And if I really need extra lots, I can just have an out-of-town shopping district or family who live in another part of the country/world, as it's so easy to travel between them.
Newcrest is my “catch-all” location for commercial lots (no residential there), and I really like using the green screens that come with Get Famous to set up the exterior scenery so it looks like any one of those lots could be in another one of the worlds when I do my screen shots. I can set rooms up too so they’re a bit like a movie stage for scenes without needing to be “on location” in that other world. It’s a tiny bit more work, but not too much more and I’ve never felt the need to have huge worlds.
I like small worlds. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever used all the lots that came with the base game much less all of the lots in Windenburg. I think I could be very happy with the 12 lots in Henford-on-Bagley. Most of them will end up being residential anyway because of how I use Newcrest as described above.
But that’s the way I play anyway. To each their own.
In the movies they sometimes film in one place and make it look like another. So they can pretend thier in France without actually travelling. I imagine that’s to keep costs down.
I like the idea of having a commercial world. 😎
Yep! A little set dressing, a couple of green screens in studios and on sets and the studio itself can fill in for Anytown, USA (or anywhere else in the world). It’s like when they filmed The Mandalorian. It was shot almost entirely at the studio in L.A. and there were blue screens around the set so post production could edit in the “exotic” location later. I saw a video once about how they built a set for one of the Wolverine movies that was supposed to resemble a Japanese villa, but it wasn’t even outside.
@crocobaura sims won't be able to swim or skate on podes when frozen.
I really hate how the community agreed to pretend that a world with 11/12 lots is ok. its not ok guys. It should always be at least the same size as Windenburg or bigger.
That is their choice, but I have choices too as I glad I still have Sims 3 still installed as Sims 4 for me is an lost cause as it future is already written and EA/Maxis nervous in messing with the performance of Sims 4. I do not give kudos to an program that can't do what an program in 2009 can do and is capable.
@goldmoldar to me this problem with performance could be fixed by letting us manage our worlds, and by that I mean adding/removing which worlds we want in our save files and a warning after we add to many big worlds in a single save like they do when we surpass the sim count limit. It could be a simple + button, or something similar to Sims 2 when we were prompted to add the uni, shopping district, travel destination or downtown.
But anyway, i don't have the same choice as u, my laptop can't handle sims 2, imagine sims 3... even with all the fixes made by modders it still lags a bunch.
I feel the same and my systems are more than capable but EA/Maxis is stuck in 2014.
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I have a problem with the fact that EA wants to decide that I can do and what I can't do in my game. I have PS5 and I can not have as much lots as I want because some of players have ancient PCs. That is why I mabe below topic:
Disappointed but not surprised... I would've wanted a bigger world because all the worlds in my save are completely full and my sims' children never have anywhere to move to.
When I run into this problem, that's usually time to put a couple of new headstones in my Honored Dead graveyard lot alongside every other sim who lived a full and noteworthy life. I put some effort into making that lot beautiful so it serves as a suitable memorial.
NPCs who are just taking up a housing lot and aren't interesting enough to justify it get sent to the Watery Grave, which is just a fenced pool in Oasis Springs and a whole lotta headstones. Basically a landfill.
(he/him)
And remember this above all. Our Roman gods are watching. Make sure they are not ashamed!
My NBA site, Pace and Space
I'm fine with the sizes of most of the worlds we've been getting lately. Every world in my game has a specific theme, which may or may not correspond to what the developers originally had in mind, and with ten or more lots, I usually have enough space for both a community and places to go. Henford-on-Bagley will be no different, and since I'm probably not going to have more than six farmer families, twice as many lots sound great to me. The worst an EP can be is a shallow beauty, nice to look at, but lacking gameplay-wise. I'd rather have it the other way around, if I can't have both.
That said, I still think the official excuse for the small sizes of the worlds is silly, but who knows, this is a farming world, so maybe at least the lots themselves and their surrounding neighbourhoods will be bigger this time. Big lots are not something I personally need under normal circumstances, I even find 30x20 too big at times, but with farming, it makes perfect sense. We're going to need somewhere to put all those crops and sheds.
Yeah, I don‘t understand why the worlds are so ridiculously small neither. It‘s not like the entire map gets loaded at once. There is a loading screen everywhere we go. Big-ish Windenburg doesn’t perform any worse than small Del Sol Valley.
While someone shared the video with the reasoning above, they shared it as a twitter post of a 30 minute video.
Here's the exact video, forwarded to the point where they say why:
Watch that from :8:16 to 11:00
(YouTube's embed system is messing with me, and seems to insist on playing that back at a random incorrect point in time, if it does that for you - forward to EXACTLY 8:16 and watch until 11:00)
It's a performance trade off made for some specific reasons:
1. The game is one of the few modern games that will run on some rather old hardware, and they still value keeping those customers.
2. Even if they wanted to say, toss every customer who didn't have a 20xx nVidea CPU and AMD 2xxx or 3xxx CPU... They recall Sims 3 at this point in it's lifecycle where even on the top end machines they had to tell customers to pick and choose which packs to have enabled in any play session because the game had become 'too heavy'. A lot of the 'limits' of Sims 4 were made to allow the game to age well.
My thought. At 5 years in, Sims 3 was no longer a game capable of stability on even that year's newest hardware if one ran the whole game. It was rapidly spinning out of control with excessive load on a machine's hardware. Yet Sims 4 is now 6 or 7 years old, and still rock stable on even less than current PCs.
This is almost certainly due to the lack of an open world, the small size of the worlds, and all the loading screens - which is where you would push things into and out of memory.
Much as I want a pack with 537 new lots... I understand why I'm not getting it, and they made the right call.
I'd rather have a game I can play at all, than a game that checks every dream item on my wishlist but can't even run.
I wonder if there is a limit on how many more packs and worlds the sims4 can handle.
Well there are already a lot of bugs in the game, and I don’t use mods or custom content, and never have in the sims 4. Plants are broken, babies don!t save the right color, restaurants don’t’t work right. I have all the packs and kits, but no outside content.
I hope cows aren't just an object in build and buy. But after watching the trailer I'm convinced at least chickens are objects. If this is the case with both then 2 of the new animals are already not offering much gameplay.
All animals are probably objects, but a guru said they will move about a bit and that their radius is generous. I prefer it this way, I just hope setting up two or more sheds won't conflict too badly if they get too close. I expect that both the cow and llama might feel a bit repetitive in the long run, probably without tons of interactions, but think of it; a farmer does a job. Milking a cow is milking a cow and nothing much else. Hopefully there will be some variety based on the sim's personality and the relation to the animal. I also imagine season might affect this, as it must be much harder milking a cow outdoors in Winter or in rain, than on a sunny Summer morning. Such chores might be perfect for teens. Can't wait, and I have plenty of various settings, trying to make it feel a little different on farm A than on farm B.
I wonder if there is a limit on how many more packs and worlds the sims4 can handle.
The game will focus only on one world at the time, so I don't think there is any limit at all. The limit will be related to how much free space your hard drive has. On another note increased number of sims will probably ad more lag because of their relations and memories (assuming they got some, even if we don't see them).
This wouldn't be such a bother if we had the ability to at least duplicate worlds. If a modder can do it so can the developers.
What mod duplicates worlds? That sounds interesting
My username has been my internet handle for over 20 years since I was 16 and refers to when I had a crush on a very tall boy. I intend absolutely no violence toward beautiful giraffes.
I really hate how the community agreed to pretend that a world with 11/12 lots is ok. its not ok guys. It should always be at least the same size as Windenburg or bigger.
Well, you have to realise that some people aren't pretending. It's the way I really feel, for one, so I'm sure others do too. My gameplay is such that I only need small worlds. I have a couple of residential lots in a world for my active family and their friends/relatives, and then I have the community lots I need. Because each world is connected (so that my world will be populated with Sims even if they aren't homed in my current world) and we no longer have rabbit hole schools/career places, 12 is plenty for me. And if I really need extra lots, I can just have an out-of-town shopping district or family who live in another part of the country/world, as it's so easy to travel between them.
Personally, with each world being connected and broken down into hoods (and for the reasons I explained above), I can't understand why people desperately want large worlds, but I don't say they're wrong or pretending or lying. I understand that our viewpoints are different on this matter and you probably don't understand my viewpoint either, but it doesn't mean that either of us are pretending.
I play rotational so most of my sims live in the same save, along with most of the premades ( some of which I play also ). And I love taking my sims to commercial/community lots. There are so many lots from the gallery I would love to be able to download for my save.
Eh. It sounds like it'll be about the same size as Evergreen Harbor. Mt. Komorebi is only a couple lots bigger. Pretty sure this world size has kind of become a standard at this point. Would be nice to have more lots, yes, but personally I don't mind it.
Was hoping it would be bigger. They probably made it small for the people that play on toasters. People really need to get a new PC or upgrade them if they want to play PC games. I used to play on a very low-end PC, but I recently bought a high-end one to be able to play without lagging.
Sometimes it’s the cost of computers and it takes time to save. I’m saving up for a new computer.
More power = more Sims! 🥳🎉🎉🎉
I hope you get it soon! It really is a huge difference playing on a good PC. My comment was probably a bit too harsh, but I just feel like they could do more if they didn't keep low-end PCs in mind. It just feels like it's holding the game back.
I completely agree with this as why should I suffer because I am prepared to pay out for a performance PC? Do other game companies downgrade the game just because players can't or won't upgrade their PC's? I only ask because I don't understand how game companies work in general around this area?
But at the same time, if they deliberately want to give us smaller worlds in order to prevent performance issues then why not give us more features? Or decrease the price tag?
I really don't understand what lot quantity has got to do with performance, could anyone kindly explain?
Doesn't the game only load one lot at a time? So couldn't we have like 500 lots in a world and it wouldn't make a difference cos you're still only loading one at a time?
@elanorbreton I think it has to do with the capacity of Sims per save. So theoretically if there are 100 lots in total, each lot could be home to 8 Sims, so that would be 800 Sims plus the townies it generates. And having that many Sims would reduce performance.
This wouldn't be such a bother if we had the ability to at least duplicate worlds. If a modder can do it so can the developers.
Lol that’s exactly why they want to keep the worlds small. They don’t want you to have too many lots in a single save as it can cause performance issues.
What doesn’t matter: the number of lots in a single world.
What does matter: the number of lots across all worlds in a save file.
Worlds are merely an illusion in TS4. You can create a brand new 2D map view with 3 neighborhoods from Willow Creek, 3 neighborhoods from Windenburg, and 3 neighborhoods from San Myshuno, and then call this whole thing a single world & everything would work just fine. The game simply does not care whether a neighborhood is categorized as part of Sulani or part of Windenburg, as it is completely arbitrary. What the game does care is the total number of lots across all worlds, as it will affect performance. Your loading time for example will significantly worsen as there are more lots & more Sims in your save file.
I as the player should be able to make that decision for myself. If I want to add more lots into my save file at the expense of performance, by duplicating worlds in a single save for example, the game can prompt me with a message saying "this could lead to the game being less stable blah blah etc." but that would be my choice to make, so if the game slows down that's a result of my decisions, not the developers. And besides, The Sims 4 has an abundance of features where if over used will slow the game down, Sims 4 is no stranger to player created instability with the available set of features, why stop now?
This wouldn't be such a bother if we had the ability to at least duplicate worlds. If a modder can do it so can the developers.
Lol that’s exactly why they want to keep the worlds small. They don’t want you to have too many lots in a single save as it can cause performance issues.
What doesn’t matter: the number of lots in a single world.
What does matter: the number of lots across all worlds in a save file.
Worlds are merely an illusion in TS4. You can create a brand new 2D map view with 3 neighborhoods from Willow Creek, 3 neighborhoods from Windenburg, and 3 neighborhoods from San Myshuno, and then call this whole thing a single world & everything would work just fine. The game simply does not care whether a neighborhood is categorized as part of Sulani or part of Windenburg, as it is completely arbitrary. What the game does care is the total number of lots across all worlds, as it will affect performance. Your loading time for example will significantly worsen as there are more lots & more Sims in your save file.
I as the player should be able to make that decision for myself. If I want to add more lots into my save file at the expense of performance, by duplicating worlds in a single save for example, the game can prompt me with a message saying "this could lead to the game being less stable blah blah etc." but that would be my choice to make
@filipomel This is exactly why a Create-a-World or place lots feature is needed. In the Sims 3 I deliberately played smaller worlds because I had some performance issues and people who had monster PCs could go online and download these massive worlds (or make them themselves) so the experience was much more customizable when it came to both performance and gameplay.
@elanorbreton I think it has to do with the capacity of Sims per save. So theoretically if there are 100 lots in total, each lot could be home to 8 Sims, so that would be 800 Sims plus the townies it generates. And having that many Sims would reduce performance.
Thank you, but I still don't understand it lol. The game is not loading 800 sims at a time, only the sims in the lot you are playing and the ones who appear as walk-bys etc.
I really don't understand what lot quantity has got to do with performance, could anyone kindly explain?
Doesn't the game only load one lot at a time? So couldn't we have like 500 lots in a world and it wouldn't make a difference cos you're still only loading one at a time?
Could be the townies generated as walkbys and Sims living nearby, the world detail you see from your lot? That would be a lot of information to load so the townies and world are the same. So you don’t keep getting different townies etc.
I agree that it wouldn’t be loading everyone at once and the game would accessing files as required. More lots you visit the more info.
The performance issue is moot. Back in the time of Get Together and City Living, they would release one EP a year. These days, they're releasing two EP's a year, but the worlds are half the size. Basically, they're chopping the EP's in half and still charging the same money for it. Performance-wise, it doesn't matter if we get one EP with six neighborhoods and 26 lots, or two with three hoods and 13 lots. The only difference is that they can charge $80 for it instead of $40.
Maybe it is better to limit random townies number then? I think that currently in my savefiles I have too much ugly, weird and useless townies which I delete sometimes. In my opinion thay can optimalize this aspect than the number of lots because currently we have only 20 sims per loading screen and in the most of time, that sims are new (and have 0 progress and personality). I would like to have 2x less but better townies and 20% more lots. Maybe an option to reduce or increase the number of townies per loading screen will be also a nice improvement. Someone who has next gen console or better PC can have 40 townies per loading screen but someone with worse hardware can have 10 townies for example.
Comments
Yep! A little set dressing, a couple of green screens in studios and on sets and the studio itself can fill in for Anytown, USA (or anywhere else in the world). It’s like when they filmed The Mandalorian. It was shot almost entirely at the studio in L.A. and there were blue screens around the set so post production could edit in the “exotic” location later. I saw a video once about how they built a set for one of the Wolverine movies that was supposed to resemble a Japanese villa, but it wasn’t even outside.
Movie magic!
I feel the same and my systems are more than capable but EA/Maxis is stuck in 2014.
https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/990819/bigger-worlds-and-better-optimalisation-my-concept#latest
When I run into this problem, that's usually time to put a couple of new headstones in my Honored Dead graveyard lot alongside every other sim who lived a full and noteworthy life. I put some effort into making that lot beautiful so it serves as a suitable memorial.
NPCs who are just taking up a housing lot and aren't interesting enough to justify it get sent to the Watery Grave, which is just a fenced pool in Oasis Springs and a whole lotta headstones. Basically a landfill.
And remember this above all. Our Roman gods are watching. Make sure they are not ashamed!
My NBA site, Pace and Space
That said, I still think the official excuse for the small sizes of the worlds is silly, but who knows, this is a farming world, so maybe at least the lots themselves and their surrounding neighbourhoods will be bigger this time. Big lots are not something I personally need under normal circumstances, I even find 30x20 too big at times, but with farming, it makes perfect sense. We're going to need somewhere to put all those crops and sheds.
Something wicked this way comes!
I don't use MCCC.
Well there are already a lot of bugs in the game, and I don’t use mods or custom content, and never have in the sims 4. Plants are broken, babies don!t save the right color, restaurants don’t’t work right. I have all the packs and kits, but no outside content.
All animals are probably objects, but a guru said they will move about a bit and that their radius is generous. I prefer it this way, I just hope setting up two or more sheds won't conflict too badly if they get too close. I expect that both the cow and llama might feel a bit repetitive in the long run, probably without tons of interactions, but think of it; a farmer does a job. Milking a cow is milking a cow and nothing much else. Hopefully there will be some variety based on the sim's personality and the relation to the animal. I also imagine season might affect this, as it must be much harder milking a cow outdoors in Winter or in rain, than on a sunny Summer morning. Such chores might be perfect for teens. Can't wait, and I have plenty of various settings, trying to make it feel a little different on farm A than on farm B.
The game will focus only on one world at the time, so I don't think there is any limit at all. The limit will be related to how much free space your hard drive has. On another note increased number of sims will probably ad more lag because of their relations and memories (assuming they got some, even if we don't see them).
What mod duplicates worlds? That sounds interesting
I play rotational so most of my sims live in the same save, along with most of the premades ( some of which I play also ). And I love taking my sims to commercial/community lots. There are so many lots from the gallery I would love to be able to download for my save.
I bet the world map is gonna leak so the Game Changers can cover it in their videos and create hype.
they/he
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I completely agree with this as why should I suffer because I am prepared to pay out for a performance PC? Do other game companies downgrade the game just because players can't or won't upgrade their PC's? I only ask because I don't understand how game companies work in general around this area?
Doesn't the game only load one lot at a time? So couldn't we have like 500 lots in a world and it wouldn't make a difference cos you're still only loading one at a time?
I as the player should be able to make that decision for myself. If I want to add more lots into my save file at the expense of performance, by duplicating worlds in a single save for example, the game can prompt me with a message saying "this could lead to the game being less stable blah blah etc." but that would be my choice to make, so if the game slows down that's a result of my decisions, not the developers. And besides, The Sims 4 has an abundance of features where if over used will slow the game down, Sims 4 is no stranger to player created instability with the available set of features, why stop now?
@filipomel This is exactly why a Create-a-World or place lots feature is needed. In the Sims 3 I deliberately played smaller worlds because I had some performance issues and people who had monster PCs could go online and download these massive worlds (or make them themselves) so the experience was much more customizable when it came to both performance and gameplay.
Could be the townies generated as walkbys and Sims living nearby, the world detail you see from your lot? That would be a lot of information to load so the townies and world are the same. So you don’t keep getting different townies etc.
I agree that it wouldn’t be loading everyone at once and the game would accessing files as required. More lots you visit the more info.