For Rent Negative thread

"RapidRabidRabbit;c-18327568" wrote:

I think even the presence of the loading screens, however short, are kind of immersion breaking. They’re super jarring when you just want to visit your neighbor for instance. But even aside from that, they limit gameplay. If I want a sim to say hi to their neighbors, I can only load one lot. I can’t have some sims socialize at home, and then others greet their neighbors. I essentially have to choose only one sim to follow and let the rest of the household meander offscreen.

What if I want my teen sims to hangout at their friend’s house, while also having their parents work on skills, and the children socialize with a different household? In Sims 3 and Sims 2 Apartment Life, I could focus both on having certain sims socialize in different houses/apartments, while also focusing on developing other sims at home.

I agree that it's not ideal. Assuming that you have a high-end rig, I think the simplest thing for playing with large groups of Sims at once would be to create a larger household (20-40 Sims) with cheats or mods and just pretend the lot is divided into separate units or use the roommate system. It's not great and doesn't benefit from the new pack at all... :| Otherwise, we can use the UI to direct Sims from the household in the inactive units to build skills or socialize while we focus on those from the household who are in the active units. I played both Sims 2 and Sims 3, and I think I'll prefer this system (if it's not buggy) because Sims 2 didn't simulate enough for me. There was no global aging or story progression in that game. I love having hundreds of Sims aging and doing their own thing in the background for generations. Sims 3 had huge, wonderful open worlds but it didn't allow for back-and-forth traveling among them without having Sims lose all their relationships. I would love for these new apartments to be open and not limited to just a few Sims, but I know that would probably affect performance on most computers and not just the "potatoes". 3-5 seconds of loading doesn't bother me, but I'll probably experiment with mods and cheats to find a balanced amount of Sims that works for my computer (maybe I'll push the general lot limit to 50 but not have 50 in one household).

Several years ago, someone from the Sims 4 team explained why they didn't want to add a bunch of toggles. I will look for the source/explanation for that because I wanted them to give more options too, but I don't think creating a default would be that simple if many variables were introduced, especially since the game also has to work decently well on consoles.