Opinions on emotions?

I'm have mixed feelings on them, though as they are in the game now I have a mostly negative opinion on them. Basically I think they have potential and even some minor tweaking could help, but right now I think they're too fake feeling and don't add much meaningful - imo. I do like some of the subtle animation/tone changes they have in a certain emotion however.

Happy is a bit too prevalent, and it boosts other positive emotions. Because of that if your sim has a negative emotion it can be easily buried under a slew of superficial happy moodlets, like nicely decorated. This also causes them to switch emotions far too fast, like jumping from sad to happy to playful in under a minute.

Tying into that, emotions are influenced too easily by decor. If your sim is angry from an annoying conversation or sad about witnessing death, they shouldn't suddenly be peachy because the room they're in has a painting and a flower vase. I don't think decor should influence emotions at all unless you choose to make them do so, like items with an emotional aura.

I also don't like how currently many emotions don't affect your sim enough and are instead mostly used to make building a certain skill faster, or how you're encouraged to manipulate their emotions like getting them in a required mood for work, doing an action for X amount of time while in a certain mood, etc.

Believe it or not I've never played sims 1-3 before and am only starting with sim 4 and freeplay so I might not be in the position so say anything. However I watch a lot of lps from previous games and have a general idea of what's going on. To me emotions in sims 4 is just an additional feature to the game, one of the "gimmicks" to add varieties to the gameplay. I like it, it makes the characters more intimate and the characters are what I care about most in sims games.

It does sometimes get in the way when your focus in the game is more on other aspects. You don't want to add one more possible way of dying bc of extreme emotions, you don't want them to be too tense/uncomfortable to not do sth you're trying to make them do, you don't want certain interactions to not appear when your sim is "not in the mood".

If you come from a sims 1-3 background I understand that those additional "inconvenience" would draw your attention more than the "good" aspects do, cuz getting used to sth. new is always hard (I personally never try to lol). But to me as a new simmer, I'm okay with it and I kinda like it since I'm not entirely bored with the game yet. XDDDDDD

I hate them. They don't even feel like real emotions, but a MMO buff system. Emotions are so unbalanced to being so happy all the time and traits don't really have an effect on them. If anything, the Sims 4 feels the most robotic to me in that all the Sims feel like the Sims 3 Into the Future Plumbot life states. Reactions being a hit and miss don't help matters too. Makes it hard to get emotionally attached to this generation of Sims. Sims act like they have short and long term memory loss. It is really depressing to watch sometimes.

I think manipulating emotions was supposed to be the replacement for meeting a sims' need bars. Not always, but many times they will take care of their own needs (remember the "smarter sims" line?), so the challenge to the player was to manipulate their emotions in order to 'level up' and unlock content.

So IMO they certainly ARE a buff system and personally I am not the least bit interested in trying to put them in various emotional states for some kind of "gamey" purpose. That's not what the sims were ever about, IMO. The last time I tried to play, several months ago, the sims were doing their own thing, chatting, cooking, skilling, etc. I felt like an observer just watching their (un-amusing) chat, chat, chatting, and I really felt nothing for those sims.

I don’t think they’re done properly. I agree they do feel like buffs to reach certain goals easier, and they make all the sims clones. I already mentioned it in some threads, and plenty of people also did, but when two sims are experiencing the same emotion they’re basically clones – they have the same animations, the same whims, the same autonomous actions, the same expressions, the same everything. Emotions shouldn’t be so shallow and override traits, they should be filtered through them – a loner shouldn’t want to meet someone new or hug someone when happy; however, if they were in a happy relationship they could want to hug that particular sim. Energised shouldn’t be tied to exercising, for example an ambitious sim could want to raise a skill level; flirty shouldn’t make all sims want to perform romantic interactions with random sims unless they have such an aspiration.

Also I actually believe than emotions don’t seem a revolutionising feature – as far as I’m concerned, they seem to be doable as an EP for TS3 – they’re basically categorised moodlets, where each category has its own unique animations, buffs, and interactions. TS3 also has moodlets – so they would just need categorising and adding those things, and it’d be no different to the TS4 system. TS2 sims seemed more emotional due to the memory system – they could get sad or angry even after a few days later. Sims in TS4 completely forget that something happened after the moodlet related to it disappears, and some seem to be a pure decoration – in TS3 sims sometimes performed a certain animation while having a moodlet, in TS4 it’s all depending on which emotion is active at a certain moment – e.g. if they have an inspired and angry moodlets and the value of inspired is higher, they don’t seem angry even a little bit. In TS3 I saw a townie crying because someone broke his heart, and that surely wasn’t the only moodlet they had (it’s actually not that easy to have just one moodlet in TS3, lots of things make them appear).

And I think that happy shouldn’t be the default mood – it basically is, because there are to many things that can cause it – if a sim is a loner that loves outdoors, they have two happy moodlets when they’re alone outside, which means a wide smile from ear to ear almost all the time. That is not realistic. Happy should be a special emotion caused by exceptional events, like maxing out a skill, reaching a milestone in an aspiration, finding love and so on. Those examples I mentioned should give fine moodlets, so then it’s harder to make a sim feel bad, but then they would be... just fine. Not grinning all the time, but feeling fine. I’m a loner and I’m alone at this moment – and I don’t have an extremely wide smile, I just feel fine and much more comfortable than in a crowd.

I don't like the Mood swings, you try to do something and there goes your sim, weather to happy to do the simple task YOU want them to do, while they sit there every 3 sec laughing or they walk into another room and are to mad to even do it.
They spend to much time on their emotions then letting you play your game, your way.
It's way to over emotional and to bipolar.
Talk about mood swings.

It's a lousy system, solely designed to be manipulated in order to meet the RPG-style goals instead of reflecting what it should - our sims reaction to the people and events around them, affecting their lives. Too many buffs, lasting too long, for trivial reasons. Who really goes out brimming with confidence just because they've brushed their teeth? Rather there should be a potential anti-social penalty if you haven't brushed for a time, similar to not bathing.
Also there are not enough emotions- where's fear for instance? And we need more than 3 traits ( and for them to actually tie in to emotions) to create more rounded individual characters. ATM most sims all seem like clones emotionally. I could go on forever, but life's too short! :s

They're useless and get in the way. They don't add anything new to the game and they do not make the sims more individual. If two sims have the same emotion, they're basically the same person. The wants and fears from Sims 2 or even the moodlets from Sims 3 worked much better.

It's absolutely not for me, that's for sure. I don't like the focus on the emotions, I don't like emotions being part of gameplay. I played Sims 2 last week and at one point some townie visited my sims. She apparently had a bad temper, because even though she rang our door, as soon as my sim started talking friendly to her, she behaved nasty. My sim didn't like that, so we decided to teach her a lesson :mrgreen: by pulling some pranks (throw a water balloon, giving her a buzz handshake) and the atmosphere reached below sea level pretty fast :D So in the end they were really mad at each other, pushing each other and it ended by a threat of the other sim she would bad-mouth my sim in public. My sim apologized and later the other sim phoned her twice to have a chat, clearly to improve the relationship again because it did.
Now, that's emotions for me. I could clearly see what they were feeling, I had some choices how to treat the quarrel and that's more than enough for me. The pushing was utterly funny to watch by the way.

I don't need my game to tell me with little jingles (they irritate me, don't know why) and a pic of my sim at the bottom showing the mood they're having how they feel. To me that feels like I'm a little kid learning about emotions.

http://karlamclaren.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/understanding.jpg

I also don't like it they can end up having moods by doing totally unrelated things (like watching a painting or taking a shower). The reason I had fun with my quarreling sim, was that I could see it building up in a natural way. When people behave unpleasantly we get mad at them. And afterwards we can make it worse (by fighting) or better (by apologizing). I can relate to that, that's what emotions are about for me. I also prefer that though my sim was angry with that woman, she was normal and loving to her own husband. In Sims 4 when something makes them angry, they're angry in every situation following. When they are flirty they flirt with anyone. Not just with that one particular sim.

They need tweaking. And the moodlet system needs to go. For TS4 I would like an option to hide the moodlets like in TS3's UI. It just breaks immersion for me.