Opinions on Goth makeover?

Maybe they could of tweaked them a bit; but I liked how they were before. If Bella is supposed to be Mediterranean/Italian/Hispanic, then just give a bit more of an olive skin/warmer tone would be accurate/fitting. They went the opposite direction and gave her a cooler tone instead though. They also could of gave them them likes or dislikes, something that would help impact the gameplay.

I like Mortimer though, as someone else said, he reminds me of Gomez Addams.

The Sims 2 version of Bella Goth and Michael Bachelor, that everyone all knows and love, is a whitewashed version of their Sims 1 versions. In the Sims 1, both sims use heads labelled Asian (In the Sims 1, heads came as a complete package, ie, no changing hair and facial features), as shown below via the Sims 1 Make a Date application which displays both head and body meshes and texture names.

https://i.imgur.com/fpX30r6.png

https://i.imgur.com/D08UexF.png

While in game, this may have gone unnoticed for Bella, given that it is difficult to see facial details for Bella in Sims 1 quality, for Michael, it is just inexcusable given how obviously and clearly east Asian he looks. In the Sims 2, they just give him a completely different face. If they decided to make Bella and Michael siblings, they should've gone the way that didn't remove his entire ethnic identity. In fact, the only thing the 1 and 2 versions have in common is a name, because they certainly decided to ignore everything else, such as making the fresh out of college graduate the older brother of a woman with a school age child, and have him die of old age 25 years later.

This was partly due to the limitations of Sims 2 CAS in that every sim essentially had manipulations of the same base face, and as such ethnic minority sims were much more difficult to create.

I just felt the need to post this in here because everyone loves the Sims 2 version, and during the whole discussion about the whitewashing of older characters in the Sims 4, they would often point to the Sims 2 version. People would say that she was Latina, native American, Italian, black etc (or worse, say she was canonically that ethnicity based on no evidence whatsoever), often based on the names of her parents and grandparents that were retconned into existence and nothing else. As far as I'm aware, the above game files are the only explicit description of her ethnic identity in the entire franchise. Sure she could be those other ethnicities in part, but the main part should always have been her Asian identity.

In addition, I find the whole comparison to the Addams family very limiting. Sure, Mortimer and Gomez are similar in that they are white men in suits and moustaches, and at a stretch Cassandra due to the pigtails. But it just seems forced on Bella, how in any way is she like Morticia? It feels like if some members of the family fit, they all must fit, they cannot have individual identities.

Sims 1 is an important piece of software but canonically it was obsoleted by Sims 2. The developers adopted the lore from the first game and retconned it. This worked in part by taking branched discombobulated lore and making it more cohesive; as a result the world building in Sims 2 was phenomenal.

Note I said retconned. I don’t think the term whitewashing is applicable in that situation. Neither character had any kind of established racial identity and neither were light skinned in Sims 2. In Sims 2 Bella was “medium” skinned and Michael was “tan” skinned. Their retconned lore didn’t establish them as any particular race either, seeing how the fathers name is Hebrew and the mothers was Greek. In the end none of them were playable characters, aside from a duplicate of Bella Goth who was a townie in a separate neighborhood.

I also don’t agree with calling the Goth family in 4 “whitewashed”. Sure Cassandra may have had a lighter complexion than her Sims 2 counterpart but that’s really the only thing I give in that regard. Is a lighter skin tone really a big problem when the developers retconned the entirety of their lore out of existence? I don’t really think so. All in all I thought they looked the part.

I’m not sure if it was the developers who made the statement that Sims 4 goths were whitewashed or if that’s something players are running with, but I think they got a little carried away here in the name of representation marketing.

They should remake our poor Alex. He doesn't deserve this

I didn't play the previous versions of The Sims, but I prefer Bella from The Sims 2 Strangetown as I saw her on You Tube, I think she looks there like her character should be looking.

And if the Goths were modelled after the Addams family, then why such a worry about the skin color, because only Gomez is Hispanic and Morticia is pale white, and their children are obviously mixed.

I prefer the original Bella from the Sims 4, the new one even doesn't look like Bella.

Right now I've chosen to make the new Goths wear bags on their heads 24/7 on every new save I start and I rename their last names to NotGoth, SoNotGoth, WannabeGoth or something similar (different every time) and I evict them and move them to Strangerville.
Then I download the original Sims 4 Goths and move them in their home, they're the only Goths I accept in my saves.

Sims 4 is the only Sims game I've played, so I'm used to the whitewashed version of the family. I'm probably going to change them back. I didn't even recognize Bella or Cassandra when I saw them walking down the street after the makeover. I just thought "hey, new townies I've never noticed before", hovered over them, and nope, that's Bella and Cassandra lol.

I mean, if this is what people wanted then fine I guess, but I feel like there are so many other things they could be spending time/money on than giving townies makeovers. I can go give the townies makeovers myself if I want to. I would rather they spend time fixing bugs, adding more likes/dislikes, fixing the wants/fears, making the packs more cross compatible, etc.

I don't like the make over because the ethnicity has been changed. The Goths were an Italian family, I thought. At least I assumed that Bella Goth was from Italy from her first name and complexion. Mortimer was obviously a Goth... A Scandinavian. The children had Greek names. I suppose they were a European family. Now Bella and the entire family are Indian or at the very least South Asian. Why? Even the gothic culture originates in Europe via Christianity and European "memento Mori", so it's a bit weird in my opinion.
I don't know why the ethnicity needed to be changed but I think if you change the ethnic group, you should change the names. Call Bella, Priti or something...

Bella's gorgeous now. The others look neat. Wish they'd done likes & dislikes so I had more to comment on.

"Heronyx;c-18164200" wrote:
I don't like the make over because the ethnicity has been changed.

If you scroll up you'll see that Bella was originally described as Asian, and then in Sims 2 she is shown to have Black and Greek heritage; Sims 4 follows the latter.

"SimSoon;c-18167035" wrote:
Bella's gorgeous now. The others look neat. Wish they'd done likes & dislikes so I had more to comment on.

"Heronyx;c-18164200" wrote:
I don't like the make over because the ethnicity has been changed.

If you scroll up you'll see that Bella was originally described as Asian, and then in Sims 2 she is shown to have Black and Greek heritage; Sims 4 follows the latter.

Which TS2 Bella are you referring to? There is one in Strangetown and one in Pleasantview, though buried in a usually inaccessible bin unless you follow the complicated tombstone cheat procedure.