For me the game is shallow. I’ve said it before and I will say it again but there’s no real consequence and that can make it boring. For example cheating. Have your sim cheat on their spouse, sometimes right in front of them and at best you get an angry moodlet, at worse nothing. The player has to engineer the reaction and consequences after. Because if the player doesn’t, it’s like the cheating didn’t happen. The couple’s relationship will remain unchanged. My sim got a whim to try for baby with her cheating husband minutes after catching him cheating. Minutes after she caught him cheating she went and shared a joke with the other woman. I had to make her be angry about it, I had to make her confront the other woman and as soon as the interactions were complete the sims returned autonomously to nice interactions. They shared a hug. The game fights against the player for any interaction that isn’t sweetness and light.
I mean for crying out loud! Yes there is the argument that not every sim should respond to cheating by slapping the cheaters and the relationships being severely damaged (ala previous games) But relationships not being damaged is just ridiculous. Because it’s not realistic. How can the first three sims games get that aspect right and the sims 4 cannot? Boggles the mind.
Traits are a huge problem as they have very little impact. A good example is the evil trait in the sims. An evil sim will autonomously do a “evil laugh” regularly. They become happy when others have negative moodlets (but all sims are almost always happy so that’s irrelevant) and they have a few unique socials that don’t change the relationship with the target and don’t mean diddily squat.
Now an evil sim in the previous games could steal candy from toddlers, did better in certain career tracks, laughed at others misfortunes, woke up sleeping pets and left to their own devices would be incredibly mean to those around them. You had to micromanage their relationships as they would quite happily destroy it on their own. On the contrary my evil sim in the sims 4 has a great reputation and has lots of friends. In the sims 4 you have to pretend your sim has emotions they don’t have. I’ll never forget an LP I watched where the youtuber was talking about how distraught and upset her sim was, her sim was heart broken at a situation. Except.. the sim wasn’t. There she was, sitting on the couch eating popcorn wit the worlds biggest smile. The sim should have been broken hearted as her dad had died but the sim didn’t care!
Will Wright recognised that players preferred to explore failure states in games and as such if that’s how you wanted to play you could. If you didn’t you didn’t have to but your sims would still have fulfilling, challenging lives. The game encouraged you to try different things, different traits, mix things up and many times it encouraged you to mess with your sims lives. It threw you challenges like burglars, like the repo man, like bug infestations, social services taking your children if they were neglected and woe betide your sims if they angered another. Your trash can would be on the ground for at least a week. Your sims could lose their jobs. It felt realistic as our sims went through lots of different things good and bad and it kept it interesting.
Sims 4 wants your sim to live a perfect utopia where everyone is friends with everyone else, there’s no conflict and the only challenge your sims will face is the occasional fire. Try creating a family situation with say feuding siblings and watch as the game fights you to maintain a negative relationship. Watch as children don’t give a darn if their parents are cheating or if their parents separate then compare it Sims 2 kids who if they found their parent cheating would hate their parent and the person caught doing it too. In sims 4 I could turn my game on at 8pm and leave it running all night long and come back and everyone would be fine. There’s no challenge. It’s fun in short bursts but after a while of “Go and react to your child misbehaving”, “Go and tell this sim his mother is a llama”, “Go and react angrily to your mother being called a llama” and cancelling out the friendly social queuing. It feels very tiring.
Sims 4 wants to be a story telling game, it wants to be a safe space from an already safe space and it’s completely forgotten it’s roots. They say they want it to be a story telling game but in a world with checklists for so many things, shallow relationships and meaningless traits i find it very hard to overcome. It looks pretty but aesthetics should not be everything. But in this game, they very much are.
