Missing Emotion

They should add the fear (Scared) emotion. It's long overdue.

> @MaggieMarley said:
> GrumpyGlowfish wrote: »
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> Well, I don't think I'd want fear to add to the discrimination against aliens that is already going on in the game. It's weird how every sim, independent of their traits, reacts negatively to finding out that someone else is an alien. So if fear (either as a new emotion or some kind of trait) ever becomes a thing, I'd like to decide for myself who or what my sims are afraid of.
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> @GrumpyGlowfish I do agree with you on the alien discrimination. My doctor sim (who is a hybrid alien himself) was giving one of his patients (incidentally, they were an uncle or cousin or something) an X-ray scan. The patient was an alien and the scan showed this. Then, a horrible notification popped up saying something along the lines of “Alek has discovered that X is an alien. I don’t know what it (the game’s italics, not mine) expects from this visit, but let’s pretend as if we haven’t noticed”. It - the game called an alien it. To me that was just too close to speciesism and made me uncomfortable. I love my aliens.

I think the discimination against aliens is valuable in so far that it reflects our society, where there is a lot of debate regarding migration. I use it in my plays where I got two politicians competing for power, where the migration from Xisam is the most important topic. One is pro the other one wants to send them all back to Xisam.

True and that's where Traits would come in. Traits like Coward, Courageous, or Nihilistic could individualize how a Sim approaches potentially frightful circumstances.

Fear would be a great addition to emotions. Sims can then develop phobias, which they may choose to overcome or just deal with everyday

I'm still hoping we get more elements of fear in the game. We do have interactions that can mimic it already with the shock, run away and the one where they jump around holding their face. I doubt they would add a new emotion but this would be the one I'd want if it's added in.
If all else fails at the end of the series I hope a modder takes this project in hand and works it in somehow. Sounds like a huge overhaul though.. no clue what it would entail to pull off.

I would guess some shade of red. Many mood colours repeat with variations in hue and there's already an existing association, both in RL and in past Sims games, between red and fear. Red is used in The Sims 4 only for Anger as far as I can recall, making it one of the few non-repeating colours thus far. It would make sense on multiple levels.

If Dazed hadn't been light purple, I would say fear should be that.

Our pets can be afraid, and they're a member of our household.

However I maintain that making fear its own emotion would need a lot of work.

I've got a bit of thing about toddlers being 'sad' and older Sims being 'tense' when 'scared' is the proper emotion. I agree, though, that it would be fairly difficult to implement - you would need to change the moodlets generated by dozens of interactions and circumstances, and then tune them appropriately.

We've seen that tuning can be a bit of a challenge with Sims laughing themselves to death over clean laundry or going into a two-day funk over the death of a relative they've never met. I don't mean that sarcastically - in some cases, other moodlets will mask the negative moodlet. I never had a laundry death, and the mourning moodlet seems to work well for the adult in my house - she is occasionally 'very sad', but perks up when she picks up some positive moodlets. That's fairly realistic, really. It doesn't work as well for kids and especially toddlers because they don't get some of the adult buffs, and go into a funk for hours.

You don't want to under-tune, either, because then the moodlet is overwhelmed. It wouldn't make sense for a Sim to go back and forth between being 'happy' and 'scared' - if they're scared, they should be scared until the scary thing goes away, or, in the case of kids and tots, a parent comforts them. At the same time, you don't want your adult Sims scared to death because the moodlet is too powerful.

When the Carefree Trait is in effect things get even more out of whack. The times a Tense Moodlet would come up, they end up Angry, or Sad, or some other nonsense that's even farther removed from what they ought to be feeling. That said, since emotions can already overwrite each other in this way, substituting one emotion when another is blocked, it may not be as hard to patch in Fear as some may suppose. It would just add another layer to the hierarchy. During a thunderstorm, they might feel afraid, but if they have a trait that blocks or changes Fear, they might become Tense, then with Carefree, it might sub in something else as it already does.

In the console Sims 2, Fears were in red while wants were... I think green (except the mandatory Gold Wants). Red is also associated in real life with frightful things like bloodshed (and by extension, death), monsters (red glowing eyes), devils and demons, fire, etc. A dark or muted shade of red, distinct from the one used for Anger, could be a good option. Most of the other colours have been repeated. Blue (Sad, Inspired & Confident), Pink (Playful & Flirty), Purple (Focused & Dazed), Yellow (Energized & Embarrassed),. I think Green may be used for something other than Happy, but I forget. As far as I'm fairly certain, only Orange (Tense) and Red (Angry) haven't been used more than once.