"marcellala;14047082" wrote:
I also don't like the shortcuts they do for everything, but to me TS was always more of a caricature of life and i have long since burried the hope of it becoming more realistic.
Actually, i don't believe most sandbox players even want one. A life sim would be waaaaay mrore restricting. Jobs would be harder, sims would be complexer/harder to deal with and everything would take more time.
... Sandbox players want everything easily accessible.
Honestly, balancing sandbox and life sim has always been a struggle for TS and i think they should concentrate more on the life sim aspect, because there are other sandbox games out there but no life sim. But if TS5 was more like i wanted it, people would probably hate it even more than TS4 for being "restrictive" and "too hard".
That being said, TS4 doesn't even try to balance those two aspects and replaces them with a lot of watered-down RPG-elements. No, thank you.
i think rather "sandbox" means "choices" & not "reality only"
it means as well reality as shortcuts & the player decides how detailed the game has to be
the sand is as many options available to the player so that different people can play in different ways, building small or big sandcastles, detailed or clunky
with every game there are always people complaining,
it's just that with TS4 there are way more complaints than joy about the limiting decisions
those many limitations in TS4 like backdrops around the corner & not at the horizon first, no roads & no cars to use for sims, tasks to perform by numbers, plants without seeds, spawned & culled sims instead of those living in the neighborhoods, many removed completely or shortened animations &&&
TS4 is in some parts more elaborate like the expressions, animations & performed actions differently with different emotional state
still, i think the focus mainly on design in CAS, buildmode & emotional animations doesn't provide the player with a simulation
but it's rather like well done dolls moving around in well done homes due to animation by a machinery inside of them, everything else is done by the player alone & not by those dolls ... besides of playing phone games, wishing for a 1x1 pool & trolling the forums, which is annoyingly uniform behaviour for all sims without any exception
those dolls are leading a limited & similiar to each other sort of life, that's not sand, it's just few stones which can be set into few lives together often even by numbers only
& btw
i remember, as i moved from TS2 to TS3, i missed in TS3 too that those sims don't need to go out to actually buy clothes,
that the grocery shop consists of a list to click, but at least TS3 has still babysitters, paper delivery, burglars, policemen, firefighters in action & many other details from RL, past, fantasy & imagined future
it is surely an art to design a well balanced simulation game between detail & daily chore
but TS4 has lost that balance greatly & the makers filled the holes in the simulation with other game genres, which don't deliver enough substitute for that missing sand
