How are you feeling about the sims 4 and its current state ?

"Metior_Ice;c-18165751" wrote:
@flauschtrud I sympathize. I play a game on my Laptop called Stellaris. I can’t play that game without mods, and I’ve been there with an unplayable game when it gets updated. I know what it feels like to have broken mods in a game you love.

Thank you, but it's definitely not the mods at this point. I only use quite small and specific gameplay mods and they have been fine so far. But what makes the game unplayable for me right now is the fact that the aging is still wrong even on backup saves (probably due to the new lifespans) and my Sims have totally wrong ages and some age up and die. I know I could partially "fix" this with cheats but since I'm also a perfectionist this just does not feel right. And my Sim currently has a relationship with the pub owner in Henford-on-Bagley, but because of the NPC bug he does not work at the pub anymore... :(

But I'm happy that your console experience has been fine so far. And yes, I agree that a lot of things that modders add or fix should be part of the vanilla game.

But I also have to say that this patch is the worst that I ever had. I was always excited for patch day and to get new stuff, but will now forever have a "Fear of patched game" trait...

Mmmyeah.... Myup myup....

I've been struggling a bit to be honest. I've been trying to "fit" in as a player, trying to find work-arounds to make live-mode more enjoyable but unfortunately it's getting rather challenging for me to play the game my way. I love building and creating characters in CAS, but that's not where I'd want to stop. Right now I cannot play in live mode without mods that handle certain, extremely gamebreaking autonomous behaviors. Updating these mods is getting tiresome though. Not interested. The game should give me options.

I figured I'm really just not a member of the intended Sims 4 target audience and never will be. Sad to share this, but I'm no one's bestie. I'm this crazy, random dude who loves making up psychological horrors and wacky adventure stories and couldn't give a snails fart about phones and the latest fashion / social trends. What are you even on about?
I'm wondering whether this game is about Sims or Simcards? Is that all that there's to life now? Phonecalls , popularity and social media feeds? These are such utterly boring concepts to me.

And wait, you know what? I don't care if you found a bloddy diamond ring in yer purse. You already rang and asked me 5 times in the past half sim hour. I don't care if you were to marry a toiletbrush and gave birth to 53 garden gnomes and a neutered cat. You annoy me, go away. I mean it. Go away. If I had a flame thrower I'd blast you out of existence, whoever ye are. I'm a decent person in general, however, we should have flamethrowers in The Sims.

I'm not sure how the introduction of features such as sexual orientation, likes & dislikes, wants and fears actually enhanced gameplay?
My sim very much dislikes dancing and yet there he is brutally dancing to METAL and then getting all stressed out about it!! I mean dude, use your darn brain you dumb nut! Why are you acting so ridiculous? It's mind blowing. Absolutely mind blowing. You're doing it to yourself, getting all stressed about it. Like we all do, right? Like we all do. And stop flirting with the sofa. Please stop. That's enough of that. Cut it out!

I appreciate the devs efforts of adding all these highly requested features to the game, but Sims still don't care. They just don't care about anything. Never did. The engine just doesn't support sims that care. The Sims 4 engine is a " I don't care -engine". I'm sorry, but why should I care again?

On a positive note, I really like Werewolves. I love it when they go on a rampage and smash the bejoonkas out of my furniture. That's the spirit.
I'm still updating mods for my dear werebeasts, but only because I'm currently sick at home (*cough cough- someone please have pity on me ?) and there aren't many other adventurous ways to move my butt.
It's either watch Netflix, finish writing my autobiography: My Life as a Failed Male Model, or play The Sims 4. Those are the only 3 options for me. There's nothing else for me in this world, because I already washed the dishes and I'm not hungry. Oh, and I have cats NOR children to feed. Life's bliss.

I play entirely offline, and I update when I'm good and ready. So, currently I am still sitting on patch 1.89 (June 14 Werewolf patch), because of all the bugs that have been introduced in the most recent patch. Particularly the aging bug (which, even after the hotfix, I'm still seeing reports of happening in some cases). I have too many saves I care about to risk it.

I didn't buy a couple packs I wanted last time they were on sale, because of bugs in those packs that still aren't fixed.

And I'm currently being super-annoyed by the bug that causes sims to keep moving after being paused. Taking screenshots is extremely important to how I play and how I write my simlit stories, so this bug is causing me a lot of trouble.

And a few of the recent non-bug changes aren't my cup-of-tea either. Mainly the addition of " wants and fears" (I guess I'll be turning that whole system off, when I finally do update) and the "walking while using cellphones" thing I've been hearing about, which I really hope a modder creates a way of stopping, because sims are already annoyingly obsessed with their cellphones enough.

I had to get a mod to turn off the phone calls that go with Neighborhood Stories, because for some reason the "off toggle" for NS in the settings does not include actually turning off that specific feature. I was not happy about the "death by meteor" addition, and I had to get a mod to put a stop to that too. And, to be honest, I don't really like sentiments all that much either and I wish they had given us an off toggle for that feature as well.

It's astonishing how many mods in my mod folder are simply "turn off this new thing that I never wanted in the first place" mods.

I still like the game, but the recent bugs are alarming, and I wish they wouldn't add game-changing features to the base game without giving us a way to fully turn them off.

"flauschtrud;c-18166334" wrote:

"Metior_Ice;c-18165751" wrote:
@flauschtrud I sympathize. I play a game on my Laptop called Stellaris. I can’t play that game without mods, and I’ve been there with an unplayable game when it gets updated. I know what it feels like to have broken mods in a game you love.

Thank you, but it's definitely not the mods at this point. I only use quite small and specific gameplay mods and they have been fine so far. But what makes the game unplayable for me right now is the fact that the aging is still wrong even on backup saves (probably due to the new lifespans) and my Sims have totally wrong ages and some age up and die. I know I could partially "fix" this with cheats but since I'm also a perfectionist this just does not feel right. And my Sim currently has a relationship with the pub owner in Henford-on-Bagley, but because of the NPC bug he does not work at the pub anymore... :(

But I'm happy that your console experience has been fine so far. And yes, I agree that a lot of things that modders add or fix should be part of the vanilla game.

But I also have to say that this patch is the worst that I ever had. I was always excited for patch day and to get new stuff, but will now forever have a "Fear of patched game" trait...

@flauschtrud I’m in a situation where the initial update was fine and didn’t break my game.

I did notice that my settings were changed from a long lifespan to a normal one, and I have aging turned off.

A couple days after the update, they must’ve sent out a patch that got downloaded because my save is starting to break down, and I’m looking at rebuilding my save in a new save.

My point with the part you quoted was that the mods could be the source of the problem and it takes time for them to get updated.

The game I mentioned, Stellaris. The developers warn the modders in advance to give them time to update their mods before releasing a major update.

The problem with aging is likely a problem that comes from the mods.

The game was playable with aging turned off and a normal life span. It seems that most of the bugs do come from outdated mods and CC and that’s normal when it comes to using mods.

Currently, I don’t know what the state of my game is. I haven’t been able to access my game for a couple days.

I have been watching the development of things in the forums, and I know that mods and cc have been the source of most bugs everyone is experiencing.

In one thread, @Brd709 removed a mod, I think it was MC and it fixed the problem.

There is Custom Content, CC, that also caused some problems. I think it was a makeup mod.

So, even if you use a small number of mods, it just takes one to be outdated.

I'm actually mad about the handling of the werewolf GP. They hid the main aspirations behind a single-tier CAS aspiration, only to reveal the four main werewolf aspirations as single-tier aspirations as well. To add to the insult, 3/4 of these single-tier aspirations are inextricably tied to either the NPC factions the devs invented or their NPC's, and the fourth plays into the worst trope in werewolf media: "the search for a cure"! What kind of bunkus is that?!

Then, the situation with female werewolf body customization is just a hot mess. The more I dig into how to fix the problem, the more horrifying the discoveries become: A base body model that was deliberately made with a flat chest and masculine proportions, a slider reference model with less hip and waist flexibility than the normal female slider references, things deliberately coded in to keep breasts from appearing on female werewolves when clothed whether you're using a slider mod or not by not giving female werewolves the "Breasts_ForceOn" trait automatically in CAS...It's not just an oversight, they went to all-out war against the female body here! That's unacceptable, especially considering their "Inclusivity to the Max" branding over the past several years!

So, yeah, I'm mad. I waited 8 years for werewolves in this game, through garbage like tiny homes and home makeover and an eco pack that includes extreme pollution without mutagen or monsters...and they give us this? They give us aspirations that are more restricted than the ones for vampires and spellcasters (the other two occults that got their own packs)? They give us forced masculinity on our female werewolves with less body shape customization than female sims normally have, even as they wrap their game in pride flags and act like they care about freedom of gender expression? No way to make our own werewolf packs, no way to even fake them with the GTW club system because they didn't add using werewolf abilities as a club activity in order to force players to join their NPC factions and play with their precious OC's? That's some mess...

"Metior_Ice;c-18166684" wrote:

The problem with aging is likely a problem that comes from the mods.

I took off all mods and had problems when loading an old (pre-patches) backup save. I also sent it to a mod on the bug forum and they could reproduce my issues. I assume it's due to the changes in lifespans and that something gets calculated wrongly when you first load a save that still uses the old aging settings. I assume there are also people that would not notice this or would think it was the other aging bug, but it is really noticeable if you play on short lifespan (and might also cause deaths depending on the initial age).

I had a look into the tuning files and the mechanism the lifespans are handled was changed for the HSY patch. So this is a high risk change that obviously was not tested enough and also made old saves not compatible. No mods involved.

I feel like it's gone on way too long with EA/Maxis not listening to what we want. We can't build apartments,we can't have apartments in other worlds(Forgotten Hollow,Oasis Springs,Sulani,HoB,etc).we have to put up with not being able to use the locked apartments traits(like Historical),we're still getting small worlds,we can't even use the stuff from the Copperdale boardwalk.

I like sims 4,but I do wish it would just end soon so we could move on to Sims 5 already.

I am taking a break from Sims 4. I am frustrated with all the bugs since the patch and, from what I have read on the forum, how the newly implemented behaviors are affecting gameplay. So I plan to stay away until most of it is fixed. I started playing Sims 2, but could only play for less than an hour. I always loved that game but had forgotten how much fun it really is, and how much more challenging! I had a blast in that little bit of time and can't wait to get back to my game! I was really missing Sims 4 and wanting to get back to playing, but now that I am experiencing Sims 2 again I won't miss it as much. I feel a bit saddened by this, though. Sims 2 is an old game. Since then there has been so much progress in technology. I would expect that that would make newer games even better. Sims 2 has so much more depth, so I think that is why it is so addictive.

My Sim went for an Energized Jog and was tapping away at his phone the entire time. Nobody does this in real life. You would run into so many objects and people if you didn't look at the road ahead of you.

I'm taking a break from it at the moment. A long moment.

It's a minor thing, but those cellphone animations that shows up every 5 seconds or so (I didn't count) annoy me even more than the bugs - because at least they have the excuse of being unplanned. Unless I've missed a post where they adress this annoyance feature, this is apparently something they're proud of, or at least, they've implemented it, and they won't bother to remove it or make it optional because of those precious time constraints that were luckily not a thing when they coded this abomination into the game.

Not all my Sims are cellphone obsessive. I can't fathom who came up with this brilliant idea. "Hey, let us make all the Sims even more glued to their cellphone, no matter which age they are, because kids today are all about social media and nothing else."