I think the base game is not good to begin with. Considering the base game updates done since and it’s a mess. For example the entire emotional system is tragically bad. It’s shallow and the point count for mood changes is atrocious. Emotional deaths are absurd, serial killing sims in hijinx festivals. Actually everything is over repetitive. Maybe when you do so little that is the consequence. When the base game came out one of the selling points was the ability for a sim to multitask. I would not call that a selling point and most people wouldn’t today. Not when it’s so badly implemented every assigned action is a battle with the sim. Sims constantly overwrite assigned task, stop mid-project, walk away from conversation or enter into them uninvited, they ignore assigned queues to do meaningless, often pointless things. The needs drop so quickly autonomy is a monkey circus. It takes almost as much time for a sim’s hygiene to be in yellow (a color the design team deemed worthy of dropping assigned tasks for) as taking a shower. Then add the badly coded predisposition to do random tasks and for sims to be obsessed with certain objects. Add the absolutely terrible interaction wheal which is delayed, chaotic and senseless. Add the lack of proper outfit changes. Did you know that sims 3 had sims playing basketball outside in winter dit it in their winter outfit. In sims 4 the sim decides to cancel what ever you told them to do switch to work out outfit to play basketball in winter and promptly start freezing. Design of base core components is just a chefs kiss. And by that I mean junk. Sims 4 has 1/3 the animations of sims 2 and those glitch. How sad is that? If someone will say that sims 4 has a semi-open world you are trippin. Sims 3 had an open world. Sims 4 has a sims load lot placed in a barely interactive to not interactive backdrop pretending to be a world. It’s just a big lot you can’t build in or play with. And let’s talk about lack of cause and effect. The randomness and lack of code is glaringly disturbing. And it has been present since base game. Nothing stems from triggers that move from cause to effect it just always random. Ea sold people in the idea that this randomness is somewhere a representation of life but really it takes work to make it make sense and they did not want to bother. So you deal with random pushups, random musical chairs, random strangers, random idiotic outfits, random events, random responses, random neighborhood stories (that simple demolish your carefully crafter households with random pets and random breakups, even in happily crafted families, random marriages that randomly attached together), random preferences that randomly do not fit traits or careers or anything basically, random everything is not a life simulation it’s pure psychedelic chaos. Your sims goes to a bar talks to random strangers, ignores your tasks to do random things like play video games when they hate video games and have traits like outdoorsy then start a random riot for no effing reason what’s so ever. Now on top of all this trash add DLC that adds more randomness and eliminates options and adds few animations, excludes base game features and life stages and adds game breaking errors. It’s errors in a poorly designed mess of randomness stripped of meaningful animations and gameplay. Anyone that defends this game is just a tool. This is why I play with mods. I fix the randomness, add causality, add missing options, add actual gameplay, add animations, change the surroundings to make them part of the game and not a picture that simulates a game and fix glitches that make this so called game operational in the minimal sense. And while dealing with all this nonsense and picking mods and cc to make my game slightly enjoyable EA ignores everything that exists since base game to fix a few new issues and breaks the mods that made the game functional by addressing the issue they ignored forcing me to reupdate the mods just to discover that the game is not playable because of a mess they introduced fixing new game breaking problems while ignoring the long lasting problems that have simply been once again either exasperated or finally exposed. If the error is so bad the game can’t be played they patch it like you would put a happy face sticker on a leaking mattress and sending it in a voyage across the Atlantic. Then hauling it back in a month to put another sticker on the existing water logged mattress and pealing previous sticker.
