Traits Alone Can Never Represent Personality
Let's start with a hypothetical. You make a sim with the Geek, Cat Lover, and Ambitious traits. Supposedly, this is designing their personality in the Sims 4. ...Okay, but what's this sim's actual p...
Forum Discussion
Very well said @PugLove888 ! I particularly like your point that aspirations don't really seem to affect what sims to autonomously.
We need several things here:
- core personality sliders (like sims 1 and 2) that drastically affects AI, motive decay, rates of skill gain, and other things
- traits are particular quirks of added scripting that affect certain behavior. It's more specific, but less generalized than core personality
- A high-level aspiration. Think simply popularity, romance, creative, fortune, knowledge, adventurer, etc. These aspirations should drastically affect the Wants and Fears rolled by the sim. It should more or less permanent and a constant driving force in terms of what the sim wants to achieve out of life
- Lifetime wants. These are the specific checklist goals that the Sims 4 currently calls aspirations. (It's important to note that the Sims 4 conflated lifetime wants with aspirations themselves. They are inherently different. The former are specific goals, the latter drives the wants and fears of the sim.) E.g. renaissance sim, chess master, best selling author would be example of lifetime wants.
@Anonymous , yes I see what you are saying about them conflating Aspirations and Lifetime Wants in the Sims 4. It has been so long that I forgot that what TS4 calls Aspirations are closer to what TS3 called Lifetime Wants! 😅
And my favorite system for Lifetime Wants, Aspirations, regular Wants and Fears was TS2! There were repercussions for your actions. Sure you could go out for a night on the town, but your Neat Sim might have a crisis if they have to use a dirty public restroom! 😉
Also, to this day I still think of myself as a combination of Knowledge Sim and Family Sim, with a touch of Grilled Cheese Sim thrown in the mix! 🤣 Classifying Sims according to what is most important to them was a great way of directing our gameplay.
And I do think having sliders for the main personality characteristics, combined with a few selected traits for those quirky traits that don't drive personality, would be the best of both worlds.🤩 Take the Vegetarian trait in TS4... other than mealtime, this trait does nothing but offer the ability to talk to other people about being a Vegetarian. I know some Vegetarians who almost never pick this trait because with only 3 traits, there isn't much variety to personality left to choose from , which makes all of those Sims seem very similar and is also a kind of a waste of a trait slot. It is similar for Clumsy Sims. The animations are funny, but it doesn't carry the same weight as something like Outgoing or Creative or Slob. (Though I am glad they tweaked some of these traits a bit, as it is better than it used to be!💖 ) So by adding the sliders and keeping a few quirky traits , we can still have a few quirky-but-not-as-useful traits without sacrificing core personality points! 🥳
