I only discovered TS4 at the start of the pandemic, and have not played any previous Sims game. Right away, I got hooked and had soon bought all the packs. Since then, I've played TS4 more than any other game and have continued buying all the packs. Being able to build houses, style sims and create stories just really appealed to me, especially since I found the game when looking for interior design software. So I think that's why the extremely lacklustre so-called gameplay didn't bother me so much at first, but I've grown increasingly frustrated with how this game often feels like an animated, prettified, poorly structured spreadsheet. Pixel graphic games by single developers on Steam can do it better if you look only at the core gameplay mechanics.
At this point, I really feel Maxis are forced to add to a game they are no longer interested in and that really can't support all the addons. Because TS4 has a large customer base ready to pay for content with minimal gameplay - an attractive proposal for EA as gameplay development is much more unpredictable. And yet still, the game breaks, over and over, because the foundation was clearly built to support an entirely different sort of game. With this recent update, I can no longer play as my game keeps resetting progress randomly. And what is a game where you can make no progress? Useless, that's what.
