Disappointed with City Living
I purchased City Living a little over a week ago while it was on sale for 60% off. What I've now found in my shortish time playing the pack, that this City Living is but a shadow of what it could have...
Forum Discussion
Completely agree, City Living is terrible and it's actually the reason I stopped playing the Sims 4 and refused to buy any more packs. I also bought it discounted and still felt ripped off (50% off).
The apartments are one of the worst things for me, I was so angry when they revealed that you can't build them or move them, you are stuck with what you get. Having creative freedom has always been the most important thing for me with the Sims, and this just removed it in the worst possible way. Compared to the Sims 2, these apartments are absolutely terrible. There are so many limitations and in the end, playing an apartment just felt no different to a house, only with a pretty backdrop (which is clearly the main priority for the sims team in this game judging from how nearly all the packs have been handled). There's no lively communal areas and social life that you got in Sims 2 AL (and no loading screens to visit neighbours), nor roommates. Just incredibly disappointing.
I also totally agree about the busking, I'm surprised no one else already mentioned this before. It's very frustrating trying to play a musician sim who busks for their job, I tried to do this and gave up in the end due to the problems you've mentioned above, just like so many other (flawed) gameplay elements of the Sims 4 that I gave up on and never touched again. As you said, I also noticed that the busking area was ALWAYS occupied so I could barely ever get my sim to busk in the first place. And even if it happened to be empty for once and I clicked on it and told my sim to busk, there was a high chance that another sim would get there first and start using it before my sim got there. And like you said it was so hard to get tips. It was so much easier in the Sims 2, where you could go up to any musical instrument and play for tips, and usually you got quite a few tips as well. You could also freestyle for tips wherever you wanted.
Yeah I agree about the recolours, there's loads more in CL as well. It's becoming a concerning trend for the Sims 4, with many objects in new packs bring recolours. The worst example is the MFP pack, nearly everything in there is either a recolour, or clearly part of a set in C&D. It's extremely lazy. I'm starting to think now that this is why we didn't get create a style or a colour wheel for CAS, because that would get in the way of them making tons of recolours of objects and outfits/hair and selling them again in future packs.
But yeah, the two words for me that best describe CL are "missed opportunity". That is honestly all I could think of while trying to play it, it's honestly totally shocking what we ended up with for a full price expansion. It seems that much of what you listed and other things you'd expect to see in a city pack (eg restaurants), were split up and sold in other packs. IMO CL and GT could easily have been combined into one big city pack, albeit with only one of the worlds. That said though Windenburg was pretty much a city and that's how most cities are here in Europe, so I would've been happy to have that instead of San Myshuno, but with an urban district or something added in.
The apartments are one of the worst things for me, I was so angry when they revealed that you can't build them or move them, you are stuck with what you get. Having creative freedom has always been the most important thing for me with the Sims, and this just removed it in the worst possible way. Compared to the Sims 2, these apartments are absolutely terrible. There are so many limitations and in the end, playing an apartment just felt no different to a house, only with a pretty backdrop (which is clearly the main priority for the sims team in this game judging from how nearly all the packs have been handled). There's no lively communal areas and social life that you got in Sims 2 AL (and no loading screens to visit neighbours), nor roommates. Just incredibly disappointing.
I also totally agree about the busking, I'm surprised no one else already mentioned this before. It's very frustrating trying to play a musician sim who busks for their job, I tried to do this and gave up in the end due to the problems you've mentioned above, just like so many other (flawed) gameplay elements of the Sims 4 that I gave up on and never touched again. As you said, I also noticed that the busking area was ALWAYS occupied so I could barely ever get my sim to busk in the first place. And even if it happened to be empty for once and I clicked on it and told my sim to busk, there was a high chance that another sim would get there first and start using it before my sim got there. And like you said it was so hard to get tips. It was so much easier in the Sims 2, where you could go up to any musical instrument and play for tips, and usually you got quite a few tips as well. You could also freestyle for tips wherever you wanted.
Yeah I agree about the recolours, there's loads more in CL as well. It's becoming a concerning trend for the Sims 4, with many objects in new packs bring recolours. The worst example is the MFP pack, nearly everything in there is either a recolour, or clearly part of a set in C&D. It's extremely lazy. I'm starting to think now that this is why we didn't get create a style or a colour wheel for CAS, because that would get in the way of them making tons of recolours of objects and outfits/hair and selling them again in future packs.
But yeah, the two words for me that best describe CL are "missed opportunity". That is honestly all I could think of while trying to play it, it's honestly totally shocking what we ended up with for a full price expansion. It seems that much of what you listed and other things you'd expect to see in a city pack (eg restaurants), were split up and sold in other packs. IMO CL and GT could easily have been combined into one big city pack, albeit with only one of the worlds. That said though Windenburg was pretty much a city and that's how most cities are here in Europe, so I would've been happy to have that instead of San Myshuno, but with an urban district or something added in.
