The Shallow Feeling of Roles and NPCs

Triplis

I'll preclude this by saying I'm aware this may be something that bugs me a lot more than for some others, for whatever reason. And I get that roles for NPCs are often filled by whatever NPC is available for performance reasons, i.e. if too much of the game required unique, segmented roles, the game would wind up generating too many sims, which leads to either culling or a game that becomes a walking time bomb heading toward the event horizon of lag, corruption, and crashing (I can't imagine why else).

That being said, I can't help noticing it nonetheless... a lot. And I think it's felt most strongly with the Fame system from Get Famous, with sims who are "Fans." When I'm playing a famous sim or just observing other sims react to one, I can't help noticing the fourth wall and for a pack that's primarily about actors, it feels, in a twisted way, kind of fitting that the "fans" often feel like performers putting on a show. They have shown up to support the matrix-like illusion of a sim being famous and when the famous person disappears, they will go back to normal as if nothing interesting ever occurred.

I believe that this feeling comes across in such a way because of how non-exclusive many of the roles are. You go to place A, you see the same sims. You go to place B, you see the same sims. You go to place C, you see the same sims. It's hard to maintain the illusion of something as vast as a big city with celebrities who can have millions of adoring fans when you have probably something like no more than 200 sims generated in total at any given time (I don't remember what the actual numbers are off-hand, the point is that it makes it difficult). The same goes for City Living and its neighborhood, where it tends to feel, in terms of who you meet, more like a small city made to look like a big one.

And I mean, small towns aren't a bad thing. It's just disappointing that TS4's efforts to make the illusion of a big city often feel to me like a small town with a one-dimensional big city backdrop.

From the standpoint of fun and the concept of becoming immersed in a virtual world, it's hard to attach emotional value to particular sims if they seem like fluid character pieces who show up when needed to fill out the backdrop. I generally don't care a lot about immersion in games, but this is something that is jarring to me just about every single time I play. I often don't notice it consciously, but I can remember having noticed it in retrospect. Thus why it's taken me so long to bring it up. It's a relatively minor irritant overall, but it's persistent and it just sits there, being slightly annoying every time.

This along with the culling issues earlier in the game's history and just the general fear of performance and corruption issues that build up over time, has meant that I don't tend to get very invested in any specific save/household.

I suspect this may be one of the contributors to people complaining that sims have no personality. It's amazing the amount of three-dimensional character that the human imagination can project onto a fictional being just from them taking a few actions or having a few thoughts within restricted parameters. The Grim Reaper's character, for example, is, with very few exceptions, solidified and easy to project a sense of identity onto. But for most sims, I find that the fluidity of their character makes it difficult to project an identity onto them and their readiness to jump forward to fill just about any role as needed by the game seems to be part of this problem.

I get that on a certain level, you want them to be fluid so that players can craft their own stories. But perhaps you could increase the number of Grim-like characters in their solidity or something.

Short of filling out every household at the beginning with my owns sims and giving them a complex backstory (that they will most likely walk all over with their randomness) I don't see how to overcome this problem on my end, as a player.