The chemistry/attraction system was first introduced in The Sims 2: Nightlife and there were options to set certain turn-ons and turn-offs which I find myself missing in Lovestruck:
I found occult states especially cool and think they would be a great addition for storytelling in TS4.
Also, with the expanded character creator in TS4, I would love tattoos to be an option as well.
I made a suggestion to add a physical based attraction system but I didn't get a lot of support for some reason because people seemed upset that it sounded mean and were probably worried that their sim wouldn't be considered universally attractive to other sims. I would just like a little realism. Like people are attracted to other people for more than just their personality like their looks etc.
I tried making a similar suggestion but all I got was hate for that lmao. Adjustable Physical Attraction & Repulsion System for The Sims 4 | EA Forums - 13705807
Agreed. All those things were key turn ons/offs in the Sims 2, but now all we have is personality based ones with the exception of hair colour and clothing style (which along with furniture style is something I completely ignore as it's not intuitive and doesn't give examples). The personality based options for the friendship compatibility is all well and good, but having the same options for romantic compatibility just results in a bored me selecting the same options all over again. Let's be real here, the majority of people who experience attraction experience it based on some form of appearance based factors. Locking our sims solely into personality based attraction (or visual categories as arbitrary as hair and clothing colour) is unrealistic and tiresome.
@Coraychiexactly, or we should introduce build limits to prevent people from making netherbits shaped buildings, and the like. It's completely ridiculous to go to the extent of customising gender and preferences, but then completely go over physical traits because someone thought the solution to the male gaze and unnatural beauty standards is to pretend they're not there, instead of revolutionizing the concept and making it our own.
I feel I'm condescendingly being told my body and relationship with physical intimacy does not matter at all, when instead it was a huge factor in stepping into my power
I'm sure the exclusion of these things is the Sims Team's attempt to be all inclusive (an effort which has been routinely flubbed) but it seems almost comical to exclude them in this case.
Especially in the context of dating apps, blind dates, etc., when you really don't have much to go on about your match, you'd be looking at things like their eye color, hair color, facial hair, or body to determine if you find them attractive or not. It's a bit juvenile to beat around the bush and pretend that people have no physical preferences when it comes to attraction.
Maybe I'm being too cynical, but I feel like they were afraid of backlash around having things like "skinny", "blue eyes", and "blond hair" being a turn-on. But at the end of the day, what people do in their own games isn't really the team's responsibility and they shouldn't water down features just to avoid people being potentially problematic* in a single-player game. You know that there are already people who only have their sims hooking up with white supermodels. That's not a good enough reason to completely ignore any physical attraction in a game that already has "woo-hoo" as a core feature.
(*not that it's problematic to be attracted to any of these traits, but I'm sure we all know why this specific combo and nothing else might be perceived as racist)
I remember that sims 3 had something similar. You would make a dating profile and choose whether you had an athletic body, skinny, average or 'more to love'. I feel as if sims 3 was more unrestrained compared to 4 which made it all the more interesting :D.
