I was thinking about getting the Sims 4 Growing Together for all the cool stuff it has and the world. I usually don't play families with childrenn (though I may in the future). So I want to know if this packs plays well with the other expansions. Will it adversely affect gameplay across all the packs. I am a little leery of "Family Dynamics"--is it a good thing or does it make gameplay more difficult.
I appreciate your feedback.
As someone who was looking forward to family dynamics feature, unfortunately I hardly even notice them. Nothing comes to my mind where Growing Together would be a distraction... Personally I was disappointed though that my sims got no milestone when I added a baby to their household through Life & Death reborn feature. It's their baby anyway. So there could be some instances where sims don't gain milestones even when you think they should.
As long as you stay away from the "permissive" or "strict" dynamic between parents and children, you don't need to worry. Those two do give weird moodlets at an extremely annoying level (strict leads to tense moodlets all around, permissive is worse, with the child being either very sad or very angry all the time). The difficult dynamic will mean more arguments and spontaneous meanness, so be careful with who you add it to.
Other than that, I generally love the pack and have very little bad to say about it. Just be wary of the dazed burn out. If your sim goes to work without getting rid of the moodlet first they will burn out, so I most often cheat it out since my sim without a fail get it after every workday and it last 21 hours so either your seem needs to taka a vacation every other day or you cheat.
I believe it plays just fine. I really enjoy this pack, too. You get a chance to set the family dynamics in CAS. The options are fine, nothing to be leery of.
I discovered a new milestone for infants just recently.
I tend to avoid using the family dynamics or just choose close or supportive. I don't notice that they do much anyway really so that aspect wasn't worth it for me. There's a lot of family gameplay in the pack though, so if you don't play with children you may miss out on a large part of the pack.
I really enjoy having recreation centres, which are a great place to have combined activities for all ages (music, gym, games etc) and being able to have guests stay over is cool.
Growing together is not really a pack that has much cross-compatibility. Let me be honest about the downside when playing families: You don´t have pre-school. As far as infants they are SUPER annoying but super lovely also. You die of baby fever as well as find them extremely annoying. You barely don´t have time to get the milestones. But otherwise the family dynamics can be changed super easily. In game, you get pop-ups often about family dynamic to change and whatnot. You can also change on cas.
Probably the most annoying is midlife crisis. I am not sure if it´s growing together or parenthood since I got them both at the same time. So do your research.
But overall, I feel like it´s a good pack, if you are really interested into family playing probably this is the pack. If you are interested in education of kiddos, parenthood is the pack.
Overall I have a positive review about it really.
I got Growing Together as a late Christmas gift. I think it is a nice pack, although I have to say that I wish mental fog, burn out and midlife crisis didn't happen so often (I had three sims have a midlife crisis in a short amount of time). I also find additional trait discoveries a bit too frequent, but maybe that's because I quite rarely accept the discoveries, so the game keeps offering them 😅 But yeah... I just think they happen too often, otherwise they are fine.
I haven't noticed the family dynamics much, only with my strict parent and her child, but I don't mind it.
The main things to consider about this pack
All in all it is a nice pack with lots of small additions. (tree house, kids bikes, baby shower, games like simbles and puzzles, friendship bracelets,..) I like the pack but depending on your interests I would advise waiting for a sale.
I'll be brief and honest. This pack is probably super if you play family life including focus on infants and family dynamics etc. I don't focus on those things, so it might me one of my less used packs. I just recalled that I never even tried the back carrier for bringing an infant with you... The world is nice, but without much extra. There's many lots, but I guess it all depands on what you use those lots for. I like CAS, because it brings a new fashion style (tiny bit weird, though, but something we did not have before). I'm quite neutral to this pack, and my biggest negative is the milestone system which mainly give plenty popups and clutters the simology panel, while I can't see how it influence on my game in any way other than graphics/UI. The system is probably good if you focus on all those small milestones - especially for infants, which I don't. I must add that the infants are very well made, occasionally I can sit watc hing an infabnt for a long time only to watch its movements and reactions, they are very good and I assume their chain of milestones feels very realistic too, for those into it.
As with TS3 Generations, I assume TS4 Growing Together adds more in the background than we can see. So there might be a few smaller improvements to the game that I'm not aware of.
I enjoy Growing together. I like the world, the new rec center lot, the lakes and swimming area. It comes with children’s bikes and learning how to ride. It has the tree house and also has the water park sprinklers. Children can loose their teeth. If you have Growing together it adds greater dimension to infants, and I love the infant milestones. I was disappointed in the rabbit hole theatre. Family dynamics are fine, they have a pop up, which I like. I turned off midlife crisis. They seem to have ironed out what bugs it had.
