How Random is Sims 4 Really?

Truthfully, it's not as random as I'd like it to be either. Taking chance cards at work as an example, the outcomes are scripted and will always provide the same outcome. The outcomes from many of the phone calls are always the same and entirely predictable (thinking of the inheritance one from Eco Lifestyle as a prime example).

All the events I can think of are indeed heavily scripted and specific. There's not really much randomness at all.
I'm no expert but that's from what I've observed, both from the gameplay itself and from peeking at the code when modding.

So I'm not alone in feeling like the game needs more randomness.

I know that people like stability and continuity but that gets boring for me. Of course those who create story content would probably disagree but if you think of the movies that have been released over the last few decades, when was the last time you said "I did not see that coming!"

Everything anymore is too scripted and benign. I do however enjoy the random neighborhood events like reading that Judith Ward randomly burned to death while making a sandwich. I laughed loudly at the one.

Imagine walking down the street I. The middle of the day and suddenly an alien lands in front of as if just returning from the current abduction system. Or seeing two people get into an argument that turns to a fight! A random woman going into labor, like in sims 3! Stuff, random stuff happening.

I agree as well. The game feels like it should have random events, but then the design reveals itself to be more linear. The emotion system is a good example of this. In theory, adding emotions to Sims should make them unpredictable sometimes. As they navigate their lives and experience loss, heartache, bad days, arguments and frustrations, they should, in theory, have some unexpected reactions based on how they experience a situation and what their own personality is like. But what we see a lot of is all Sims reacting the same way to the same stimuli, which makes them all predictable. Now there have definitely been some tweaks to traits and systems to change this, and it has helped somewhat, but unfortunately the emotions were designed to be at the forefront to override trait influence, not the other way around, so we end up with samey Sims.

And I think this is what players of the older Sims games try to refer to when they say they enjoyed the gameplay better of those games. No two Sims were alike in response and reactions, (at least it felt that way) so the gameplay wasn't repetitive and predictable. It would be nice if the devs went back to the older personality designs (but better) for Project Rene. I never once saw players say they were bored with the older games and needed a break, but I see it said a lot about Sims 4.

I also feel that the unpredictability and surprises like burglars breaking in, Sims taking revenge on a bad breakup by knocking over trash cans, stealing your newspaper, leaving flaming bags of poo on the doorstep, or events like alien abductions resulting in unnatural births, were also a part of what made those games so exciting and fun. They were poking fun at life with good humor. I feel like there could have been some great opportunities in Sims 4 to have some of these things too.

For example, the influencer and social media gameplay should have had a chance for your Sim to choose extra posts they
could make online, like "try to start a new joke trend", "make a risque comment", "post your honest opinion"... and there's a hidden chance that your following will get upset at you because you inadvertently said the wrong thing and offended them. Now you've lost followers so you have to "post an apology", "repair your reputation", or stand" your ground, and there could be different outcomes of your choice, depending on your Sim's traits or skill levels. A high charisma would be more likely to recover, but a Paranoid Sim might still have a meltdown and cry or tremble under their bedcovers, lol.

It's all about seeing the humor of life and being able to laugh at the good, the bad, and the unexpected in a simulation game. Real life is unpredictable, as you said, and sometimes the darndest things go wrong. It would be nice to see this reflected in the gameplay.

My theory is because of how the game started out.

It was originally meant to be an online multi-player game. Why would you need to code in random events if every sim in the world was being controlled by a RL human? There would be tons of random stuff happening because you can't predict the behavior or actions of a RL person.

Then when they decided to scrap that, they had to hurry up and create some type of single player game ...... so they created scripted "random" events that have certain triggers for all sims.

It's definitely not random. And when they do try to do random, it's turned up to 11! It's either full-blow and annoying or it gets nerfed and never happens again.

I feel like the closest two things to random events in my personal game was when my 7D Legacy founder got struck by lightning on day 1. Also, on day 3 or 4, she was abducted by aliens. I honestly didn't see those coming. I mean, I sort of did because I kept yelling at her to go back inside before she got struck by the lightning but I didn't see it coming in that precise moment.

But I agree, we need more randomness. My gameplay thrives on the unexpected. I'm one of those simmers who doesn't restart when something happens, I roll with it. With the exception of my sim dying fresh out of CAS, which is also highly unlikely.

"Chicklet453681;c-18272973" wrote:

It's definitely not random. And when they do try to do random, it's turned up to 11! It's either full-blow and annoying or it gets nerfed and never happens again.

There doesn't seem to ever be a happy medium. It's all or nothing. Years ago, I had a sim that was abducted 6 times in his lifetime (YA to A because I abandoned that save before he became an elder). Apart from the sim I mentioned above, only one other save has seen any abductions. That was my alien legacy so it sort of made sense though. Ironically, my founder, who is an alien, was abducted.

@PenguinFoop I don't know if you use mods or not but there are a number of mods to bring randomness to the game. I think one of the more popular ones is Slice of Life & another would be Lifes Tragedies. At least those are two I've heard mentioned in the past.

There actually is a noticeable difference in coding when compared to TS2. In TS2, programming was heavily based on probabilities. You got a starting point and would go from there with different probabilities for random outcomes.

TS4's programming on the other hand ist heavily based on tests. For a certain event to happen, specific predesigned conditions must be met. Randomness can be best achieved by creativity in assigning those conditions. There is coding for randomness (called weight), but that has been kind of broken since release and not used as much as probalbilities were in TS2. The game is heavily leaning towards picking the outcome with the least tests and for a lot of events, the same option is mostly picked despite there being other ones available.

It seems they are too scared to make it random these days anyway because of people's complaints. They've nerfed out everything that was any good and now they play it safe instead.

Just take a look at the small telescope and how they implemented the getting hit by a meteorite. That could have been fun but, no, they give you so much warning that it takes away all the surprise.

There ought to be a random toggle so that those of us who want a bit of risk and surprise can have it.

I see some randomness in my game when I’m not micromanaging which I tend to do a lot because I see sims being specific ways for the most part, and control them.. I’ve seen things, like a grandmother sim sitting down on her granddaughter’s bed with her granddaughter and talking to her. I see a grandfather dancing with his grandson after eating. I see someone coming up and slapping my male sim because he kissed his wife in my movie theatre ( the sim had a pink bar with the male sim and slapped him ( the pink bar was not there because I had played the male sim that way.). Sometimes if you change households you will see you sim is at another lot that you didn’t send them to…….I see these as all random events. In fact many people complained because they didn’t like their sims flirting with people and getting a pink bar when they weren’t playing them.

They did try to add randomness over the years but as people have said, it felt like they could never really balance them. This caused a lot of discussions in the community where people felt that these events happened too often or never happened.

People wanted to play the game differently, some people wanted something random to happen to their household and some people wanted everything to happen a certain way and the game could not offer many options for those players to customize it.

It seemed to be difficult to achieve a happy medium so a lot of events are triggered by the player these days. You increase your chances of getting abducted by aliens by being in the scientist career and talking to aliens for example.