Forum Announcement, Click Here to Read More From EA_Cade.
Sexual orientation issues
Celticlass
Posts: 38 Member
I have to constantly change NPCs and townies because I don’t get any choice on sexual orientation in my game. I recently discovered (during a bachelor story) that my sim who I made completely heterosexual for the story suddenly became a lesbian. What?? And I’m not the only one. It also happened to the men in the bachelorette the previous “season”. There really is a simple solution if the programming is done correctly that would fix both problems for everyone. No need to download mods. Just add a sexual orientation slider with homosexual on one side, heterosexual on the other side, and bi in the middle. Let us - the consumer purchasing your products- decide what we want from 100% in either direction and everything in between. Let us decide how we want to play our game. If we’re intelligent enough to buy the Sims, we’re definitely intelligent enough to decide how we want sexuality to play out in said game. This is especially helpful for historical, futuristic, and fantasy players who make up a large portion of the customer base. Of course, we would like to reserve the right to create our characters we play with the sexuality we choose as long as it actually works. Which it currently does not! It’s frustrating as a player.
4
Comments
I am all for choices and options. I just want the option for a sim to be hetero or celibate if that is what I choose for them. I am very slowly and carefully choosing which packs to buy for my PS5. I had everything for the PC and I am realizing that sometimes I can stop the game from doing something that I do not like simply by not purchasing the pack that added it.
Some changes are updates to the Basegame, but what about sexuality is added by a pack?
Were teenage crushes added with Highschool Years?
Lifestyles came with Snowy Escape and many relationship changes came with Growing Together. Sometimes these "improvements" affect sexuality. This wiki about the Nectar Making Duo specifies that Growing Together must be installed for the duo to have the relationship problems intended for them.
https://simscommunity.info/2023/07/25/sims-4-horse-ranch-premades/#the-nectar-making-duo
Click on a mirror and select change sim
But imo it's more important to have a choice in things we don't want to do/see/experience.
It's all about consens and options and giving us a choice.
Not all persons (for example ARO/ACE or people with a difficult past) have fun to experience/watch romantic interactions ingame.
And I also can understand people who don't want to experience same gender romances ingame.
I feel they are doing the queer community a disservice here by forcing this on all players.
No one will feel more open and friendly and understanding towards us if being pushed like this.
This also counts, for example, for death (we have an option there but not for all deaths, animal deaths are the worst for me), burglary, and now, with the new pack: eviction. Or when they turn the electricity off.
If you experience such things in real life, they are not that funny anymore ingame.
I wish there were a bit more sensibilty from EA in these matters too.
And even if there are cheats/mods and hidden options to avoid this.
Please put them there where also unexperienced players can easily find them!
Or make it so that alle these things have to be toggled ON instead of OFF!
Instead of implementing the third(!) tutorial 😖
🎁 Best of Buydebug ☃️ Short trips to the Oggiverse - Short Clips 🎬 My Builds: Houses 🏘 Rooms 🛋 SciFi 👾 creatively edited Screenshots 🎨
I know how to change it, but mine are always grayed out because “you can’t edit pre-existing sims”
I am sorry, I would not suggest something to a simmer if I have not used it and know it is working. do you play with mods, perhaps one of them is causing the grayed out issue for you. I have specially gone in game to test this on a well known pre existing family and will post the pics for you in a spoiler, it does work, you have to select change sim not plan outfits in a mirror.
Pancakes family. Changing Bob's sexual preferences and even sex itself without using cheats. I play a mod free vanilla game.
Just to show I did not use a cheat, you can not change the other things like family relations and traits
But the rest you can change as you can see below
You can even change his sex and masculinity
http://www.getfreeebooks.com/star-trek-original-series-fan-fiction-trilogy/
Same. I think you hit the nail on the head and this is often what people are doing without realizing it. I think people also don't realize, or have forgotten, that our sims were always bi "under the hood," long before we had these preference options. Waaaaaaay back in the beginning of TS4, before we ever got these options, I had a happily married-to-a-man female sim who was having a long, friendly chat about books in the park with a neighbor, and when the other women complimented her (not an appearance compliment, just a Heartfelt compliment), my sim suddenly had a small romance bar with her (even though there were no interactions that I would have considered flirty). Her husband yelled at her for flirting, and she was mortified.
Even though I intended for that sim to be one of my heterosexual sims, and generally still consider her so... and she has a wonderful relationship with her husband aside from that incident... I didn't lose my 🐸🐸🐸🐸 over it. For me, it's actually one of the more endearing (and rare, until recently) moments when your sims can surprise you. So I decided to roll with it, and my head canon is that my sim had never realized before that she was just the tiniest bit bi-curious, and was flustered by it, but that after the momentary drama, she and her husband were both fine with it because they are still 100% monogamous and it's just part of the tapestry of who she is.
That being said, if the settings are impacting your plans for endgame pairings, or making sims cheat when you don't want them to, or having romance interactions at all when you want them to be aromantic/asexual, then I can see where that would be more of an issue. I just think people do often focus on the first and third options and forget to turn the "exploring romantically" section to No. Since that's the intended fix, as the developers have repeatedly said, if it's not working then it may be a bug, rather than people being intentionally "left out."
As far as the game mechanics are concerned, I don't think it happens because of some "agenda" <eye roll> but rather because the TS4 struggles with tuning for EVERYTHING. But that's nothing new. And here, "everything" includes flirting or even platonic friendly interactions. Particularly with multi-party conversations. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if some of these incidents are because the sim is flirting with their partner and has a romance bar, and then some third sim comes up and jumps into the conversation, and now all of a sudden your sims are flirty with everyone in the conversation... which leads us back to tuning, and now suddenly that's enough to make your sim a little bi, if you haven't locked down all of the preference settings.
I recently had 2 very happy marriages break up when both wives began heavily flirting with their female friends, they were not exploring or even into same sex so it felt bugged or that something wasn't working. Those households turned on their heads overnight.
I may be misunderstanding the attraction system, but the female sim I'm currently playing is into men. Except all her great or amazing compatability matches are with women. She's openly flirting with women. It's immersion breaking.
@Lenny_Ogg I agree, to me it feels forced.
@Celticlass @Katofhyrule12 @GalacticGal If any of you are experiencing this without mods, and with the "exploring" flag turned off, would you consider making a bug report on answers.ea.com ? There doesn't seem to be one as of yet.
It's a pleasure
Yeah I think it might have been added when we got the he/she options
I am so relieved that you were not trying this actual method, I went into a little panic and thought I gave bad advice that is why I retested it LOL. I usually only advice if I am certain and check first, but I was tired and on my mobile phone when I answered you the first time
I have never considered this to be a bug. I just assume that the gamemakers have decided to change the game. I was surprised when the default they/them setting was listed as a "bug". I just assumed that the game had been "updated". I will never report these updates as bugs. None of this is any different than the textbooks and rules that are used at my college. Calling an update a bug or a typo doesn't sound like a safe or "educated" thing for me to do, here or at my college.
I mean, since the devs did add options that let your own playable sims have strict romantic interactions with only one or more than one gender, and nobody here has really clarified if they themselves even made use of said features, I find it really weird to call these bugs when it mostly seems to me they just forgot to use game features that could have prevented their issues in the first place
I don't think you're understanding. We're saying that if she didn't remember to use the features as intended, then it's not a bug and she should use those features to get the desired outcome. But if she is using the features as intended, and it's still not working... which is what she claims... then that would be a bug.
What it is NOT is some sort of agenda to force all sims to be gay, which is what certain people seem to implying.
Interesting note, every sim had gender curious marked. I don't usually dl sims from the gallery, so I don't know about them. I also don't play pre-mades.
Only one person specified they had romantic exploration turned off for their sim and it wasn't the op of this post so that's why I was confused. Also yeah to the last bit, I can kinda see that now yikes
Excellent comment. Exactly how I feel about the sexual orientation too. It should be an option. I remember watching the livestream when it was introduced, and the Simguru showing it said there was no toggle on/off because you can't do that in real life. I appreciate that sentiment but for me this is a game not real life, and I want to play any way I want with no rules or judgement as the game advertises. It breaks the immersion for me if I have to change my sims so I can play the story I want in my way.