Lack of Long-term gameplay in TS4

"@drake_mccarty;c-17554896" wrote:

"NXOR007;c-17554631" wrote:

"@bethyGrace;c-17554014" wrote:
The thing is, there's no real conflict. No consequences. No real motivation.

The Sims have no real personalities, so they get along with everyone, will do everything, and don't care about anything.

You can set an aspiration for the Sim, completely ignore it, and they won't care at all. In The Sims 2, if I ignore my sim's wants and aspiration, or if they have their worst fears come true, they'll end up a depressed little pixel person having a mental breakdown on the floor. And that is AWESOME.

But in The Sims 4, they don't actually want anything. They don't fear anything. There's nothing to really motivate you to explore the Sims and their personalities. The traits are often one-dimensional, the aspirations are super linear. I actually really dislike having all of the tiered, small goals - I'd rather have a fortune Sim who wants to be super rich, and then I can get them there in a number of different ways... not by placing x amounts of columns in their house.

It is a simulation game - the characters should therefore be simulated. You set it up, press play, and see what happens. Not constantly try to make things happen with little to no input from the characters themselves.

We have the emotions system... okay, but, what fun is that if every sim has basically the same emotional response to events that happen in the game? And why is Nancy Landgraab diving in dumpsters? The game makes no sense, the characters have no depth, they are constantly performing actions that make no sense for their "character".

Yes, story progression would help. But I truly believe that the lack of individual personality, wants, fears, interests and consequences is the core issue of the game.

Absolutely. Very little resources have been used to explore and create deeper personalities and true character for the sims in the 4th title, even if they were advertised and sold that way. Ultimately they have no more character than any of the sims in The Sims Mobile or The Sims Free Play.

Aside from an Open World, the catalogue of TS4's Build/Buy options, World Choice and Game Play Objects is perhaps bigger and fancier than its predecessors. Yes, there are objects and life states missing that previous titles do have, but none of that bling helps to actually define the true character depth of the sims. The little people end up doing and 'feeling' exactly the same. That's why the community constantly begs for another theme pack and game play objects to make-believe that their sims somehow has a unique personality:

"Maybe this object or system will somehow make my sim feel unique without me having to imagine it all, or pretend not to see my sim actually doesn't care about a. darn. thing. whatsoever." The sims community is incredibly loyal and hopeful.

I do hope its a learning curve for the studio. There's no way I believe the creative developers don't care. Life simulation is a very tricky thing as there are innumerable aspects to keep in mind, especially with technology AND society changing at the same time. What worked in the Sims 2 or 3 long ago, may not work in current times. I wish it was simpler than that, but alas.

I very much hope more emphasis will be put on the character depth of sims in the future. It will make all the difference.

Learning curve? They built the tech for this game in-house. They are the ones who SHOULD know how to work with it, it’s not like they leased out a game engine from some other developer. They also have previous games to examine and see how they function, because they have all the source code available to them since they designed those too. Too many excuses! It’s been 6 years

These are excuses based on poor decisions made at the start of development though. Some things can't be fixed after 6 years because they weren't implemented at the beginning, where it should have been. TS4 was to have a huge online feature and the engine was built for that and in such a way that low spec machines could even run it, without having to sacrifice too much of the graphics aspect of the game.

All the focus has been put into building tech that can run an aesthetically pleasing game. Sims 3 couldn't release any more EPs because the game engine that supported the open world system was burning up the player's machines. Open world was scrapped and sacrificed in order to run TS4 on pretty much any machine. On top of that, the online feature was also scrapped because they quickly learned it had failed with SimCity, so TS4 got a quick overhaul and all there was left was a half single player game that would look really pretty on any machine.

I think the fact that TS4 wasn't built for beefier computers is part of the problem. Of course they did not want to lose an already established player base. Eventually the game got an upgrade to work on 64bit machines only, but this has nothing to do with building a system for better in-depth gameplay. The 64bit support is only there so that TS4 can add more aesthetically pleasing content while another title is in development.

I don't believe TS4 will get any more extensive game play systems. It will get variations on what it currently has, but nothing beyond that. The core engine is already in a fixed state.
So yes, I hope they're learning as they go, when moving onto production of a successor. And that focus is not on aesthetics and online game play only. I know there is a huge chance that the next iteration will support VR as well. But if true immersion is being overlooked -unique personalities and behaviour for sims and anything that did work better in previous games- then it's going to be the same thing all over, just maybe in a slightly prettier dress.