LGR Nifty Knitting Review
https://twitter.com/lazygamereviews/status/1289201076676079622?s=19
Forum Discussion
I’m with LGR that this game will not improve much more in the future to come. I like his honesty and I can see his sadness in the video, and that means he cares about The Sims, but not about TS4.
I can understand that there’s a huge number of players with different playstyles and different opinions. Not everybody will like certain packs and that is fine and logical. I do complain about the quality of these packs and the whole game itself. It started wrongly with too many restrictions for a sandbox game and the lack of too many features.
TS4 has no open world, no Create a Style and no world customization which make a huge impact on the whole game. The Open World feature is not just that you don’t have loading screens, it means that the whole world, all the Sims in it progress with you in every single second of gameplay. All actions have consequences, some good and some bad.
Talking about consequences, you just have to play TS3 for a few minutes to realise that people fight on the street, you can get insulted, relationships are harder to achieve, money is way much harder to get, you can get robbed, you can get angry or sad… Lots of things could happen to you in TS3, while in the TS4 everything is perfect and nothing out of the ordinary happens. TS4 is a game where there is no challenge for anything at all, killing a sim is almost impossible. In the TS3 when you get out of your home you really don’t know what will happen, while in the TS4 you already know: nothing.
Animations are way too childish, and sometimes way too feminine. When you play a couple, sometimes the responses of the man to a romantic interaction are too feminine and that breaks my immersion. If my Sim is brave and tough why should he behave like a child or a woman?
Some animations happen so frequently that they are not something funny anymore. The murphy bed breaks too often, lightning breaks things in the yard too often, and a huge list of things that should be funny when they happen once in a while.
Just play the TS3 a bit to see tons and tons of little features that adds a lot of depth: throwing food gives you a negative moodlet of “wasting food”, clocks show the real time, you can go to the grocery to buy food, you can make your bed… It’s an endless list of little things that don’t have anything to do with more and more content, all these are already in the base game.
Emotions take over any trait that your Sim has, so all focused Sims behaves exactly the same no matter what traits he or she has. With the emotion system traits are almost useless, meaning there are no unique personalities. All the sims behave the same way. Plain game, plain personalities.
The Lifetime rewards system of TS3 is way much better than in TS4. I like the idea of having a big goal to achieve that will be hard to get. This goal will define his personality, aspirations, career and job. Having a happy Sim will increase his Lifetime Happiness score, even when sleeping: having a good and comfortable bed, next to cosy fireplace in a room well decorated and with good views affects the happiness of the sim and his Lifetime Happiness score. In TS4 you can have multiple lifetime goals, some of them you can’t achieve unless you change for job… it doesn’t make sense.
Last EP is a good example of what a game company should never ever do. How is it possible that the main features of your game don’t work? I’m not talking about some minor bugs, no, I’m talking about the main features of the game: eco footprint always changes to neutral no matter what you do, some NAPs can ruin your game… This means that they don’t test the game. I repeat: THESE ARE MAIN FEATURES that we all discovered just by playing the game a few hours.
EPs give separate features that can only be played in the world of the EP. Only the new world in Eco Lifestyle can show all the things of the pack while the other worlds only show a cough and some clouds in the distance. Nothing more. You can only swim in the ocean in Sulany. Really? You can only go hiking/having a walk in the forest. Really? Rumour says that maybe there could be a winter activities pack. I’m sure it will come with a new world, probably a one with mountains but many of the new activities will be only playable in that world… it would probably be a new disappointment.
Apartments are another disappointment. Way too many restrictions. Would it be too difficult to let us redistribute the space of the floor? I can accept that we can’t change the exterior of the building (that’s realistic) but forcing us live in these apartments with almost no customization is not right. There is a nice apartment in the Spice Market district that has a balcony but the “Needs TLC” trait. Even if you change the trait with mods and remove all the items related to this trait it still has odd smells, bugs, etc. Really? The only apartment in the neighbourhood with balcony and it is useless? Some other apartments have very tall walls. The Spire Apartments is one of my favourite because it has good views, a balcony and plenty of space, but the space feels like a narrow tube with all these tall walls. If you place more than three rooms in a floor and don’t play with walls down you have to play from above to see what your sim is doing. Wrong choice. Could we change the height of the whole apartment floor? Apart from that, we cannot create our own apartments. Is it too difficult to add a shell so we can place it anywhere and have our own apartment?
Some worlds are ridiculously small. I don’t like to play a world knowing I only have one neighbour and the rest is just a decoration. Besides, If I’m playing a DJ who is single and loves the big city: why should he/she go to the desert to just read a book? Or go to the mountains to have a coffee? It breaks my immersion. I need a world with plenty of lots to have a library, a gym, a bar, a disco, … all the things my sim will need in that world. Developers say that big worlds affect the performance. I really don’t know why because only the neighbourhood you’re in is loaded, not the entire world, but I’m not an expert on The Sims code, so it must be true. What if we could disable the worlds we don’t use without disabling the whole pack? That would solve the performance issue and we could have bigger worlds.
I also don’t like that EA is more focused on releasing more content than fixing the huge amount of bugs we’re still experiencing. Some people say that there are separate teams working on different things… It don’t find it ethically right to have a certain amount of developers working on new content knowing that many people’s game is ruined because of the previous EP. I payed 40€ for a pack that I cannot play because of the bugs and I see EA excited about releasing a new pack… I don’t find it ethically right.
This game has many flaws in the base game and that is why it will not improve much more. EA instead of fixing these things like the emotion system, apartments, swimmable oceans, etc., it is just focused on releasing more swallow content of poor quality that you can only play in a certain world, in a certain way, with lots of restrictions and poor customization. This game is not a sandbox anymore and above all, it is not a life simulator. It’s a beautiful empty shell.
Peace!
I can understand that there’s a huge number of players with different playstyles and different opinions. Not everybody will like certain packs and that is fine and logical. I do complain about the quality of these packs and the whole game itself. It started wrongly with too many restrictions for a sandbox game and the lack of too many features.
TS4 has no open world, no Create a Style and no world customization which make a huge impact on the whole game. The Open World feature is not just that you don’t have loading screens, it means that the whole world, all the Sims in it progress with you in every single second of gameplay. All actions have consequences, some good and some bad.
Talking about consequences, you just have to play TS3 for a few minutes to realise that people fight on the street, you can get insulted, relationships are harder to achieve, money is way much harder to get, you can get robbed, you can get angry or sad… Lots of things could happen to you in TS3, while in the TS4 everything is perfect and nothing out of the ordinary happens. TS4 is a game where there is no challenge for anything at all, killing a sim is almost impossible. In the TS3 when you get out of your home you really don’t know what will happen, while in the TS4 you already know: nothing.
Animations are way too childish, and sometimes way too feminine. When you play a couple, sometimes the responses of the man to a romantic interaction are too feminine and that breaks my immersion. If my Sim is brave and tough why should he behave like a child or a woman?
Some animations happen so frequently that they are not something funny anymore. The murphy bed breaks too often, lightning breaks things in the yard too often, and a huge list of things that should be funny when they happen once in a while.
Just play the TS3 a bit to see tons and tons of little features that adds a lot of depth: throwing food gives you a negative moodlet of “wasting food”, clocks show the real time, you can go to the grocery to buy food, you can make your bed… It’s an endless list of little things that don’t have anything to do with more and more content, all these are already in the base game.
Emotions take over any trait that your Sim has, so all focused Sims behaves exactly the same no matter what traits he or she has. With the emotion system traits are almost useless, meaning there are no unique personalities. All the sims behave the same way. Plain game, plain personalities.
The Lifetime rewards system of TS3 is way much better than in TS4. I like the idea of having a big goal to achieve that will be hard to get. This goal will define his personality, aspirations, career and job. Having a happy Sim will increase his Lifetime Happiness score, even when sleeping: having a good and comfortable bed, next to cosy fireplace in a room well decorated and with good views affects the happiness of the sim and his Lifetime Happiness score. In TS4 you can have multiple lifetime goals, some of them you can’t achieve unless you change for job… it doesn’t make sense.
Last EP is a good example of what a game company should never ever do. How is it possible that the main features of your game don’t work? I’m not talking about some minor bugs, no, I’m talking about the main features of the game: eco footprint always changes to neutral no matter what you do, some NAPs can ruin your game… This means that they don’t test the game. I repeat: THESE ARE MAIN FEATURES that we all discovered just by playing the game a few hours.
EPs give separate features that can only be played in the world of the EP. Only the new world in Eco Lifestyle can show all the things of the pack while the other worlds only show a cough and some clouds in the distance. Nothing more. You can only swim in the ocean in Sulany. Really? You can only go hiking/having a walk in the forest. Really? Rumour says that maybe there could be a winter activities pack. I’m sure it will come with a new world, probably a one with mountains but many of the new activities will be only playable in that world… it would probably be a new disappointment.
Apartments are another disappointment. Way too many restrictions. Would it be too difficult to let us redistribute the space of the floor? I can accept that we can’t change the exterior of the building (that’s realistic) but forcing us live in these apartments with almost no customization is not right. There is a nice apartment in the Spice Market district that has a balcony but the “Needs TLC” trait. Even if you change the trait with mods and remove all the items related to this trait it still has odd smells, bugs, etc. Really? The only apartment in the neighbourhood with balcony and it is useless? Some other apartments have very tall walls. The Spire Apartments is one of my favourite because it has good views, a balcony and plenty of space, but the space feels like a narrow tube with all these tall walls. If you place more than three rooms in a floor and don’t play with walls down you have to play from above to see what your sim is doing. Wrong choice. Could we change the height of the whole apartment floor? Apart from that, we cannot create our own apartments. Is it too difficult to add a shell so we can place it anywhere and have our own apartment?
Some worlds are ridiculously small. I don’t like to play a world knowing I only have one neighbour and the rest is just a decoration. Besides, If I’m playing a DJ who is single and loves the big city: why should he/she go to the desert to just read a book? Or go to the mountains to have a coffee? It breaks my immersion. I need a world with plenty of lots to have a library, a gym, a bar, a disco, … all the things my sim will need in that world. Developers say that big worlds affect the performance. I really don’t know why because only the neighbourhood you’re in is loaded, not the entire world, but I’m not an expert on The Sims code, so it must be true. What if we could disable the worlds we don’t use without disabling the whole pack? That would solve the performance issue and we could have bigger worlds.
I also don’t like that EA is more focused on releasing more content than fixing the huge amount of bugs we’re still experiencing. Some people say that there are separate teams working on different things… It don’t find it ethically right to have a certain amount of developers working on new content knowing that many people’s game is ruined because of the previous EP. I payed 40€ for a pack that I cannot play because of the bugs and I see EA excited about releasing a new pack… I don’t find it ethically right.
This game has many flaws in the base game and that is why it will not improve much more. EA instead of fixing these things like the emotion system, apartments, swimmable oceans, etc., it is just focused on releasing more swallow content of poor quality that you can only play in a certain world, in a certain way, with lots of restrictions and poor customization. This game is not a sandbox anymore and above all, it is not a life simulator. It’s a beautiful empty shell.
Peace!
