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How Random is Sims 4 Really?
PenguinFoop
Posts: 1,582 Member
So let me start with a real life example.
I live up a one-lane gravel dead-end road in rural America. Yesterday, I was on my way home from a doctor's appointment when I got to a sharp turn just before my house. I saw the turn was blocked by a mobile home being moved out of our area (random event #1). I pulled into our old driveway from before we built the new house and waited.
After half an hour or so, the mobile home was finally past me so I drove on toward the new driveway when I noticed that our mailbox was flattened. They had smashed it (random event #2).
I turned around and drove out to where they were still slowly moving along, stopped my car in the middle of the road and walked to the truck that was moving the mobile home.
When the driver saw me, he stopped and waited for me to approach. When I was close enough, I simply asked him when they were going to replace our mailbox. He didn't know anything about it because the ground crew (who had been guiding him down the narrow tree-lined road hadn't told him what had happened). I knew they knew about it because the one there at the driver's door described our mailbox and confirmed that it was smashed.
So the driver turned toward the inside of the cab, reached down and then turned back to me and stuck his hand out the window.
"Here," he said, "this should cover the mailbox. Sorry for the damage." He handed me a $100.00 bill! That was unexpected but not really random since they were in the wrong and caused damage.
So this got me to thinking this morning, life is one long series of random events and as I started my game up, I thought to myself how random is TS4 really?
I've noticed in the past that I mainly get the free money events when I'm low on cash and I just recently read that one player always has alien abductions happen at around 10:45 pm when they happen and there is supposed to be a 25% chance of a PFA (pregnancy from abduction) for male sims, though this seems to be broken.
I am a lover of chaos and unpredictability, so now I can't get over this feeling that the game may be more scripted and less random than I had originally thought.
I live up a one-lane gravel dead-end road in rural America. Yesterday, I was on my way home from a doctor's appointment when I got to a sharp turn just before my house. I saw the turn was blocked by a mobile home being moved out of our area (random event #1). I pulled into our old driveway from before we built the new house and waited.
After half an hour or so, the mobile home was finally past me so I drove on toward the new driveway when I noticed that our mailbox was flattened. They had smashed it (random event #2).
I turned around and drove out to where they were still slowly moving along, stopped my car in the middle of the road and walked to the truck that was moving the mobile home.
When the driver saw me, he stopped and waited for me to approach. When I was close enough, I simply asked him when they were going to replace our mailbox. He didn't know anything about it because the ground crew (who had been guiding him down the narrow tree-lined road hadn't told him what had happened). I knew they knew about it because the one there at the driver's door described our mailbox and confirmed that it was smashed.
So the driver turned toward the inside of the cab, reached down and then turned back to me and stuck his hand out the window.
"Here," he said, "this should cover the mailbox. Sorry for the damage." He handed me a $100.00 bill! That was unexpected but not really random since they were in the wrong and caused damage.
So this got me to thinking this morning, life is one long series of random events and as I started my game up, I thought to myself how random is TS4 really?
I've noticed in the past that I mainly get the free money events when I'm low on cash and I just recently read that one player always has alien abductions happen at around 10:45 pm when they happen and there is supposed to be a 25% chance of a PFA (pregnancy from abduction) for male sims, though this seems to be broken.
I am a lover of chaos and unpredictability, so now I can't get over this feeling that the game may be more scripted and less random than I had originally thought.
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All the events I can think of are indeed heavily scripted and specific. There's not really much randomness at all.
I'm no expert but that's from what I've observed, both from the gameplay itself and from peeking at the code when modding.
I know that people like stability and continuity but that gets boring for me. Of course those who create story content would probably disagree but if you think of the movies that have been released over the last few decades, when was the last time you said "I did not see that coming!"
Everything anymore is too scripted and benign. I do however enjoy the random neighborhood events like reading that Judith Ward randomly burned to death while making a sandwich. I laughed loudly at the one.
Imagine walking down the street I. The middle of the day and suddenly an alien lands in front of as if just returning from the current abduction system. Or seeing two people get into an argument that turns to a fight! A random woman going into labor, like in sims 3! Stuff, random stuff happening.
And I think this is what players of the older Sims games try to refer to when they say they enjoyed the gameplay better of those games. No two Sims were alike in response and reactions, (at least it felt that way) so the gameplay wasn't repetitive and predictable. It would be nice if the devs went back to the older personality designs (but better) for Project Rene. I never once saw players say they were bored with the older games and needed a break, but I see it said a lot about Sims 4.
I also feel that the unpredictability and surprises like burglars breaking in, Sims taking revenge on a bad breakup by knocking over trash cans, stealing your newspaper, leaving flaming bags of poo on the doorstep, or events like alien abductions resulting in unnatural births, were also a part of what made those games so exciting and fun. They were poking fun at life with good humor. I feel like there could have been some great opportunities in Sims 4 to have some of these things too.
For example, the influencer and social media gameplay should have had a chance for your Sim to choose extra posts they
could make online, like "try to start a new joke trend", "make a risque comment", "post your honest opinion"... and there's a hidden chance that your following will get upset at you because you inadvertently said the wrong thing and offended them. Now you've lost followers so you have to "post an apology", "repair your reputation", or stand" your ground, and there could be different outcomes of your choice, depending on your Sim's traits or skill levels. A high charisma would be more likely to recover, but a Paranoid Sim might still have a meltdown and cry or tremble under their bedcovers, lol.
It's all about seeing the humor of life and being able to laugh at the good, the bad, and the unexpected in a simulation game. Real life is unpredictable, as you said, and sometimes the darndest things go wrong. It would be nice to see this reflected in the gameplay.
It was originally meant to be an online multi-player game. Why would you need to code in random events if every sim in the world was being controlled by a RL human? There would be tons of random stuff happening because you can't predict the behavior or actions of a RL person.
Then when they decided to scrap that, they had to hurry up and create some type of single player game ...... so they created scripted "random" events that have certain triggers for all sims.
It's definitely not random. And when they do try to do random, it's turned up to 11! It's either full-blow and annoying or it gets nerfed and never happens again.
But I agree, we need more randomness. My gameplay thrives on the unexpected. I'm one of those simmers who doesn't restart when something happens, I roll with it. With the exception of my sim dying fresh out of CAS, which is also highly unlikely.
There doesn't seem to ever be a happy medium. It's all or nothing. Years ago, I had a sim that was abducted 6 times in his lifetime (YA to A because I abandoned that save before he became an elder). Apart from the sim I mentioned above, only one other save has seen any abductions. That was my alien legacy so it sort of made sense though. Ironically, my founder, who is an alien, was abducted.
TS4's programming on the other hand ist heavily based on tests. For a certain event to happen, specific predesigned conditions must be met. Randomness can be best achieved by creativity in assigning those conditions. There is coding for randomness (called weight), but that has been kind of broken since release and not used as much as probalbilities were in TS2. The game is heavily leaning towards picking the outcome with the least tests and for a lot of events, the same option is mostly picked despite there being other ones available.
Just take a look at the small telescope and how they implemented the getting hit by a meteorite. That could have been fun but, no, they give you so much warning that it takes away all the surprise.
There ought to be a random toggle so that those of us who want a bit of risk and surprise can have it.
People wanted to play the game differently, some people wanted something random to happen to their household and some people wanted everything to happen a certain way and the game could not offer many options for those players to customize it.
It seemed to be difficult to achieve a happy medium so a lot of events are triggered by the player these days. You increase your chances of getting abducted by aliens by being in the scientist career and talking to aliens for example.
I feel like sometimes its tad stale n boring that nothing actually random happens
like how vampire attacks and aliens etc are super rare and we don't even have burglars and all the deaths throw you warnings first so I really have to scheme for my sims demise
but also the game can't ever be truly random tbh and the so called random events will start to feel repetitive themselves
also i feel that it sometimes gets in the way of what i actually wanted to play so there should be toggles for when you don't want them
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This is definitely part of the issue. Take what happened to vampire break-ins. When I got the pack back then it was a feature I really enjoyed. It was an event I couldn't control and my Sim would be completely exhausted in the morning and I had to figure out how to deal with them the next day. There were so many complaints about this feature that it was severly nerfed to a point, that vampires do show up at night, but just stand in front of the house. Staring, waiting, possibly contemplating the futility of their existence. And then they shuffle off, beaten by the front door. But I guess I do understand the complaints to some degree. If your main goal is to tell your story or you like to play The Sims like a cozy game, randomness can mess a lot of things up. On the other hand, those of us who want to play a life simulation are missing this key ingredient. Life is both terrible and wonderful because it is random. Not from the day you were born, but from the moment you were conceived, really. Our first random life event is the genetic lottery - some win, some lose and some just break even. Living life means dealing with randomness every single day. So if you remove that element, you're left with a virtual doll house. TS4 has very few events that feel truly random and the predictability of it certainly makes the game less enjoyable to me.
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One thing about the sims is everyone likes to play differently. And I think the Devs should cater to that as much as possible. Please give me a toggle for the base game to turn off death by laughter.
And like someone else mentioned…… I never got bored with Sims 2. Sims 3 I stopped playing early because it had too many rabbit holes for me. Even restaurants were rabbit holes in the beginning of sims 3, and you couldn’t enter work places, they were just shells. And, sims 3 tended to crash a lot on me. Sims 4 doesn’t!
They annoy people because they happen too often. Even if they are not completely random, if they just decrease the frequency then they wouldn't be quite so annoying. In all my years of playing sims I've had exactly one alien abduction. It was a female sim who wasn't even in the science career, but she did investigate the Strangerville plant mystery at some point, so maybe that was the trigger for this event. That was definitely unexpected, and I wouldn't want an alien abduction to happen in each play session or with every sim. Like the phone calls sims get nowadays about getting married or squirrels in the power lines, those happen too often. I mean, what are the chances of squirrels in Oasis Springs or even Strangerville? Also, how many long lost relatives are there for a fresh out of CAS sim without a family? Sure, vampires could visit more often if you live in Forgotten Hollow or next door to a vampire or your sim is friends with one, but there shouldn't be a vampire waiting outside your door every night. A toggle wouldn't work, because the frequency of these events is set too high in the first place, to make them stand out probably on release, and it would be a real chaos if all events were enabled at once.
Tuning something to have a decent frequency is much harder than making it happen all the time or not at all. It needs much more time and effort.
I'm a second-class simmer. I play on console and we are not deemed worthy of mods. Also, it shouldn't take a mod to have random events happen in a life simulation. We have vampires, werewolves and guys that can get pregnant for crying out loud, but no randomness?
I would LOVE a "chaos mode" toggle for more dynamic gameplay.
Yes those are sweet little, I mean little, random moments with the grandparents, and relationship-altering events like having a pink bar that shouldn't be there would be bad. But what I mean is well, less unicorns and rainbows and more reality. Life is messy complicated, sims should be too.
A joke I've made before is:
Sim 1: Hi, how are you?
Sim 2: I'm good.
Sim 1: You single?
Sim 2: No, I'm married to Sim 3.
Sim 1: Wanna have a baby?
Sim 2: Yes! Let's go!
In the course of a few Sim hours, you've convinced some rando to have an extramarital affair and baby. It's predictable and rather boring.
It shouldn't be that easy to have an affair.
Of course one random event that happened back when Get to Work first came out was when my male sim (a scientist that worked with his father) was at home with his twin boys and a little girl knocked on the door. I checked her name and they had the same last name. That was odd but oh well.
I later went into the simology of one of the boys and found out that that little girl was his dad's half-sister! My main sim's dad had cheated on his family-oriented wife!
The disturbing thing is that the whole family had just accepted it with no problems; unicorns and rainbows. I mean, I was more upset about this than the family-oriented wife!
Oh! I forgot my point! Lol
Now it seems that any sim you meet has to check in and get your permission before they do anything! Like your sim has become their overlord. No random surprises. Boring.
Missing the randomness, in both Sims3 & 4, I confess to experimenting with a mod that seemed to promise a certain amount of the randomness of life. Well, it was too much. It wrecked my storyline, killed two of my top characters, and the kidnapped one I had to use cheats to get her back and then she couldn't get into the lot.
There has got to be a happy medium here. Somewhere between dull, boring, nothing ever happens in my life, to outright everybody's got to die and now! I now this game and the one prior are geared for the younger players but come on. Most of these kids have seen and done more than I have in my 68 years of life! Perhaps, the older players can be appeased with an EP, let's say, that is rated M Adults only. I'm not suggesting anything of a woohoo nature, if you get my drift, just some of the random happenings. Somebody backs their car into you Sims' new fence knocking half of it down, that sort of thing. Frankly, if and when your Sims even happens upon good ole Mrs. Crumplebottom while out on a date, she's at least likely to give the offending Sim a good whacking with her purse.
We just need a little more whackiness. unpredictable stuff to keep the player on their toes, you know?
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One thing that happened in this save but before infants, I had my male sim get abducted, when it was confirmed he was pregnant, I had hom and his wife try for a baby. That worked out to get timing ( it was a spontaneous decision I made without thought). However, what I did not expect was for his wife to have triplets half a day or so after he gave birth! Essentially quadruplets! That was random as they did not use fertility treatments or anything. So yes, there is still some randomness but just not enough out of the blue, as you said, neighbor backing into your fence type.of stuff.
Sims 4 would really benefit from a Long Term relationship bar.
@83bienchen Chaos mode!
(Is there a chaos mode?? like in a mod somewhere)
(I would definitely play chaos mode)