Controlling Your Cats & Dogs: New Blog 8/31

"@MizzSammii3;c-16244881" wrote:
To be honest, I would have liked the option to control the pets. When my sims go to sleep or go to work, I focus on the pets and see what they're doing, what they're up to, what they need. The fact that you can't even click them to see their needs or relationships is a downer already, but even more so that even if you wanted to, you can't control or essentially "play" them. Having them automated on "taking care of themselves" would've been great, only requiring the player to step in if they really wanted to. The essential --option to-- would've been great, even if it wasn't a necessity in your pets' survival. There's no fun in watching your cat run around the neighborhood without being able to have them interact with things along the way. You don't even know what they're doing half the time.

The fact that the Sims team looked to their own pets and did research on the matter is awesome, but I'm bummed that they removed a feature that I found to be a really fun aspect of the game. I found great joy in exploring which items pets could interact with, what type interactions with other sims and pets were available at each stage of a relationship, and what features pets could interact with that sims couldn't. Sometimes my household's pets became my priority, and the Sims were expected to take care of themselves.

It seems whenever an expansion pack comes out, there's always some really great feature removed from the previous Sims 3 that's really disappointing. I wish the Sims team would take the opinions of their players a little bit more in mind, and perhaps these disappointments wouldn't happen.

We also have to keep in mind on how the developers will divert their resources throughout development :) In this pack for example, We may had the great feature of controlling pets, but if they did that, the depth that our pets have right now when you are not controlling them will be lessen, as their resources will be diverted into developing that feature. I mean instead of using their time in naming moodlets, creating name strings, a different ai when they are controlled, adding images/logos for moodlets, and testing them, they decided to use their time to develop one great feature, developing their ai.

When a modder enable the ability of controlling them, the way the pats act didn't affect their ai. I seen people said the devs are lying that making them controllable will make their "ai" less smart, but on development side, their ai won't be as smart as we have now if they divert their resources to another feature.

When TS3 Pets released, a lot of fans got bored with "be a pet" thing, complaining that the "have a pet" part wasn't fleshed out just like TS2 pets. I am one of those fans who are very happy that the "have a pet" in TS4 was great. For me removing one feature for the betterment of one that isn't fleshed out in the previous iterations that received many complaints means that the team take the opinions of their fans seriously. :)