Open Neighborhood Rather than Open World
In TS3 the entire world was open and i think this contributed to difficulty running the game. In TS4 the active lot and a portion of the neighborhood within the world is open. I'm not sure if this can...
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"jackjack_k;c-16022062" wrote:
I don't understand the hate for backdrops. Every good game should have them.
Open World games have them too (Skyrim & GTA V both have them).
It's embarrassing and poor design when a world suddenly comes to a halt because the no one bothered to make backdrops. Your world literally stops as soon as you reach the playable area border.
The Sims 3 would have looked a lot better had their been backdrops surrounding the explorable area. The size difference wouldn't have changed. All they had to do was make the worlds bigger but keep the routable area the same.
It's grating to see a City like Bridgeport literally be an island the size of a small town. Had there been a city that continued around Bridgeport it would have looked a lot better.
The Sims 3 on Xbox/PS have backdrops in it's worlds alongside the normal world and it looks great. Not just distant terrain, but houses, objects, decorative pieces. Not just endless Ocean.
It was nice to play a Sims 3 world that wasn't a town on a random island.
Worlds in The Sims 3 had a 'distant terrain' object that honestly serves the same purpose as the backdrops in Sims 4. The 'playable area' did not extend to the border of the map in any world, nor did the camera. There was a point of collision between the DT object and the terrain that hid the connection.
Bridgeport wasn't an island, it was a peninsula. The distant terrain wraps around the side making the 'ocean' more of a gulf and continues backward.
I don't know what you were doing to see nothing but oceans in Sims 3, because that's not possible using the standard camera mode. Sure you can see that using camera-man mode and scrolling to the unroutable edges of the map, but you can see the same thing in 4 except it's not ocean it's nothing because Sims 4's world(s) are floating decorative pieces assembled to look like a world.
