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Problems that still plague the game years later
Triplis
Posts: 3,048 Member
Speaking for myself, as the game has gotten more fleshed out and "not enough to do" is less of an issue (especially with the help of mods) there are still some fundamental problems that stick around.
They are the kind of problems that slightly annoy me at the beginning of a gameplay session and have me feeling exhausted and tired of the game by the end, which is not a feeling I usually have with a game. I'll get bored or need a break from any game, but this is stuff that is deeply frustrating that erodes any interest in coming back.
I'm sure some of this has been mentioned before, maybe even by me, but it's still there, so maybe it bears repeating. I dunno.
Autonomy: Actions dropping, sims hanging / taking forever to take action, sims taking forever to get from place to place which causes actions to drop, walkby sims deciding to leave in the middle of a queued interaction causing it to drop, NPCs queuing up a prompt on your played sim that you don't want over and over. (It seems clear to me that part of the hanging problem is idle animations. I don't know how you fix this considering the way animations have their little specified exit paths, but there are definitely cases where an idle visibly has to play out before a sim will get their behind moving.)
Time: Events with objectives giving you no time to do anything because sims take so long to do stuff and some actions in general have a duration that is too long compared to the timed event length (ex: active doctor career giving little time to assess patients while they just keep coming in endlessly and NPC coworker AI is near useless).
Music: Instruments sounding distorted on faster speeds (I have a decent ear for music and it's painful and disorienting to listen to). Ideally, it'd be nice to have an option like radio music where it won't match the game speed.
No way to customize keybinds (or not that I'm aware of anyway?): If I could customize them, maybe I could handle time speed switching more easily. As it is, there's a lot of tedious stuff like the following example: click multiple times to find an interaction, queue it up, sim hangs, fast speed to get past the hanging, interaction drops, pause game, click multiple times again to find the interaction, queue it up, sim hangs, fast speed to get past the hanging, interaction finally goes through. I do this enough and it just gets utterly exhausting and doesn't feel like a game at all, so much as fighting with a user interface. I mean, the keybinds for time speed on PC are 0, 1, 2, 3. Unless you're using numpad (with a mouse and arrow keys?) 0 isn't even close to the other numbers.
As you can probably see, there's a theme here of time management and autonomy/AI intertwined that makes things frustrating. If this was a game with no clock where time never mattered, maybe I wouldn't get as frustrated. But when things are fundamentally time-sensitive and it's difficult to execute things efficiently and smoothly, that becomes annoying over time. When you give a command and the game queues it up and then drops it, I mean, that's just not a problem that I encounter in just about any other video game (I'm struggling to think of one). I can't imagine playing most games if they had that kind of issue. I think it's only forgivable here because of the ability to pause time or speed it up, allowing you to pause to requeue and then speed up to carry it out.
They are the kind of problems that slightly annoy me at the beginning of a gameplay session and have me feeling exhausted and tired of the game by the end, which is not a feeling I usually have with a game. I'll get bored or need a break from any game, but this is stuff that is deeply frustrating that erodes any interest in coming back.
I'm sure some of this has been mentioned before, maybe even by me, but it's still there, so maybe it bears repeating. I dunno.
Autonomy: Actions dropping, sims hanging / taking forever to take action, sims taking forever to get from place to place which causes actions to drop, walkby sims deciding to leave in the middle of a queued interaction causing it to drop, NPCs queuing up a prompt on your played sim that you don't want over and over. (It seems clear to me that part of the hanging problem is idle animations. I don't know how you fix this considering the way animations have their little specified exit paths, but there are definitely cases where an idle visibly has to play out before a sim will get their behind moving.)
Time: Events with objectives giving you no time to do anything because sims take so long to do stuff and some actions in general have a duration that is too long compared to the timed event length (ex: active doctor career giving little time to assess patients while they just keep coming in endlessly and NPC coworker AI is near useless).
Music: Instruments sounding distorted on faster speeds (I have a decent ear for music and it's painful and disorienting to listen to). Ideally, it'd be nice to have an option like radio music where it won't match the game speed.
No way to customize keybinds (or not that I'm aware of anyway?): If I could customize them, maybe I could handle time speed switching more easily. As it is, there's a lot of tedious stuff like the following example: click multiple times to find an interaction, queue it up, sim hangs, fast speed to get past the hanging, interaction drops, pause game, click multiple times again to find the interaction, queue it up, sim hangs, fast speed to get past the hanging, interaction finally goes through. I do this enough and it just gets utterly exhausting and doesn't feel like a game at all, so much as fighting with a user interface. I mean, the keybinds for time speed on PC are 0, 1, 2, 3. Unless you're using numpad (with a mouse and arrow keys?) 0 isn't even close to the other numbers.
As you can probably see, there's a theme here of time management and autonomy/AI intertwined that makes things frustrating. If this was a game with no clock where time never mattered, maybe I wouldn't get as frustrated. But when things are fundamentally time-sensitive and it's difficult to execute things efficiently and smoothly, that becomes annoying over time. When you give a command and the game queues it up and then drops it, I mean, that's just not a problem that I encounter in just about any other video game (I'm struggling to think of one). I can't imagine playing most games if they had that kind of issue. I think it's only forgivable here because of the ability to pause time or speed it up, allowing you to pause to requeue and then speed up to carry it out.
Mods moved from MTS, now hosted at: https://triplis.github.io
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Comments
The biggest problem is the absolute paper thin personality system. The perks are basically pointless, the emotions are as fickle as a leaf in the wind and there are nothing but the perks to actually define a personality.
"This sim is unflirty and a loner. That means it takes a whole day to go from 0 relationship points to marriage instead of half a day like other Sims". Seriously, there are NO meaningful traits, period. Exept maybe Vegetarian because it can actually force your Sim to throw up. So that's actually the trait with the most jarring consequences.
Combined with the absolute lack of challenge (Seriously, how long does it take to get rich in Sims 4? An IRL afternoon?) it makes the game boring. I remember reading that according to collected data most Simmers don't want a challenge, they just want to tell their story. At least that was the explanation back in 2014 why virtually all challenge is removed and also why the Sims don't have a personality; you are expected to make up their personality in your head, the Sim is at all points a blank canvas without any real purpose other than to wait for your orders.
This could have presented some kind of interesting challenge. Maybe it's harder to flirt, but the available options are still doable (instead of the 2 sad flirt options that basically never work). Or maybe I gotta address the sad in some interesting way. What I ended up doing was queuing up Sadness Hotline over and over until the mood was gone prematurely and then my sim was completely normal again.
In the end, I was mildly inconvenienced by something I didn't expect, nor want, and ultimately got rid of it. I'm fine with the idea of the game sending me down a different path than what I was planning to do, but the problem as I see it is, getting a big sad mood presented no different path other than inconvenience. The path was be big sad and watch my sim mope around for 2 sim days, or try to get rid of it.