Feedback on Picking Cause of Death in CAS
With the update on 23rd of October 2024 we got a new function in CAS: Pick a cause of death. In CAS, it looks like this, where the hexagon for creating a ghost is placed in the upper left corner, ma...
Forum Discussion
@SqueamishNerd I have to say that I did struggle for a few moments with this as well. I did figure it out pretty quickly though, fortunately! I do agree that it would be better to put this elsewhere for newbies.
@PugLove888 I'd say that the design choice for picking Cause of Death isn't good UX in general, for any simmer, and there are more of CAS I feel is like that, but it's really non-intuitive for new simmers in particular. I understood how picking Cause of Death worked as soon as I saw it, but I also know that I'm not everyone and I can see how non-intuitive it is. I might've been confused about it if I didn't know about it before the update. I recently had a friend who has played all the previous Sims games, a lot, and they wanted to try The Sims 4, they even work with programming and are good with computers and technology in general, but even so, they had to come over to my place so that I could show them all the options in CAS and what they do. I've also seen simmers who have played Sims 4 for years and have completely missed that you can create up to 5 outfits per category (Everyday, Formal, Sleepwear etc) or those who don't even know that you can mould the sims' bodies, they have only ever picked the preset bodies and didn't know you could alter them. Those are just two examples. The Sims 4 CAS isn't intuitive in general, and the design choice for picking a Cause of Death is exceptionally bad design 🫤
@SqueamishNerd I agree with you in general, though every version of the Sims has some UX issues that take getting used to, which can be forgotten if you haven't played that version in a while. But this is true to a lot of other games as well.
The problem is that even if you make a change for the better, old users aren't used to that and will sometimes prefer the older way of doing things even if it is clunkier, just because it is what they are familiar with. Take the Social Menu that was revamped a little while ago. I love the changes, but some people just wanted it to stay the same, even though it kept getting harder and harder to navigate through all the Friendly social interactions that were not subcatergorized at the time. They were just in alphabetical order, which many people didn't even realize, including myself, until someone mentioned it. 🤦🏻♀️😅
But you are right in that there are a lot of things in the UX that aren't ideal, or in some cases not really explained. I didn't know that there were people out there that didn't know you could mold the Sims' bodies in CAS, but that is because I started playing the day the game was released, and it was a huge marketing point how you could just use your cursor to manipulate and change the Sims' bodies in CAS! My guess is that those who don't realize this are people who are much newer to the game, because just about everybody knew about it when the game was launched!
As for the 5 outfits per category, I can see how a lot of people miss that one, since the little button you click on for that is relatively small and easy to miss. But it was something I stumbled upon within the first week of playing because I went and clicked on everything when the game was released!I do agree with you that the UX isn't the best and could use a lot of improvement. However, with a game as old as this one, a lot of the bad UX choices come from just tacking on a new feature. This wouldn't be as much of a problem if developers knew what would be added in the future. Unfortunately, they don't know what will be added, so it is hard to anticipate where the best placement of things should be, and they can't go and totally revamp how things are done each time something is added, so they end up just making the best of existing things and tacking the new feature on to the old set up. It isn't ideal, but I get it! 😊
