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
"ScarletSimEater;c-17180397" wrote:
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.
If the game is really going to last a few years longer, that would mean a sizable number of packs along with various bug fixes and features. Granted, we do not know what the new packs will bring in terms of bugs or features. I am not inclined to believe it is such a tradeoff as you say, but if it is a tradeoff then the amount of time should be an indicator that what is left to come is still significant to the base game, even if a few packs are lackluster here or there.
They have shown from the beginning they are capable of adding much-needed features to the game despite launching any type of pack at or around the time. Their limits sound more along the lines of how much they can get done at once. I watched an interview between The Sim Supply and Lindsay Pearson, general manager of The Sims. She something like, "We're just chipping away at a long list of things simmers want."
5 years of chipping has been good so far! I'm excited to see more chipping away come to fruition, for now at least. :)
