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Repetition and Irritation: A reflection on some of TS4's more obnoxious bits
Triplis
Posts: 3,048 Member
It's a fairly well-known concept in game design (or at least, I think it's well-known) that in games that are significantly non-linear (e.g. not a one track on-the-rails game with few repeating elements), you want to be wary of things that are repetitive because players are going to encounter them over and over and over, and so the general thought is to make it more like a background actor in a movie than a star character with a catch-phrase.
Probably one of the most commonly known examples of this problem at work is Lydia in Skyrim with her lines like, "I'm sworn to carry your burdens."
I'm sure the sims team has some familiarity with this idea in game design and I'm preaching to the choir, but despite that confidence, I can't help noticing that over the history of this game, there is a pattern of problems in this style slipping through in a way that is irritating and I don't know why.
The examples are unfortunately extensive:
Base Game: Obsession with getting water that is not properly communicated to the player (I don't think this has ever really been addressed. The most frustrated people modded around it and moved on). This would probably be alleviated almost entirely if sims could have more than six visible needs and were given a visible water need, so that it makes sense to the player why they are insisting on going for water. There's also been countless overtuned interactions throughout the game's history, in general. It's hard to remember them all.
City Living: Dream Big and Neighbors making noise. Dream Big was outright broken for a while, causing sims to do it despite being in the middle of other things. And neighbors making noise, I don't think has ever been retuned. It's just this staple of living in an apartment. Even though that's not how living in an apartment works. It is actually possible to live in an apartment and not have many noise complaints. I know from personal experience. [I think there's one exception here with some built-in lot trait in one apartment, but who wants to live in the same one apartment over and over with little customization?]
Seasons: Some complain about the going out to see first snow. This exactly fits the kind of problem I'm describing. The first time, it might seem interesting and enthralling. After a while, it's probably just going to be annoying. You're going to see it every single time winter rolls around.
Get Famous: React in Disgust, seems to have no discerning for anything other than being disgusted by everyone, even if they are close family. Some of the celebrity reactions in general (reacting to celebrities) seem to have no discerning for relationships or are broken in that regard (I don't know which one). Celebrities reacting to other celebrities momentarily as if they are fans, family members reacting as if they are fans.
I'm sure others can think of more examples, but the point here is not to rag on every flaw. The point is that there's a pattern of having this problem. I suppose if I'm looking at this more generously, it should be worthy of praise that the examples of annoying repetition aren't more extensive.
The problem is, when this game does have problems of annoying repetition, they tend to go for the jugular. It's not just Lydia saying, "I'm sworn to carry your burdens." It's more like the equivalent of Lydia shoving a mage staff in your inventory all the time and telling you to learn spells.
The worst of these types of problems in The Sims 4 seem to have a habit of interfering with how you see the game and how you want to play it (ex: apartments and noise, reacting to snow). Suffice it to say if it wasn't for modding, you'd probably have had a lot more players who ragequit because of some of these issues over the years. I'm sure you've had plenty who did anyway.
My advice in the new year is, err on the side of being too gentle and letting the player direct too much. I doubt you're gonna have a bunch of sandbox players saying, "This is too boring because I get to do what I want." I know some people love the scripted stuff and you need to have some pushing in there to keep people interested, but it doesn't have to hit them over the head.
Being able to customize your experience is what keeps sandboxes interesting. It allows you to skirt around the repetition and find interesting and unique ways to do things in a sea of mix-and-match possibilities.
And when the game says, "NO, this is how it's done," it interferes with that. It's like someone saying, "No, no, no" at a brainstorming session. It kills the creativity. I think it's best to leave that to Monty Python's "hitting people over the head lessons."
Probably one of the most commonly known examples of this problem at work is Lydia in Skyrim with her lines like, "I'm sworn to carry your burdens."
I'm sure the sims team has some familiarity with this idea in game design and I'm preaching to the choir, but despite that confidence, I can't help noticing that over the history of this game, there is a pattern of problems in this style slipping through in a way that is irritating and I don't know why.
The examples are unfortunately extensive:
Base Game: Obsession with getting water that is not properly communicated to the player (I don't think this has ever really been addressed. The most frustrated people modded around it and moved on). This would probably be alleviated almost entirely if sims could have more than six visible needs and were given a visible water need, so that it makes sense to the player why they are insisting on going for water. There's also been countless overtuned interactions throughout the game's history, in general. It's hard to remember them all.
City Living: Dream Big and Neighbors making noise. Dream Big was outright broken for a while, causing sims to do it despite being in the middle of other things. And neighbors making noise, I don't think has ever been retuned. It's just this staple of living in an apartment. Even though that's not how living in an apartment works. It is actually possible to live in an apartment and not have many noise complaints. I know from personal experience. [I think there's one exception here with some built-in lot trait in one apartment, but who wants to live in the same one apartment over and over with little customization?]
Seasons: Some complain about the going out to see first snow. This exactly fits the kind of problem I'm describing. The first time, it might seem interesting and enthralling. After a while, it's probably just going to be annoying. You're going to see it every single time winter rolls around.
Get Famous: React in Disgust, seems to have no discerning for anything other than being disgusted by everyone, even if they are close family. Some of the celebrity reactions in general (reacting to celebrities) seem to have no discerning for relationships or are broken in that regard (I don't know which one). Celebrities reacting to other celebrities momentarily as if they are fans, family members reacting as if they are fans.
I'm sure others can think of more examples, but the point here is not to rag on every flaw. The point is that there's a pattern of having this problem. I suppose if I'm looking at this more generously, it should be worthy of praise that the examples of annoying repetition aren't more extensive.
The problem is, when this game does have problems of annoying repetition, they tend to go for the jugular. It's not just Lydia saying, "I'm sworn to carry your burdens." It's more like the equivalent of Lydia shoving a mage staff in your inventory all the time and telling you to learn spells.
The worst of these types of problems in The Sims 4 seem to have a habit of interfering with how you see the game and how you want to play it (ex: apartments and noise, reacting to snow). Suffice it to say if it wasn't for modding, you'd probably have had a lot more players who ragequit because of some of these issues over the years. I'm sure you've had plenty who did anyway.
My advice in the new year is, err on the side of being too gentle and letting the player direct too much. I doubt you're gonna have a bunch of sandbox players saying, "This is too boring because I get to do what I want." I know some people love the scripted stuff and you need to have some pushing in there to keep people interested, but it doesn't have to hit them over the head.
Being able to customize your experience is what keeps sandboxes interesting. It allows you to skirt around the repetition and find interesting and unique ways to do things in a sea of mix-and-match possibilities.
And when the game says, "NO, this is how it's done," it interferes with that. It's like someone saying, "No, no, no" at a brainstorming session. It kills the creativity. I think it's best to leave that to Monty Python's "hitting people over the head lessons."
Mods moved from MTS, now hosted at: https://triplis.github.io
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Comments
If I had to think of a system in TS4 that was guilty of the issue discussed above without necessarily being bugged the first one to come to mind would be the text messaging. Not only are they repetitive, but they're relentless. Particularly after the reputation system was added which just gives other sims all the more reasons to message you the same things over and over and over again. The fact that there's no variation in the messages at all makes them feel robotic and impersonal and it's hard for me to take them seriously.
(◡‿◡✿)
I'm just spitballing, but I think it might be better if we could choose who can message/call us or something like that. Some of the time, I'd probably like to just have it completely shut off. But I might want some messages from some sims or certain types of messages and I'm sure it'd feel more meaningful if it was only some sims you prefer messaging you some of the time. Probably would still look somewhat robotic, but maybe less so.
How is getting a text pop-up notification a million times for every little event ("Heard you became friends with x! She's a cool bean!"), with no way to disable it or dismiss it until you hit the x, any fun?
How are city festivals any fun when you've visited them the first time? They are all so predictable; nothing is spontaneous or new in each one (just like visiting ANY lot in itself), and none really offer any kind of meaningful gameplay advantage.
Speaking of gameplay..
Where is the fun in making Sim personalities if emotions just override them entirely? A developer once responded the traits you unlock are more meaningful, but they only provide a gameplay advantage to a game that is already dead easy to play. They do not make one Sim different from the next.
Where is the fun in building legacies with there being no inheritance? You can tell they did not think this through, as there were no family trees in the game at launch, and the game still can block various sections of your family tree, if it's long enough. Other passing down the "genes" of your Sim, building long lineages does not feel any special.
Where is the fun in having a Sim wake up at 8:00AM, but not actually get to the fun part of their day until their needs are met, which takes until 1-2:00PM? How is dining fun, when it might've took 2 in-game hours in TS2, but now takes half a day or more in TS4?
I really want to list so many other examples, but I don't want this post to become nothing but a wall of text. The point is, there are so many instances where the game feels like it is not fun after you have done it the first time, and there are a plethora of other instances where it feels like the gameplay design is just poorly thought out, especially compared to the predecessors. As of now, I can't stay in the game too long without boring my brains out, and then I find myself still playing a game that is more than a decade old (TS2).
They really don't seem to playtest at all.. maybe all they look for is that it somewhat works and not whether its fun for them or not. Since they cater to tweens, then they probably assume that they can be entertained by almost anything, and don't care about making a game fun for the rest of us.
It's always just kinda sad to me. I want to love the game so badly, but there's so much of it that bothers me that I just feel cheated playing it. When I play ts2, I'm endlessly mesmerized. All they had to do was remake ts2 with better graphics and options (fatter/fitter sims, more life stages, more skills/interests, more jobs and types of worlds and weather etc). That's it. No need for whatever ts 4 is.
This. A million times this. I do agree with the OP too. The game being linear is killing the franchise.
I do agree that compared to Sims 2 and 3 the goals in this game and careers are somewhat too linear and the game needs to be more free play. Some of the sandbox feel is gone and is returning to a degree with some of the new content, but it doesn't hold my attention like previous versions (I still play 2 & 3).
Been watching hubby play Red Dead Redemption 2 which he got for Christmas and THAT is a sandbox game. While there is a main storyline, there are so many other elements to complete and you do have more freedom to do what you want instead of the same old boring "wash, rinse, repeat" careers and jobs and tasks.
It's not a bold statement at all. Some of them said themselves they don't play the game privately and if you watch some of their streams then you'll notice they often have no idea what to do or how things work. A part of me understands that you don't want to have The Sims at work and at home, but another part of me is annoyed because it explains so much. It's like they add features but never experience them in the same way we do
Completely agree with the rest of your post btw!
The one that's a bit of a mystery to me is the sameyness feeling of sims. I've thought at great length about that one countless times and I don't know what it is the other sims games do that make sims feel more distinct, in terms of personalities (probably in part because I haven't played them - if I had free access to them, I'd probably do it out of curiosity, but they ain't cheap when you add up all the content
I did that mod where you can lock/unlock skills and I think that helps for some user control over personality, but it seems like the greater issue may be that sim behavior is almost too well-refined. Like it's orderly and prioritized to the point of being boring in how predictable it is? Or maybe it's too reliant on particular objects being present?
From the way people talk about the other games, I wonder if their autonomy was actually less precise and so it created more of a feeling of random behavior, which helped keep it interesting? I know people talk about the likes/dislikes stuff in TS2, I think, but I don't know how defined that looks in practice compared to TS4. There are traits like Loner that are pretty heavy-handed as far as disliking being around strangers. But I don't know if that's the kind of thing people are talking about when they bring up likes/dislikes, or if it's more subtle than that.
The problem is the emotion system-- that thing that they praised so much when the game launched.
Personality traits don't really have any effect since their autonomy is overriden by the emotions. All happy sims feel the same, all sad sims feel the same, all angry sims feel the same .. because they all do the same things to 'deal' with their emotions. A bookworm sim won't go read sad novels, an evil sim won't go make someone cry, a foodie sim won't binge eat, a music lover sim won't go listen to sad tunes-- no, they'll all just go cry in bed or in the closet. All my tense sims also always go into the sauna, whether it's because they're lonely, because there's a dish on the floor, or because they haven't gotten a promotion in a long time -- none of those things matter to the game, the result for any of these is just to find something relaxing, and apparently that for all my sims is 'sauna'
To see how weak traits are, go compare corresponding traits for ts3 and ts4. For example for the evil trait:
ts3:
https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Evil_(The_Sims_3)
ts4:
https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Evil_(The_Sims_4)
ts4 personalities are trash.
I suspect part of the problem is because they have different teams working on different things, but those teams don't overlap on how to improve the concepts they're working on. And obviously, the biggest part pf the problem comes from developers who don't play the game for fun.
Yes, yes, yes. They lost track of what makes a sim an actual sim. Emotions are nice, except when they are not as a sim can cycle through 6 different emotions within seconds. And even putting that aside, the way they implemented emotions and traits makes all sims globally the same. Sure a sim can be evil, self-centered, etc., but in actuality, they will all get happy, or angry, or sad, and do the same things. I specially loathe the traits that simply add an emotional buff with some text. Ah, my sim is a genius! What could that entail you ask? Well, your sim might spontaneously wake up with a +1 Focused buff because he is a genius. Great! 10/10.
It's probably broken. I just recently reported the filthy lot trait also being broken. A lot of the lot traits don't seem to work at all, just like the earthquakes are meant to break things in your apartment but they don't. I don't think there's a lot of people playing with lot traits, there's no one testing for their functionality and that's why no one reports them for not working at all.
This game is so full of bugs right now. They don't fix most of the bugs that are introduced before shoving even more content, with even more bugs, in the game. TS4 is gonna end up just like TS3, a broken mess.
As for the OP I think there are more pressing issues, and those he mentioned aren't really this game's problem. There's a lot more evident problems that make this game repetitive like sims always doing the same autonumous cheery interactions, sims not acting like their traits, linear aspirations, linear party goals, linear active career goals etc. Either way TS4 wasn't designed to be even the slightest sand box game and a game can never be 100% sandbox either otherwise what drives a player's will of playing the game? The Sims needs scripted events but how you balance them is the key to having a good game.
Also, text messages are definitely a problem, they are annoying and repetitive but I'm myself a person who hates getting texts I always have my phone sound off because I detest listening the sound of notifications.
You know what I bolded in your comments reminds me of a very old interview by someone who had played console games (more questy type games with end goals) and they were musing about The Sims and found there was no win situations, no end game. They couldn't understand what was the point of it all. They tried back then to play it as any other game they were familar with, goals and gains, and how to 'win' it. Then they realized that was never it's point. It was about the journey. It's clear more recent teams don't remember that was the focus of The Sims.
Also, why are there only like... 10 options for careers? WITH expansions? I'm really big on having my sims live a pretty normal life, so having more typical career options would be really nice.
Ideally, I would love a game that was a mash up of some of TS4 new features (executed a bit better) with the gameplay of TS3. I only really played TS2 very briefly, so I can't speak on that, but it seems like most people I've talked to agree that previous versions of the game had a lot more to offer than TS4.
@JoAnne65 Insightful to know. I mean, I know the sims in Sims 4 do this to some degree (I recall recently playing around with a particular household for some testing reasons and they certainly had some variation on the two different times I played them from the beginning).
But I wonder how your experience compares as far as how varied the behavior seems by comparison?
I do wonder about the fact that some skills are sort of locked in autonomy until the player directs the sim to do them past a certain point (I think usually level 2 or something). Like I recall the sim from that household I did a couple different times, he had the computer whiz aspiration, but he never once chose to attempt programming on his own; this didn't surprise me as I'm pretty sure programming doesn't trigger autonomously until the player directs it to past level 2 or so. But it is an example of how a sim's behavior could end up being more restricted in terms of object usage because of rules like that. Possibly intended originally as a way to avoid sims becoming good at every skill, but it may contribute to the "obsession with TV/computer/games" phenomenon.
Then again, I know certain types of behavior don't trigger autonomously at all, no matter skill level, and it might be more interesting if they did. I don't think writing a book or writing music does. (I was gonna say hacking doesn't, but it looks like it does if programming skill is high enough, there's just not much to push the sim to do it.) Activating many of these as possible autonomy and/or increasing how strong the autonomy pull is may create more of an effect like what you're describing with Sims 3. But then, it might also just create the exact issue as described in the OP of this thread.
I might fiddle around with it in modding on a slow day and see if there's any noticeable impact to doing so.
Another repetitive annoying feature - chance cards. Always the same ones, always the same result.
And limited whims that keep getting repeated over and over (and really don't make any sense at all, going against the Sims' traits sometimes).
That's pretty much why I haven't been playing lately - it's just the same thing over and over again, just with different Sims.
The first part, the dancing, is the most boring for me. When I restarted the game and they turned out to do all kind of other stuff is when it became interesting. I deliberately influenced their social bars, so some like each other, others don’t. Which means you see some quarreling, some friendly socializing and even some flirting. They use the juice kegger, the pool table and my highly skilled mixologist even headed to the bar to start mixing drinks (which tbh even surprised me). It’s not in the footage (because that video again appeared to be broken) but all his drinks were consumed by the guests later.
We’re more than 4 years in and all this time I’ve been trying to pinpoint why Sims 3 has always been (and still is) so addictive to me - I never even intended to start playing the game, that was an ‘accident’ caused by my daughter who talked me into trying - while Sims 4 at times definitely is enjoyable, but never addictive. Again, to me. What you describe in your OP might very well come very close to the reason (or at least one of the reasons).
I’m a very controlling player, meaning that I like to instruct my sims, guide them, tell their story. But at the same time I also love being guided by the game. Led in directions I never planned or even thought of. I think it’s that interaction that I miss in Sims 4. I think Sims 2 did that even better by the way but I’m not familiar enough with that iteration to tell. Sims 3 is running through my veins
That alone struck me just in terms of how different it looks. Between that and the one-on-one dancing, the TS3 clip immediately felt more intimate. The helping with the keg stand aided in that feeling as well.
By contrast, the best way I can think to describe the TS4 clip is it feels more ordered, like actors waiting to play their part in some sort of live play, similar to the concept introduced in the beginning of the movie The Man Who Knew Too Little. The venue bartender waits idly in their place, ready to prepare drinks for anyone who wants one; the DJ plays music nonstop; the patrons dutifully dance to the music, ready to be interacted with if you wish, but not too invested in their own existence or decisions, lest they miss their cue.
Which I'm not saying is inherently a bad thing. It's just... different. Some people seem to love it and if your goal is to play it like you are the sim you're playing, walking through a live performance as a living, breathing actor, it's probably great. But I don't think it hits that mark of surprise as well, that you describe. Instead, I think it comes alive most when you, playing as if you are a sim, start influencing what's happening through your (the sim's) actions. I have a suspicion that if the game was inherently first-person, TS4's design might seem stronger. Thanks to that one guru's work on the side, we can now try playing the game in first person, albeit a little jankily. I wonder how that would change the perspective; if the comparison was watching TS3 after a little setup, versus directing TS4 from the eyes of a first person sim.
As for the actors waiting to play their part, I think Sims 3 has that as well. When my sim goes to a nightclub, the bartender is doing nothing basically untill someone shows up. They are busy though, while the bartender in the Sims 4 part of the video does nothing. That might be a glitch though, I don’t think it’s meant to be that way. I made this video quite some time ago and I believe people told me bartenders are not supposed to just stand there? On the other hand, the open world definitely helps the feeling other sims are having a life of their own. Maybe that’s the feeling you’re describing?
No, I agree one isn’t necessarily better or worse than the other, there are clearly lots of people addicted to Sims 4 so I’m sure it’s playing style and preference. I quit playing Sims 1 by the way back in 2001 because I felt I was too busy keeping my sim satisfied, the feeling that was all there was to it and for me that became more frustrating than fun. Literally making me think: I love this game but it’s as if there’s something in the way that keeps me from actually playing it. In 2009 they appeared to have taken away that ‘something’. I know for a fact though there are tons of simmers who actually loved that aspect and missed it in Sims 3 and now 4. It’s still interesting though to try and figure out what it is exactly what we love in his franchise and what could be improved. And what you are adressing in this topic certainly is something that could use some improvement.