Perhaps a topic of interest for 411 would be that of design decisions made for performance reasons. I saw a bug report made a while back on certain plants that look beautiful on an outside wall and become dark and smudgy when placed on an inside wall. QA stated this was for performance reasons, which just made me shake my head.
I'm concerned at how gameplay seems adversely effected now by reasoning of performance. Plants aren't maturing in the wild, dig rocks and frog logs aren't respawning in my vanilla, rotational style save. Try visiting Sylvan Glades for example. Nothing produces harvestables during a sim's visit like used to be the case. My assumption is this is caused by now having to be on a lot at 5:00 a.m. for plants to function properly. In short, that 5:00 a.m. limitation is creating frustrating gameplay issues. There are both careers and aspirations adversely effected by that limitation.
Another example of change I think must have been done for performance reasons is the fairly recent change to capping texture quality from 2048x2048 to 1024x1024, even if running the game in Ultra settings. The result is some blurry textures even on some official game content. Why was this imposed on a player using ultra settings? I wasn't encountering any issues that I am aware of before the change was made.
I understand performance is an important area of concern to stay on top of for a large, complex game but decisions are being made that are taking away from the gameplay experience for players with systems capable of running ultra settings. When my collector can't collect, my scientist can't garden at the lab, a hidden lot won't produce plants and my conservationist has to take pictures of dirt piles in lieu of plants or trees, I become frustrated. It has begun to feel that basic gameplay I have been used to, and feel should work the way it used to, is now being taken away. Hence, I would be interested in knowing how performance changes made come about, i.e. internal testing, player feedback of what is happening in games...What?
EA Staff (Retired)