I want open neighborhoods so badly
I just want open neighborhoods so badly. I think that would make the game so much more fun and feel so alive since I could visit neighbors quickly or go to the park and get ice cream or to the local c...
Forum Discussion
Sims 4 will never be open world. Simply put, once you're outside the active neighborhood area, you quickly go from impressive facades that still ultimately do nothing, to things that are obviously facades if you tab out and move over to them. Trying to fill out that section of world and have it connect to the other neighborhoods would be a massive undertaking, on the level of making a whole new game.
"Open neighborhoods" would be trickier, but doable. One important element of TS3 was that everything there was dependent on items, to the point where they had to make up clever workarounds to make certain types of area possible. TS4 lots are identified by lot type, so you have to juggle that information for all lots in an area and that sounds like a lot of extra computing for no real benefit.
That said, I wouldn't mind seeing a few things added. Some vague memory of what sort of lot a place is and who might be there, so I can see my neighbors leave their homes while the bar down the street sees a fair number of people head in and out. (Which can be done without too much extra computing power, since the game would only care about who was inside and would gloss over what they were doing.) More information about each lot could be preloaded when the neighborhood loads, so instead of a full load screen you could switch gears with a shorter load pause.
And I wouldn't know about the technical feasibility of doing this, but it'd be nice if outdoors areas were treated as public and you needed to go indoors to load the full lot. (And as such, only proloaded the lot if you approached the door.) Mostly because it feels strange to need any sort of load, not to mention putting the main lot on background mode, in order to walk across an empty lot. Technically exploitable, but nothing now stops me from putting a bunch of expensive items out in the lot next door and then going there through the normal load screen.
"Open neighborhoods" would be trickier, but doable. One important element of TS3 was that everything there was dependent on items, to the point where they had to make up clever workarounds to make certain types of area possible. TS4 lots are identified by lot type, so you have to juggle that information for all lots in an area and that sounds like a lot of extra computing for no real benefit.
That said, I wouldn't mind seeing a few things added. Some vague memory of what sort of lot a place is and who might be there, so I can see my neighbors leave their homes while the bar down the street sees a fair number of people head in and out. (Which can be done without too much extra computing power, since the game would only care about who was inside and would gloss over what they were doing.) More information about each lot could be preloaded when the neighborhood loads, so instead of a full load screen you could switch gears with a shorter load pause.
And I wouldn't know about the technical feasibility of doing this, but it'd be nice if outdoors areas were treated as public and you needed to go indoors to load the full lot. (And as such, only proloaded the lot if you approached the door.) Mostly because it feels strange to need any sort of load, not to mention putting the main lot on background mode, in order to walk across an empty lot. Technically exploitable, but nothing now stops me from putting a bunch of expensive items out in the lot next door and then going there through the normal load screen.
