I'm sorry, but if you're going to argue that The Sims 1 was a mindless cozy game I'm going to stop listening. The Sims 1 was incredibly difficult to accomplish anything in.
Regardless, the following is a simple statement of fact: The game has cheats to make it easier ,and the game has cheats to skip the gameplay. The gameplay should not be designed to be short, simple, easy, basic nothingness for the sake of those who want to skip it- those people can use cheats. Please do not argue for the dumbing down of the game because you don't want to shift-click on something and make it happen.
You are welcome to disagree with the feedback but I really don't think it's fair to actively argue the game should be targeting players who want to skip through everything and then complain they don't like the content they didn't play, versus targeting players who actually want to play the game and experience its content properly.
Again, if YOU want to skip through things, YOU can cheat to do so. The rest of us need the game to have a baseline level of complexity. You can always cheat to avoid that complexity- we can't cheat to make it appear out of thin air!
Sims 1 was mindless gaming for me as a 20-something year old. It was only difficult if you didn't know how to utilize the mechanics. I learned that the newbie family could be manipulated into an easy mode for if you kept it in the tutorial overnight and left it running. Learned that from a large game guide book that I purchased at around the same time as getting the game. I also had families with 3+ adults where one stayed home to clean and make friends and the others only really worried about making money. Keeping up with the needs was simple if you learned to rotate sims in the same household. Personally, I only had the base game and livin large, so I guess I never had it too challenging by adding more to it. I also played the first iteration until 2010 it refused to download on the newest Windows system of that time. So, I guess it was easy if I had played it for so long.
EA is targeting a new audience of cozy gamers, because that is what genre simulation games usually are classified. Most cozy games are very laid back and easy. They are that way so you can pick it up and play without trying to figure out where you are in a quest.
I think they tried to make some things difficult and were met with backlash. The difficult gameplay that comes to mind is the strangerville pack, which is 100% story driven or the game challenges with different difficulty like unlucky chef which have the checklists. Even the limited time events things they have tried that many voiced dislike are examples. Btw, I took out the challenge of Strangerville by finding a game save that had the story already completed. There was also a mod that did that at one time.
