Do you find the Sims 4 challenging?

There are some scenarios where I find the game challenging:
Playing a household of more than 3-4 sims. The pause button becomes my best friend.
Running a restaurant, vet, or retail community lot.
Planning and throwing a party or wedding. I remember being more stressed when I planned my first S4 in game wedding than planning my own real life wedding. :p

Entertaining and fun...absolutely, but challenging...not even remotely.

TS2 could be quite challenging, but in TS4 it is actually difficult to not be filthy rich before the end of even generation 1and everything that can kill your sims gives you the opportunity to avoid or counter it relatively easily (particularly in comparison to past sims games). Random "bad stuff" is also nearly non-existent in TS4 and where it does exist is, again, relatively easy to either avoid or counter.

I honestly cannot recall the last time there was any occurrence in my TS4 game that felt even a tiny bit challenging, which is why I voted never. The closest would probably be when my household had 3 toddlers and a baby at the same time...but that wasn't really challenging...just sometimes frantic. lol
The lack of built-in challenge is just a compelling reason to play following any of the many challenge rule-sets though. Choosing to follow a challenge rule set adds challenge to the game that doesn't exist by default.

I think perhaps, this is a good thing though. Sims players play for a variety of reasons and there's a whole cross-section of the community that doesn't particularly want the game to be challenging. They want to tell their own stories, not have the game block their attempts by inserting challenge that doesn't fit the stories they are trying to tell. For players who do want inherent challenge, challenge-rulesets can be used to provide what they want.

It just depends on what aspect.

not usualy. i often have to up the ante as it were to get some excitement or challenge in my game. last generation i had my sim have tons of kids with random men, just to have a houseful of toddlers and no daddy to help out. stuff like that. but its also nice and relaxing to not have to deal with every little detail all the time if i dont feel like it, so i dont mind its lack of challenge

yes aspecaly with aging fully off

"Stormkeep;c-16931245" wrote:
Entertaining and fun...absolutely, but challenging...not even remotely.

TS2 could be quite challenging, but in TS4 it is actually difficult to not be filthy rich before the end of even generation 1and everything that can kill your sims gives you the opportunity to avoid or counter it relatively easily (particularly in comparison to past sims games). Random "bad stuff" is also nearly non-existent in TS4 and where it does exist is, again, relatively easy to either avoid or counter.

I honestly cannot recall the last time there was any occurrence in my TS4 game that felt even a tiny bit challenging, which is why I voted never. The closest would probably be when my household had 3 toddlers and a baby at the same time...but that wasn't really challenging...just sometimes frantic. lol
The lack of built-in challenge is just a compelling reason to play following any of the many challenge rule-sets though. Choosing to follow a challenge rule set adds challenge to the game that doesn't exist by default.

I think perhaps, this is a good thing though. Sims players play for a variety of reasons and there's a whole cross-section of the community that doesn't particularly want the game to be challenging. They want to tell their own stories, not have the game block their attempts by inserting challenge that doesn't fit the stories they are trying to tell. For players who do want inherent challenge, challenge-rulesets can be used to provide what they want.

I'd like more challenging play, but with game play so that Sims can prevent or mitigate incidents by their actions. For example, if we ever got natural disasters in the game (floods, power outages and such) there should be a way to minimize them; an upgraded pump in the basement to keep flooding to a minimum, or backup batteries (especially if we get solar or wind power) to lessen the impact of power outages (maybe not enough power to run the computer or TV, but enough to keep the lights and refrigerator running). In Sims 3 we had the meteor strikes but there was enough warning to get your Sim under cover if need be, and Sims could make a lot of Simoleons afterward when cleaning up the pieces especially the giant meteor.

I make it so. :p I can play one Sim or eight of them. I like that you can choose your level.

I myself do not see Sims 4 as an game that really challenges my tastes and creativity for some reasons in how the game is developed and the genre it is geared towards But it may excite some and it may disappoint some being it is what each and every player want out of it. My tastes and what I expect is different than the next person. Sims 4 does have it's moments but then for me it steps back as for example how CL was developed. Again this is my opinion and mine alone and those who enjoy it, enjoy it and those that do not, keep hoping. :)

As @Stormkeep said I find it entertaining and fun. Enough to keep me engaged for hours at a time and always eager to resume play. The most challenging games I've ever played were the Age of Empires and Age of Mythology games.

I chose seldom because I think my answer is a little more complicated. I don't find the gameplay itself necessarily challenging, though there are moments when my Sims don't seem to have the AI to fill their own basic needs when they get past the yellow zone, and it can cause a disruption to something else I'm doing because I have to switch over and cater to them. I hardly ever play single Sim households, so I usually have anywhere from 2 to 8 Sims (the majority are teen and older) that I'm juggling at a time, and even that can get kind of tedious when they just continue to gravitate toward the same activities and objects to occupy themselves.

So I guess I find that most "challenges" in my game come mainly from fighting against the AI behavior to try to have my Sims perform to their traits and the personalities that I intended for them. But that's not really the kind of challenge that I wanted, lol.

But I still wouldn't say "never". I did have a Sim die and I made his widow determined to bring him back from the dead by going kind of "witchy" and obsessed and making the ambrosia, so I had to find all of the ingredients and raise her skills and everything, and in the end, it was satisfying. I also found some great challenge in sending large, full households into the jungle without being fully prepared to see if they can make it all the way to the temple and back without going back to their lot. They had to camp out and eat from the cooler and pee in bushes and everything, and I randomized and rotated who did the temple puzzles, and that turned out to be some of the best gameplay I've had with sims 4. The only problem was, again, the AI autonomy because I didn't want to turn it off or it would be too easy to manage them, but I had to pause a lot to keep them from going back to their vacation house.

So essentially, I think we kind of have to create our own challenges in Sims 4 and the content is there to do it, but if a player has a hard time finding a way that suits their own gameplay, the game can definitely come off as unchallenging and too easy.