List Your Sims 4 Pros and Cons
Every game has its glowing virtues and horrible sins, and TS4 is no exception. This thread is a place to name our most favorite and most despised aspects of The Sims 4.
My list?:
Pros
1. The lifting of irritating and unrealistic restrictions on pre-adult life stages. No more arbitrary hard curfews to ruin your weekday hangout sessions for Children and Teens (Maybe those of you who barely ever had your kids do their homework didn't mind, but for players like me who always have our kids do their homework as soon as they get home unless their fun meter is dangerously low, those herd curfews were a pain in the hiney!), no more busybody social workers preventing you from playing a family with working parents and latchkey kids, no more having Children restricted to eating snacks and leftovers because they're not allowed to make a simple sandwich or bowl of cereal, no more bland babydoll Toddlers that were totally helpless and sickeningly tame. In TS4, we've got the most fun Toddlers ever in terms of being playable sims (They climb the stairs alone or in pairs, they play in the toilet bowl! They tear up the shelves, and disrobe themselves! They're Toddlers, yeah!), no overzealous social worker or stupid universal hard curfews for NPC sims to mess up your fun, Children can eat actual healthy food without needing an Adult or Teen to cook for them...If they could just patch in "Cops and Robbers", "Tag", and the other non-object play interactions and the ability to send the parents out of the house for a set number of in-game hours so our Teens could have truly wild house parties, then TS4's pre-adult sims would be just about perfect. Some may argue that we also need to unglue Babies from their cribs, I never took them out of the nursery in TS2 because of the sims' bad habit of tossing their babies on the floor to do fun things, so I'm cool with the little bundles of joy being stuck to the crib.
2. Buildings are easier to remodel. No more knocking down walls to resize rooms and buildings. Now, we've got handy arrows to push and pull that allow us to tweak our builds as easily as molding clay. It's a small improvement, but it impacts the efficiency of our building process in a big way.
3. Create-A-Sim is incredible on the body/face end of things. We can tweak our sims' facial features to be as cartoonish or realistic as we see fit, we can give them impossibly buff/voluptuous bods or we can give them the most unremarkably average figures ever, we can even choose whether our sims of either gender have a masculine or feminine build. The tagline "You Rule"may not apply to a lot of things in this game, but when it comes to the character creator it's pretty spot-on (Yes, even without a color wheel or height slider.).
4. Supernatural sims are shaping up to be really fun to play. Aliens came along with GTW and are probably the best part of that pack with their unique looks and some fun interactions. Vampires are even better, with their customization powers and weaknesses that allow us to make our vamps as Classic Hollywood or Modern Urban Fantasy as we want. The way things are going, I've got a good feeling about werewolves, fairies, merfolk, and witchcraft (which I hope they'll make into a skill that any sim can learn like TS2 instead of being a witch being a non-layerable lifestate like TS3).
Cons
1. Not nearly enough gameplay options. We just got some control over population culling, but we still don't have the ability to control things like townie generation, full story progression, and so-on. MC Command Center proves that those options can be given to us players, but we still haven't gotten everything officially patched in. What are they, scared we'll fry our computers from getting too option happy and sue them?
2. No official custom content creation tool. TS2 came packaged with BodyShop, which allowed players to make their own custom recolors and texture edits of existing CAS items and hair styles. Later, HomeCrafter was also released to let us make our own custom build mode components, like floor and wall textures. TS3 gave us Create-A-Style and a color wheel that allowed us to do that stuff on the fly in-game. TS4...we have to download a third-party application to make even the simplest of CC. We should have moved forward with customization options for players, not backward. Some sort of official external custom content editor or an internal customization system is just something that TS4 should have had at or not long after launch, period.
3. Unnatural hair colors are not heritable or available to sims younger than Teen. I know this probably dates back to a complaint that some players had in TS3 where if they changed a sim's hair color to something crazy, the kids could inherit it even if it wasn't the parent's born/natural hair color...but, come on. We should have gotten a way to define a sim's natural hair color in TS4 instead of just banning Child and Toddler sims from having unusual hair colors. Having only natural hair colors available to the younger two age groups without mods is unacceptable.
4. No Create-A-World. In TS2, I never played the pre-made worlds. I always made my own neighborhoods, to build and grow entirely based on my tastes and gameplay needs. In TS4, all we have is Maxis-made worlds to play and build in and, honestly, it can get just a little stale playing in Willow Creek or Newcrest or Oasis Springs for the umpteenmillionth time, with buying an expansion pack being your only chance to play someplace different...which will no doubt grow stale too soon enough. The worlds are beautiful, sure...but it's just not the same as building your own little town from scratch.
5. The emotions system is an unbalanced joke due to too many items, events, and actions that give Happy moodlets and there being no booster emotion for negative moods. As a result, even if your sim has an emotional trait that gives them negative emotional moodlets like Sad or Angry, they'll still be either straight-up happy or in some sort of productive mood. Only Toddlers are immune to this plague of joy due to their resistance to environmental Happy moodlets (and thank goodness for that). Uncomfortable would make a grand booster emotion for negative moods because it's just as easy to come by as Happy...but they haven't patched that counterbalance into the game yet. Yes, there are mods that can help...but mods can be broken by patches, and since these are things people make in their spare time, sometimes the updates are slow in coming or the mod isn't maintained at all due to a loss of interest by the maker or real life drama. Modders shouldn't be left to fix everything...especially not an integral game mechanic that is about as balanced as a scale with a cricket on one side and a brachiosaurus on the other.
Those are my biggest Sims 4 pros and cons. What are yours?
My list?:
Pros
1. The lifting of irritating and unrealistic restrictions on pre-adult life stages. No more arbitrary hard curfews to ruin your weekday hangout sessions for Children and Teens (Maybe those of you who barely ever had your kids do their homework didn't mind, but for players like me who always have our kids do their homework as soon as they get home unless their fun meter is dangerously low, those herd curfews were a pain in the hiney!), no more busybody social workers preventing you from playing a family with working parents and latchkey kids, no more having Children restricted to eating snacks and leftovers because they're not allowed to make a simple sandwich or bowl of cereal, no more bland babydoll Toddlers that were totally helpless and sickeningly tame. In TS4, we've got the most fun Toddlers ever in terms of being playable sims (They climb the stairs alone or in pairs, they play in the toilet bowl! They tear up the shelves, and disrobe themselves! They're Toddlers, yeah!), no overzealous social worker or stupid universal hard curfews for NPC sims to mess up your fun, Children can eat actual healthy food without needing an Adult or Teen to cook for them...If they could just patch in "Cops and Robbers", "Tag", and the other non-object play interactions and the ability to send the parents out of the house for a set number of in-game hours so our Teens could have truly wild house parties, then TS4's pre-adult sims would be just about perfect. Some may argue that we also need to unglue Babies from their cribs, I never took them out of the nursery in TS2 because of the sims' bad habit of tossing their babies on the floor to do fun things, so I'm cool with the little bundles of joy being stuck to the crib.
2. Buildings are easier to remodel. No more knocking down walls to resize rooms and buildings. Now, we've got handy arrows to push and pull that allow us to tweak our builds as easily as molding clay. It's a small improvement, but it impacts the efficiency of our building process in a big way.
3. Create-A-Sim is incredible on the body/face end of things. We can tweak our sims' facial features to be as cartoonish or realistic as we see fit, we can give them impossibly buff/voluptuous bods or we can give them the most unremarkably average figures ever, we can even choose whether our sims of either gender have a masculine or feminine build. The tagline "You Rule"may not apply to a lot of things in this game, but when it comes to the character creator it's pretty spot-on (Yes, even without a color wheel or height slider.).
4. Supernatural sims are shaping up to be really fun to play. Aliens came along with GTW and are probably the best part of that pack with their unique looks and some fun interactions. Vampires are even better, with their customization powers and weaknesses that allow us to make our vamps as Classic Hollywood or Modern Urban Fantasy as we want. The way things are going, I've got a good feeling about werewolves, fairies, merfolk, and witchcraft (which I hope they'll make into a skill that any sim can learn like TS2 instead of being a witch being a non-layerable lifestate like TS3).
Cons
1. Not nearly enough gameplay options. We just got some control over population culling, but we still don't have the ability to control things like townie generation, full story progression, and so-on. MC Command Center proves that those options can be given to us players, but we still haven't gotten everything officially patched in. What are they, scared we'll fry our computers from getting too option happy and sue them?
2. No official custom content creation tool. TS2 came packaged with BodyShop, which allowed players to make their own custom recolors and texture edits of existing CAS items and hair styles. Later, HomeCrafter was also released to let us make our own custom build mode components, like floor and wall textures. TS3 gave us Create-A-Style and a color wheel that allowed us to do that stuff on the fly in-game. TS4...we have to download a third-party application to make even the simplest of CC. We should have moved forward with customization options for players, not backward. Some sort of official external custom content editor or an internal customization system is just something that TS4 should have had at or not long after launch, period.
3. Unnatural hair colors are not heritable or available to sims younger than Teen. I know this probably dates back to a complaint that some players had in TS3 where if they changed a sim's hair color to something crazy, the kids could inherit it even if it wasn't the parent's born/natural hair color...but, come on. We should have gotten a way to define a sim's natural hair color in TS4 instead of just banning Child and Toddler sims from having unusual hair colors. Having only natural hair colors available to the younger two age groups without mods is unacceptable.
4. No Create-A-World. In TS2, I never played the pre-made worlds. I always made my own neighborhoods, to build and grow entirely based on my tastes and gameplay needs. In TS4, all we have is Maxis-made worlds to play and build in and, honestly, it can get just a little stale playing in Willow Creek or Newcrest or Oasis Springs for the umpteenmillionth time, with buying an expansion pack being your only chance to play someplace different...which will no doubt grow stale too soon enough. The worlds are beautiful, sure...but it's just not the same as building your own little town from scratch.
5. The emotions system is an unbalanced joke due to too many items, events, and actions that give Happy moodlets and there being no booster emotion for negative moods. As a result, even if your sim has an emotional trait that gives them negative emotional moodlets like Sad or Angry, they'll still be either straight-up happy or in some sort of productive mood. Only Toddlers are immune to this plague of joy due to their resistance to environmental Happy moodlets (and thank goodness for that). Uncomfortable would make a grand booster emotion for negative moods because it's just as easy to come by as Happy...but they haven't patched that counterbalance into the game yet. Yes, there are mods that can help...but mods can be broken by patches, and since these are things people make in their spare time, sometimes the updates are slow in coming or the mod isn't maintained at all due to a loss of interest by the maker or real life drama. Modders shouldn't be left to fix everything...especially not an integral game mechanic that is about as balanced as a scale with a cricket on one side and a brachiosaurus on the other.
Those are my biggest Sims 4 pros and cons. What are yours?
