting choice to have as a feature for an expansion. I don't know what to think of it.
I was really against it at first but now I kinda like the gameplay of making them shave every few days and managing the acne and things as well.
My only issue with it now is how it affects the townies and how you can’t seem to globally turn it off for townies, or at least you couldn’t. The amount of female students at the high school that had leg hair etc was just a little silly to me.
But for my own sims, sure why not, something to do.
It would have been more amusing if they'd included barbers and beauticians.
You're right, you can't turn it off at all for all newly generated townies... I don't quite know why they didn't add the global option, like they did for other features - such as the carbon-footprint from eco lifestyle or opting out of fame pre-emptively from get famous. Women have hairy legs, but it's usually not that thick or that much though. Perhaps they suffer from a hormonal imbalance. Who knows. Not a fan of it though.
I'd like that idea a lot more, tbh.
The other question I have is people have mentioned the expansion adds things like body hair. Does this expansion make that happen in all lands or just at the high school or in the high school pack?
The body hair shows up in the other worlds, too.
The pack adds functions to the regular game, and adds a new world Copperdale. Once you have the pack downloaded, start up the Sims 4 game like you used to before installing the pack. You can play a household you were already playing, or another household, or play one of the households in Copperdale, or create a new household to live there, etc. as you like. You'll notice new things in the game like the Social Bunny and Trendi apps on the phone, Facial Cleanser available as an option on mirror and sink, Pillow Fight available as an option on a bed, etc.
If you have a teen in the household, when it's time for them to go to school (8am on school days) you'll get a pop-up asking if you want to join them at school or send them alone. Joining them will let you play them through their school day, at the high school. The school gameplay is locked to that one particular lot in Copperdale, but teens who live in any world can go to that school no problem. You can modify the school building if you want, by going to Manage Worlds > Copperdale > high school lot > build.