Carl's review of Dream Home Decorator pack is out

"TheGreatGorlon;c-17899538" wrote:

I think you may be missing the point of Carl's review. His review made it abundantly clear that the rules the career followed were incredibly nebulous and rudimentary, to the point where you could overhaul their living room when tasked with a kitchen renovation and still succeed so long as you hit their likes. That's enough to tell you that this career is a hollow sham with a bare minimum of parameters in place and not enough to really make it a rich, developed interior designer career like it should be to feel fulfilling. I'm not sure what else you're expecting from this kind of career review - if the career is fundamentally broken, seeing more of it isn't going to make it any better. Even branching out from Carl, I just saw someone post today on Reddit that they got a kitchen renovation request in which the customer hated cooking and loved video editing, which is critically flawed when you're tasked with upgrading their cooking room. So Carl's review of the career was on point in showing just how poorly constructed this career was.

I didn't miss Carl's point; I just disagreed with it, as I already said. At that point I had not played the career yet but I had watched some other excellent reviews from Plumbella and English Simmer. I did not find Carl's as helpful as theirs (which were far from adulatory), that's all. In the past, I played the Sims 3 Ambitions career quite a lot, and now that I have had the opportunity to play with this career I see it as essentially the same career with just a fresh coat of paint. The Sims 3 career had some annoying glitches and bugs leading to some weird randomness (like required objects not being checked off sometimes even though you placed them in a renovation, just to name one). I think this version of the career has tried to fix these; but probably they went too far in the other direction (I don't know for sure, as I have only had a few gigs so far) as they simplified it. In my experience, though, the career is not (in my opinion) nebulous and rudimentary, or fundamentally broken (leaving aside some of the bugs that some gamechangers and players -- not me -- have experienced), or not any more than the Sims 3 version.

My sim failed at a gig because the client didn't like Contemporary Decor and I had accidentally placed a TV (which I didn't know counted as Contemporary) so there did appear to be consequences for your choices, as there were in Sims 3, if you didn't pay enough attention to traits; I also had fun succeeding at gigs and having sims clap at my carefully chosen objects. I enjoy the new animations and the before/after reveal trailer too. Prior to this pack, I already liked decorating and redecorating my played sims houses, so for me it is just a new, interesting way to do more of that, have my sims now make money at it, and have them go out and engage more with the townie sims that I usually ignore. The Sims 3 career essentially worked that way as well, at least as I remember it. Based on my experience of now having played both sims 3 and sim 4 versions of this career, it's not that different, and that just confirms me in my view that Carl's opinion of this pack (as someone else said above) was not neutral, but seemed intended to make the pack look bad on purpose. Probably he was genuinely frustrated, I don't know, since apparently his expectations were completely different than mine, but the result was that I didn't find his review particularly enlightening, that's all.