"Jyotai;c-17928954" wrote:
"thatpinkcoconut;d-991682" wrote:
Now, I don't want any trouble with those who play the game
What do y'all think?
If you don't want to stir up trouble with other factions of the userbase - turn to mods.
Noting that most of the 'trait mods' I've seen give sims near super-powers. Traits like "better at everything" get placed alongside "even better than the other person at everything plus some stuff we managed to find that went beyond everything" and a third "so amazing the game just falls over and admits defeat"...
But... grab some of these "100 traits" packs and remove about 70 of them... and of the 30 you've got left, maybe 5 will be actual 'makes gameplay a challenge' and the other 25 are 'really likes the color blue'... so it's got some of what you need.
Just repeat that with about a dozen different modders, and you'll have a collection of challenge traits.
Not easy... but it's out there.
Maxis isn't going to rewrite the entire gameplay this far into things. Especially when the big takeaway from their last livestream was shock when they killed a bunny on stream. So just turn to modders - who already have what you want - though it's mixed in with a lot of stuff that makes even the current 'positive feel good vibes' of the game look like a gang war in the midst of a zombie invasion... So you have to remove most of any mod you grab to get the 'challenge' stuff.
You can also grab some of those 'NSFW mods' from 'those other websites' and again, edit out all the NSFW (most of these mods come with mile-long config settings), but keep all the 'it's a mean world out there' stuff - and you've got assorted tragedy to now challenge your 'less than ready to handle it' sims.
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This is pretty much what I do, my game is heavily modded, but there are limitations. I still feel like I am fighting sudden mood swings, obsessive object attraction and the new (to me) likes/dislikes mechanic which again just provides a moodlet rather than emphasizing or preventing behavior. None of these mechanics appear to be joined up in any way. So mods just allow me to play a more sophisticated version of whack-a-mole while herding cats.
If I wish the game to play smoothly, then I play the game in pretty much the way it was intended on release - gaming the mood system to maintain desired moods with as much strength and duration as you can to hit certain game goals such as promotions etc. There is quite a bit of challenge in this approach, even if the gameplay loop is a bit one-note. That orginal idea has since been abandoned and the game was a bit of a one-trick pony to start with, so now it is left with a bunch of disjointed mechanics.
Nonetheless, I still very much enjoy playing (and tinkering with) the game and mods go a long way to achieving that enjoyment.
