Feeling Positive for TS4's Future
Disclaimer: I wanted to focus on positives here because I feel there has been a lot of negativity recently surrounding the rebrand, which is totally valid, but I have been feeling overall positive abo...
Forum Discussion
Here's my worry.
The base game has markedly improved with updates, to the point where I'd have no problem recommending that someone buy it. It still has a few very noteworthy flaws - emotions really need to be improved and deepened, multitasking needs to be made actually time efficient (turning on the TV should not make breakfast take forever), traits should become more impactful - but I have faith that there are prototype fixes for all these things being worked on. Fix those, take some time off to clean up the game's code, and ideally put more forethought into whim weights so that expansion wants don't get too spammy, and I'm sold.
However, Maxis programmers have been pretty upfront that they're on tight money and time budgets. They have to move packs in order to get paid, and packs sell based on the content they bring. So time spent fixing up the remaining base game flaws means that corners have to be cut on packs, and there's nobody advocating for taking time off of sellable projects in favor of a massive free upgrade patch.
I do get the feeling that the sims team does want to improve the core of the game as much as they're able. Things like the quality of toddlers give me hope. But the amount of time and effort that would have to be put into free work makes me wonder how much we can expect to see in a reasonable timeframe.
The base game has markedly improved with updates, to the point where I'd have no problem recommending that someone buy it. It still has a few very noteworthy flaws - emotions really need to be improved and deepened, multitasking needs to be made actually time efficient (turning on the TV should not make breakfast take forever), traits should become more impactful - but I have faith that there are prototype fixes for all these things being worked on. Fix those, take some time off to clean up the game's code, and ideally put more forethought into whim weights so that expansion wants don't get too spammy, and I'm sold.
However, Maxis programmers have been pretty upfront that they're on tight money and time budgets. They have to move packs in order to get paid, and packs sell based on the content they bring. So time spent fixing up the remaining base game flaws means that corners have to be cut on packs, and there's nobody advocating for taking time off of sellable projects in favor of a massive free upgrade patch.
I do get the feeling that the sims team does want to improve the core of the game as much as they're able. Things like the quality of toddlers give me hope. But the amount of time and effort that would have to be put into free work makes me wonder how much we can expect to see in a reasonable timeframe.
