NPC behavior breaks immersion
In sims 3, simply moving to a new town was enough to refresh the narrative of the game, which I believe is hugely important in a life simulation game. In sims 4, all the towns are playable at the same time, and all life stories unfold simultaneously. While this adds diversity in terms of gameplay, the immersion is completely broken from the very first generation of Sims, which is really unfortunate.
Whether they are premade NPCs or automatically generated ones, both have the same problem: they lack friendships or romantic relationships, jobs, and skills. In the case of premade NPCs, they never leave the family home, which isn’t very believable. The clothes they wear are often inconsistent, which also breaks immersion. For example, wearing a hearing aid and piercings only with certain outfits. Yet there are beautifully predefined outfits in the game that could have been automatically assigned to NPCs according to their style, which would have been interesting.
Despite receiving phone calls from NPC for romantic or friendly advice, when we play these same characters, we realize that they actually don’t talk to anyone. Even with story progression turned on, the only events that occur are the adoption of children or pets, which, once again, often doesn’t make much sense.
Until now, I didn’t understand why people said playing The Sims felt like playing with dolls. I experienced this for the first time with sims 4, because it feels as if the NPCs are lifeless.
P.S. The fact that they do push-ups anywhere, clean the playable Sims’ houses from top to bottom, or always have clay or a future cube doesn’t help either.
