EA wants to know why I stopped playing the Sims 4? Sure!

Brace yourselves, this is gonna be a long one. My main three issues with the Sims 4 are the behaviours of the Sims themselves, packs being asynchronous from one another, and the lack of freedom when it comes to deciding how you want your sim to live their lives (LTWs/parties). 

Sims in the Sims 4 act like lobotomites (a la Fallout: New Vegas, Old World Blues). They are constantly either bouncing off the walls with happiness like a six year old on Christmas morning or complaining, have no mind of their own, and cannot figure out how to do anything on their own. Yes, in 2 and 3 respectively you do have to take care of your Sims. That’s one of the biggest gameplay aspects of the franchise. But at least in those games, Sims have the common sense to use the toilet when they need to, make food when they’re hungry, and sleep when they need to. In Sims 4 unfortunately, this is not the case. 

As an example, in one of many save files I attempted to play through, I had made myself and my boyfriend. We then had a son. This poor child was constantly neglected due to my simself being unable to take care of herself and her child in a timely manner. I had my sim wake up at 7am to take care of her needs before her child woke up. This alone took her 4 hours to complete, with me constantly having to cancel actions of her trying to use the computer, pick up her sleeping son out of his crib (despite the fact that she herself was starving and needed to use the bathroom), or just put on music and dance her little heart out. At 11am, I finally got her together. Her son was a completely different beast entirely. All I wanted her to do was change him, bathe him, and get him fed and in his playmat. This took 5 hours of in game time. Why? Many reasons.

For one, she kept putting him on the floor. He was hungry, stinking, and screaming on his bedroom floor. I would have her pick him up to change him. She picked him up, cancelled the action, and put him down again. This went on for a couple cycles before I finally got his diaper changed. Then the bath went on without a hitch, but feeding him was a nightmare. His hunger bar was in the red and he refused to eat anything my sim put in front of him. He hated everything and refused to eat it. Listen, I know babies and toddlers in real life can be picky. But I feel that any child who is on the verge of starving to death would suck it up and eat something! Not helping the situation was my adult sim kept leaving him in the highchair to dance, play on the computer, etc. So by 4pm, my boyfriend’s simself had gotten home from work, and my sim and her son were finally ready to start their day. Sigh. 

For my own curiosity, I booted up both the Sims 3 and 2 respectively to test out this exact scenario. I made a woman and a toddler son and played until the following morning. Both Sims 3 and Sims 2 were way more simple. My sim in the Sims 3 even had time to watch some TV well before noon. Sims team, if you want to make a good simulation, I shouldn’t have to micromanage my adult sims’ every move to ensure they’re doing what they’re meant to do. This is absolutely ridiculous. 

Another issue I have with the Sims 4’s sims is how traits do nothing to make your sims individuals. In the Sims 3 and 2, a lazy sim and an active sim will not get along. A sim with the hot-headed trait will fight with a friendly sim. The latter happened with a married couple I had made in the Sims 3. The fighting got so bad (autonomously I’d like to add) that my sims ended up getting a divorce. Can it be annoying for people who want no conflict in their sims game? Sure. But if you want happier sims, make them more compatible with one another. 

I was faced with this issue head on in the Sims 4: For Rent. I attempted to make an evil sim who was an absolute slumlord. She was anything but. No matter what, if I sent my sim out into the world to make new enemies to roleplay as an evil character, it wouldn’t matter. She’d giddily bounce up to new sims and be as kind as ever. Why? Let the sims be evil! I want my evil sim to go up to sims and pick fights. I want them to have consequences for that behaviour. In the Sims 3 if you had a bad reputation around town, you felt that conflict. Sims would hate your sims off the rip. Your sim would autonomously be mean, no matter who they were talking to. My Sims 4 sim owned an apartment building that was disgusting and had a rat problem. But she’d still get “wants” to fix things and make them better. Why? You’re evil and mean!! Let them suffer while you collect the rent! If I wanted you to be constantly nice and an amazing landlord, I’d have made you that way. Removing all ability to interact with others in a variety of different ways and face consequences for those actions (sims hating your sim, having a hard time making friends, etc.) removes all sense of actual challenge from your game. 

Let’s move on to my second main gripe, the packs have no synergy with one another. This has been brought up many times by many different Simmers (FakeGamerGirl comes to mind) so I won’t harp too long about it, but seriously. You guys have 20 different events going on at any time in the game. Festivals in various worlds, spirit week or whatever at the university, prom every week for some strange reason, PLUS your mandatory events that do not go away. The one that was happening last time I played was the one with Emit Relevart from TS3 Into the Future. It’s overwhelming, lags the game beyond belief, and I haven't even gotten into the ridiculous “holidays’ from Seasons. Love Day, Leisure Day, Spooky Day/Harvestfest and Snowflake Day from TS3 were enough guys. I shouldn’t have to turn off things and configure my game when I start a new save. It’s annoying. Please make a way in the options to configure these things to players’ likings, or cut the crap out of the game. 

Lastly, I want to talk about events and lifetime wishes. In the Sims 4, if I want to have a “good” party, I have to do a specific interaction x amount of times, do A, B, and C specific interactions, etc. Same thing with lifetime wishes. What about reading to my kid x amount of times makes my sim a good parent? Why do I have to complete everything EA’s way instead of having the freedom to do something how I want? The Sims team, you’re making everything too arbitrary and specific. Just go back to Sims 3/2 lifetime wishes. They have a specific goal in mind, yes, but how my sim completes that goal is up to them and it is on their time. My Sims in TS3 just want to max out skills, get to the top of their career, etc. Yes there are skill requirements (and ugh, family friends in TS2), but other than that, how my sim goes about it is up to me. In the Sims 3, if I want my sim to complete Surrounded by Family, I just have to raise 5 kids. I don’t have to complete arbitrary nonsense like talking to the children x amount of times, or do whatever interaction x amount of times, I just need to raise the kids. If my Family sim in TS2 wants to graduate three kids from college, that’s the end of it. Get them to have three kids and put them all through college. No arbitrary hoops to jump through, no specific requirements other than raising the kids and sending them off to college, getting them through college, and that’s it. And there’s no nostalgia blinders on here. I actively play these games all the time. 

So in a final conclusion, beyond the technical issues that I know you all get hounded about everyday, the game is fundamentally broken. Its core mechanics don’t work properly, the Sims are annoying at best and rage-quit inducing at worst (which the Sims 4 has the distinction of being the only Sims game I have actually rage quit, by the way; like either I turn this game off now or I’m throwing my gaming laptop across the room), and there’s too many features that it’s become unsustainable to fix all of their issues. I think you all need to take a step back from the Sims 4, evaluate the mess you’ve created of it, and make some serious changes to how the game functions. And if that isn’t possible within the framework you’ve created, maybe you should reconsider not making a Sims 5. Or at the very least, give the Sims 3 the 64gb patch it deserves for Windows. There’s no reason why I can play other games as old as the mid-2000s with no issues on my gaming laptop, but the Sims 3 I have to constantly clear caches, edit .sgr files, and pray to Will Wright himself that the game won’t take 20 minutes to load into a single save file or crash once I finally start playing. Thank you.