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What is the end point of a household/game for you?
Chaotic_Moira
Posts: 484 Member
I originally was wondering this because I see people say they play with aging off, and I was like, then when do you end a story?
Then I realized, the same could be asked of nonrotational players. When do you decide you are done, and move onto a new save?
So I decided to just broaden the question. When do you feel a game/story/journey you are playing is done?
I play rotationally, with aging on, in one save.
I would get bored if my sims never aged and died personally. So for me, sometimes death is the end of the story for a household, sometimes I have gotten involved in their kids, and it continues, but this is less often. And still, eventually death is the end..
EDIT: OMG, as soon as I posted this, it occurred to me everyone is going to say, "when I get bored," lol..
Oh well, I guess we'll see. Maybe there are other reasons.
Then I realized, the same could be asked of nonrotational players. When do you decide you are done, and move onto a new save?
So I decided to just broaden the question. When do you feel a game/story/journey you are playing is done?
I play rotationally, with aging on, in one save.
I would get bored if my sims never aged and died personally. So for me, sometimes death is the end of the story for a household, sometimes I have gotten involved in their kids, and it continues, but this is less often. And still, eventually death is the end..
EDIT: OMG, as soon as I posted this, it occurred to me everyone is going to say, "when I get bored," lol..
Oh well, I guess we'll see. Maybe there are other reasons.
Features I'd like brought back from the dead.
| Picture in Picture mode | Custom Paintings | Preset scenarios for resident sims | Placing my own lots |
| Saving my own Buy Mode collections! | Saving an outfit in CAS | CaSt. Smaller is ok | Open World |
| Picture in Picture mode | Custom Paintings | Preset scenarios for resident sims | Placing my own lots |
| Saving my own Buy Mode collections! | Saving an outfit in CAS | CaSt. Smaller is ok | Open World |
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Comments
For example, my last game before the current one was about a musician who went into the witness protection program after witnessing a murder, He was living in an underground bunker with two FBI agents. I played their skills and relationships out with the game as I developed the story arc in my mind. When the mob guy got caught and the musician was able to resume his career, the game was over for that save.
My current save has more longevity, because, as the original arc was ending, it moved from a single character’s story to a world story that includes that character. That has a lot more scope and variety of play and a lot of potential story arcs.
Tales From The Myst
The Blue Moon Jukebox
Seriously though, just because I play with aging off doesn't mean my Sims don't age. I just age them manually with cake. That way I have time to play out my story to my satisfaction. (Nina has a fight with Dina over her criminal career and moves to a grungy apartment in the city. Disgusted by her new lifestyle, it is easy for Nancy to persuade her to work as a part time maid while living amidst luxury. But then she makes a deal with Geoffrey...)
Since I play in rotation, I play until I feel a chapter is finished in that household's life. Then I make note of whatever age I think the Sims have reached during that chapter with maybe a brief reminder of what I want to do next time.
I really don't think there's really an end to a sim's story until they're dead, and sometimes that's not final either.
I put a save on a long pause (sometimes permenant pause) when I run out of ideas on where to take the story. If I don't revisit a save for more than a few months, I take it as it didn't really mean that much to me, and I delete it.
For some saves, that means once my initial sim has accomplished some goal (usually an aspiration for Test Saves)
For some saves, that means after so many generations have done their thing... whatever "their thing" may be. This style of informal Legacy play is my most common.
And yes, for some saves, that means when I say "Nope. Not interested in this save any more."
I've also been known to jump between saves, usually my current legacy save and whatever short term save (testing, scenarios, etc) I have in mind. This usually keeps saves from getting too stale in play.
I don't make a lot of stories anymore so my save where aging is turned off have kinda reached some sort of end where all my played households are happy, and I don't really feel like creating new households except when new packs are released.
My problem is I'm too creative, and as such, I'm always coming up with a new idea I want to play out. There are some old saves I'd like to jump back into, but I just don't have enough time to play with every one of them.
It’s a long story and Its no where close to over.
But it’s when the Mad vampire queen, is in a hot pursuit to retrieve her daughter the Princess and rightful Queen, and her best friend and they escape to another dimension. But what the mad queen doesn’t know, the princess’s best friend, her father a powerful archmage was secretly using them as bait. To trap the mad queen, after helping them escape to a different world. Somewhere the queen can’t follow even with all her power.
And the Archmage strips the the queen of her powers and banishes her oblivion (the realm of Magic/Forgotten hollow) essentially for treason.
And then the story picks up again in 1980 two young women a princess and her lady a powerful sorceress, dressed in fine medieval/baroque ball gowns find themselves walking through a forest on the outskirts of a fictional town resembling New York.
They quickly, adapt to this new world their in, and begin a new life, leaving their old one in the stars.
The Princess falls in love with a werewolf/beast who has been trapped and living as a wolf for most of his life. And have 6 werewolf children.
Her lady and a sorceress, falls in love with the cop, who is her dashing knight in leather armor, with a gun. They have two kids. Their youngest son becomes best friends with the other family’s youngest son.
And all is well until the mad queen claws her way into the world they escaped to.
The end result of this tale, I don’t really know
My Mood:
Gosh, you very nearly wrote my reply for me.
Many of my little snippets that I share on the forums are part of one or more long-running larger tales (they don't all necessarily occupy the same save, though). I can't really share much more of the "larger whole" here, partly because some of it contains themes that could be prickly or disallowed by forum rules and partly because there's just so much other stuff that that would be difficult to share in portions larger than snippets yet smaller than long form chapters -- not if I want it to make much sense to other people, anyway.
I don't really "end" a household in the majority of cases. Like characters in any tale, their lives continue until either they die in the end or we close the book and leave them to whatever they were doing. After all, tales never truly end. We just don't always get to know everything that happens as it happens, nor will we see what happens after we stop looking. In game terms this means that my households live out their lives as they will after their main "scenes" in the story are complete. Occasionally some return to the story, and the process is the same for any new events that come up. Sometimes I never see them again, or if I do it's only as NPCs. But if they're still in the game at all, they're still part of the story, even if it's just as background noise.
Because I can't; I keep all sigs turned off.
I'll list some of the endpoints here:
In each of these there was nothing more to add. I don't play generationally, so I wasn't about to move to the children's stories in the first. In the second, my simself and his wife had lived over-long, full lives. In the third, my simself had exceeded his long-term goals. Those are the "golden points", wherein (to loosely quote Walter White) it's that perfect moment...the moment the story should've ended. Anything past that wouldn't feel worth playing. Maybe it would be, had I tried, but why gamble when I've more ideas to explore?
I do, however, cheat. By this, I mean I'll transfer those stories into a save where no one grows old or dies, families are together, and I can inhabit any simself of mine that I wish, if I ever feel the need to see their families again for a bit. That isn't a story. It never ends because it will never need to. It's more like a museum of happy endings (even for the few stories I simply grew bored of).
This is fantastic.
Ah okay, that is interesting. My sims always have a story, which is basically just a goal, a concept, or character archetype that I want to play out.
I may have one that wants to find all the snow globes (goal), or one that is witch who wants to ruin anyone's chance at love (character archetype), or a sims who is going to survive only on what can be stolen or found (concept)..
These are all stories to me.
Oh wow! I didn't realize anyone played that way. I love learning how different people play.
| Picture in Picture mode | Custom Paintings | Preset scenarios for resident sims | Placing my own lots |
| Saving my own Buy Mode collections! | Saving an outfit in CAS | CaSt. Smaller is ok | Open World |
Really, never. I have a few side saves where I've wanted to test things out, but I have one main save that I have played from day one. I play rotationally, with aging off, though as someone else mentioned above, I do age manually with the birthday cake from time to time.
To be honest, though, I'm very attached to my sims and I'm playing a whole world of them. I'm at 200 favorites, with a handful more that get rotated in and out so that I can create more without anyone getting deleted.
More to the point, I don't plan to move any of them too far into their life cycles, because there are things I still want them to do that they can't do yet, because those packs are still to come. My plan is to do what I have done with previous iterations of the Sims games, which is spend time with each household now, doing the things they can do and currently have available, build up relationships, and play out those stories. As each pack comes out, I'll rotate back through most of those households incorporating aspects of the new packs into their lives. And then when there are no more packs, and only when there are no more packs, I will start moving the generations forward. At that point, I'll play until I'm bored, and then either move on to Sims 5, or to something else entirely.
If I get bored now, between packs (as I often do), then I just play another game or do other things until there's either a new pack or I get inspired with a new idea.
I've restarted my sims 3 times. The third time I aged them down to toddlers and gave them parents in CAS.
That started in 2017 and it's now 5 years later.
The first of my toddlers to be played is now a young adult along with five others.
Another six are teens, prepping for Uni. The rest are still children and toddlers.
I play off and on.
When a new pack comes out, I usually create a new save to try it out on other sims before playing it with my main sims.
So my main sims are often interrupted by new packs. I have a new goal with these sims. I will be using them, and the dormies they met in Uni to create a master save. I will play this save whenever I start a new game.
The Sims 5 will probably be out before all my sims die of old age, and even then I can play them again my loading up a new save.
If I abandon the household because of a boring Sim I will nowadays keep the save and just create another Sim household to play. The abandoned one(s) can continue their life in the world, I don't delete them, I just don't play them anymore.
My playstyle is similar to this. I have aging on, I've added a version of the 100 babies challenge in the mix, and I'm going through everything very slowly, but I'm basically trying to have one family experience all the careers and skills the game has to offer. I don't think I'm going to make it to the end, but I didn't intend to quit anytime soon (I started in 2018 and the family has only finished 5 or so careers and had 17/100 children, but I don't mind).
When I get bored
It does depend though. I usually follow one sim at the time, and their family/house hold members, and for that one sim, the end is usually death - of me moving on to playing their kids. However, I only move on to the kids if I find I have some story for them - something which makes playing them fun, new or interesting.
For instance, in one of my saves I played Marci, a young single mother working in the culinary career trying to make ends meet and taking care of her toddler at the same time. As she worked late at night, sending the toddler to daycare just wasn't a reasonable option, so she needed a nanny, who basically cost her most of her income. She even had to think about what to serve for dinner in order to know if she was going to pay her bills or not, she was so tired she usually cried in the tub each morning. Finding her love and happiness, moving her up in her career and growing her family and moving her into better homes until she reached the top of her career and then started her own restaurant was incredibly rewarding and fun. I tried to move onto her child when he was bound for college, but Dario, as sweet as he was as a wild toddler giving his mother gray hairs, was incredibly boring as a young adult. So I pretty much left her when she had a successful career and no more kids would be born. Her story just felt done, she made her dream come true.
In another save, I started a challenge, and managed to get through several generations - each one with their challenges to catch my interest, from the gardener building the perfect park, to the struggling young mother with a horrible cheating partner (she found love in the end) to her author son married to his painter husband and their adopted irresponsible serial romantic son who ended up a parent without asking for it (playing a deadbeat dad who saw his kids occasionally on every other weekend was kind of fun). Then in generation five, the main sim lead an incredibly boring life. She was a responsible, ambitious, teacher who wanted to be a super parent. No real struggle, she always did what she was supposed to do, her husband was dull and responsible and did his thing (though he was surprisingly the better parent, mostly because he didn't focus on work so much could just play with his kids). They were just so perfect that it got tedious.
In my current save I'm on gen two but starting to move onto gen three, I'm still deciding on the kids but leaning towards the younger one as she could be a perfect scientist and I haven't tried the career yet. I'm not bored yet, but then I still have ideas on where to take the family so I'll stick with Nyla for a while once she goes to uni and see what happens.
I don’t play stories, I’m more goal-oriented but I don’t stop when goals are met, that’s the time to bask in my success and play with those rewards. I can usually set a new goal but then after a while, I’ll get bored of the more accomplished sims, so I don’t let things to drag out too long because I’ve learned that’s mainly what kills saves for me.
Updated with Werewolf Diaries (1)
It never does as long as I am able to play Sims 4.
I play with aging -> played household only. When the last sim in a household is likely to die from old age soon, I move new sims in for replacement. In that way, the homes stay occupied just with different sims.
So recognizable!
I'm doing something similar, but I have let them have a few worlds per gen (Johnny started in Oasis Springs but moved to Sulani to marry his wife, their child live in Newcrest (after a short spell in San My), and their child is currently in Britchester (at Uni) but will have to choose another world when finished since there really are very few residential lots there. I've also allowed them to make use of non-residential worlds. San My was really not in the plan, but I bought City Living while doing this, so I gave myself some leeway with that.