Please do something with The Sims

"mcorral;d-935146" wrote:
Hi,

I’ve been playing The Sims for a long time since The Sims 2. I think it is the game I’ve played the longest time. I love, The Sims, but I’m sad watching the game getting into the direction it is taking. It’s not improving, but getting worse.

I don’t post in these forums much, I really don’t know about the sales of the company. I just chat with friends who like playing The Sims and I think that I’m not alone with this kind of frustration with The Sims.

I will not make a vent post. No. I’m a positive person and I’ll try to give my humble opinion and try to give EA feedback and some things I would change.

Each version of the game had something unique that made it special in its way. TS2 had lots of actions and depth in each activity that made you discover something new each day. TS3 had an open world where you felt like part of a whole. Everything was alive in the world, every sim was progressing or doing things by themselves throughout the world. You could sit in your couch and think: “where is my friend now? What is he/she doing?”. I could take my bike and have a ride to the mountains, watching the scenery, have a sandwich in a park, fish in the pond, run across a friend on the street and go with him/her to a coffee and chat. You could recolour and place different patterns on every object. You could have generations and generations of your family, everything was connected in some way. Everything was alive in that very instant.

TS4 has good graphics and runs smoother. Just that. I don’t feel part of anything. It’s just me inside my lot. I can go to another lot and it’s me again in another lot with the same people showing up but I go to another lot and again it’s me with different people. Everything is lot-driven. There is nothing outside, just the lot. Nothing is connected. I don’t feel part of anything, it’s just me in a lot. I play a story in that lot and when I get out of it it’s gone, erased. It’s like it never happened.

Loading screens is not the problem for me. It’s ok to have loading screens if that makes the game runs better. The problem is that everything outside the lot you are in is dead and does not exist until you go somewhere else. There is no continuity in your actions.

I think EA also keeps doing the wrong choices about Expansions, packs and stuff. It is good to have different activities like going to a Jungle Adventure, for example, but once you’ve done that, you will probably won’t do that again. People keep asking over and over and over for a sandbox game, not a goal-driven game, or one-adventure game. We need more daily things to do.

I need more reactions to some situations, more specific personalities that define my sim behavior, not just some cosmetic traits that do not affect the sim much. I would like that traits were much more important in my sim life. I would like that my sim behaved differently according to the situation and other sims. For example: the way I speak to my boss should be different that the way I speak to my father.

I want to do some cooking and discover that I don’t have some ingredient and have to go to the grocery to buy it, not magically get it by opening the fridge. I would like to go to a store and buy the clothes I will wear, not just have them free. When I want to go to a lot, I need my sim at least go to the door of my house so I think: he’s leaving the house to go to the lot, not just see my sim in the couch and then in the gym. It’s not realistic, it’s just something weird which breaks continuity. If I had an argument with a friend or with my partner, I would like to have a feeling about that, not just go home and smile like nothing happened.

Nightclubs. I love nightclubs, but these are boring. I miss a mirrorball, some other effects like fog. I miss different kind of Nightclubs: posh places with disco music, old garages or warehouses with techno music, etc., each of them having different actions, styles, activities, music. I would like to be able to create new styles of music and feed them with my own music. That’s a sandbox.

Killing a NPC sim has become, at least for me, almost impossible. I tried to play an evil vampire who invited people into his castle and kill them. I tried to kill six different sims and after a sim-week they were still alive even with no food. No robberies, no evil jobs, no sarcasm in some actions. Everything is so pure and perfect that, in my opinion, is so childish. Sometimes I like to play a real life, with the good and the bad things a real life has to offer: getting robbed, be cheated by my partner, get insulted, fell on the floor, have an accident, or whatever. That’s life, not just a child tale in a Walt Disney cartoon.

Decorations are not my type as well. ¿Pink trees? ¿Trees with no leaves but some kind of green big ball up? It’s like a Walt Disney cartoon or a fantasy world. What about the city? That’s not a city.

Customization is very limited. People like me who are control freak and like to have control of everything and customize everything, don’t have the chance to change many things. Everything is so driven by the codification, so fixed, so stiff. Some worlds are so small that it’s impossible to customize to your liking because there is no room to make changes. You can’t even change trees, roads, the orientation of a lot, not even the size of the lot. Why not letting people change some aspects of the world with some prefixed patterns? Playing the game is very frustrating for me: I can’t do this because it is not allowed, I can’t do that because of the coding, I can’t place this here because there is a restriction, I can’t… I can’t…. This is not an open game. This is not a sandbox game.

Some of these changes are possible because modders are doing incredible things improving the game. Why EA doesn’t do anything at all? Shame on you!

Then, there is the empty packs and the poor base game problem. I know that the base game can’t have all we want. Companies should make money. Ok. I think the solution is, as always, a mid approach. We can get a base game with a little bit of everything, just a little bit, and then an EP taking that little bit and developing it for a whole and complete experience. For example, a base game with some kind of weather: rain, wind, snow, etc., but without much implications. After that EA could release a Seasons EP developing in more depth all the features and aspects of that, illnesses, control over the temperature and seasons, activities depending on the weather, etc. The same with Pets. We could have two different pets in the base game (cats and dogs) and in an EP we could see a complete experience with much more activities with pets, more different pets, vet job and vet clinic, and everything we can imagine. EA could make a better EP because they would have more time to develop the ideas and make the experience more complete because part of the work had already done in the base game.

I know it is almost impossible to release something that everyone would like. There will always be someone who does not like this and that, but what people is asking, demanding and shouting desperately is a sandbox game. And instead of that, EA is going to the opposite direction. Why?

I bought all the EP and many of the packs hoping the game would get better, but it is not. I love The Sims, and I really, really hate to see this game getting into this direction. I’m trying to like it, really, trying hard, but there are so many things that I don’t like that the game is not appealing much to me anymore.

This is a desperate call to EA. Please, do something about it. You can’t leave The Sims like this.

Thank you for reading me.

PD: Sorry for my mistakes. English is not my first language.

"mcorral;d-935146" wrote:

I want to do some cooking and discover that I don’t have some ingredient and have to go to the grocery to buy it, not magically get it by opening the fridge. I would like to go to a store and buy the clothes I will wear, not just have them free.

"Jordan061102;c-16326883" wrote:
I'm right with you. But since 2017, this game go in the good direction.

Nightclubs. I love nightclubs, but these are boring. I miss a mirrorball, some other effects like fog. I miss different kind of Nightclubs: posh places with disco music, old garages or warehouses with techno music, etc., each of them having different actions, styles, activities, music. I would like to be able to create new styles of music and feed them with my own music. That’s a sandbox.

Killing a NPC sim has become, at least for me, almost impossible. I tried to play an evil vampire who invited people into his castle and kill them. I tried to kill six different sims and after a sim-week they were still alive even with no food. No robberies, no evil jobs, no sarcasm in some actions. Everything is so pure and perfect that, in my opinion, is so childish. Sometimes I like to play a real life, with the good and the bad things a real life has to offer: getting robbed, be cheated by my partner, get insulted, fell on the floor, have an accident, or whatever. That’s life, not just a child tale in a Walt Disney cartoon.

I think EA also keeps doing the wrong choices about Expansions, packs and stuff. It is good to have different activities like going to a Jungle Adventure, for example, but once you’ve done that, you will probably won’t do that again. People keep asking over and over and over for a sandbox game, not a goal-driven game, or one-adventure game. We need more daily things to do.

hen, there is the empty packs and the poor base game problem. I know that the base game can’t have all we want. Companies should make money. Ok. I think the solution is, as always, a mid approach. We can get a base game with a little bit of everything, just a little bit, and then an EP taking that little bit and developing it for a whole and complete experience. For example, a base game with some kind of weather: rain, wind, snow, etc., but without much implications. After that EA could release a Seasons EP developing in more depth all the features and aspects of that, illnesses, control over the temperature and seasons, activities depending on the weather, etc. The same with Pets. We could have two different pets in the base game (cats and dogs) and in an EP we could see a complete experience with much more activities with pets, more different pets, vet job and vet clinic, and everything we can imagine. EA could make a better EP because they would have more time to develop the ideas and make the experience more complete because part of the work had already done in the base game.

"TS1299;c-16328041" wrote:

"Jordan061102;c-16326883" wrote:
I'm right with you. But since 2017, this game go in the good direction.

Agreed. The game is now getting better and Jungle Adventure was another huge step in the right direction, especially for the GP Team.

Side Note for the OP, if you have Get to Work you can build a store, be it a clothing store, a grocery, a bakeshop, tablet store, bookstore, appliance center, fitness house, music store, or even a Toy Store, then you can visit them. When my sims needs ingredients I mostly don't cook the food which required ingredients to cook. I always go to the grocery store that I had built. If I am playing at San Myshuno I always go to the veggie food stall. The tools and options are there, you just have to use it and explore them more.

Nightclubs. I love nightclubs, but these are boring. I miss a mirrorball, some other effects like fog. I miss different kind of Nightclubs: posh places with disco music, old garages or warehouses with techno music, etc., each of them having different actions, styles, activities, music. I would like to be able to create new styles of music and feed them with my own music. That’s a sandbox.

Now with how people complained during the 2015-2016 era of The Sims that The sims 4 was a nightlife party simulator I was honestly surprised that people find these nightclubs boring. There are fogs, DJ Booths, Synchronized Dancing, Dance Competition, Feel the Crowd, a DJ Skill, dancing Skill, Showing off moves, Clubs, Bars, A more "feel" with groups in a club that specializes on Nightclub activities(e.g. like the Spin Masters) Earning money trough dancing, tons of music, tons of style, tons of remixes, tons of custom dj songs for master DJ, graffiti wall decorations, and even real graffiti boards for both ground and wall, plus a garage door for mural and graffiti. The tools and features are again, already there. Its already in the game, you just have to discover and explore them. If there is one thing that The Sims 4 has done too much, its the nightclubs imo.

Killing a NPC sim has become, at least for me, almost impossible. I tried to play an evil vampire who invited people into his castle and kill them. I tried to kill six different sims and after a sim-week they were still alive even with no food. No robberies, no evil jobs, no sarcasm in some actions. Everything is so pure and perfect that, in my opinion, is so childish. Sometimes I like to play a real life, with the good and the bad things a real life has to offer: getting robbed, be cheated by my partner, get insulted, fell on the floor, have an accident, or whatever. That’s life, not just a child tale in a Walt Disney cartoon.

Have you left the house during that time? Once a loading screen incurs, the sims will automatically take care of their needs. I highly doubt that they are still alive for one whole week. They should have died for two days as the hunger hunger and ravenous moodlet last that time. Other than that, perhaps try a pool? Its the easiest thing to do in killing sims lol. If that dosen't work, feed them with a pufferfish they will be 10/10 dead. While yep I agree with you, 4 has the hardest sim death in the franchise.

I think EA also keeps doing the wrong choices about Expansions, packs and stuff. It is good to have different activities like going to a Jungle Adventure, for example, but once you’ve done that, you will probably won’t do that again. People keep asking over and over and over for a sandbox game, not a goal-driven game, or one-adventure game. We need more daily things to do.

That's why they designed the Game Pack to change the puzzles, rewards, and the adventure each time you visit ;) Not all people in the game want more sandbox game. Some of us what a breath in a sims everyday life and take them to a new adventures. The Sims is a goal-driven game. Its one of the aspects that makes the game great. Like you said you had played The Sims 2 and The Sims 3. You said they are great, which is true. But the main question is will those game will be great without the goal-driven aspects on it? Wants and Fears, Wishes, Career Rewards, Opportunities, Aspirations, and University are just some of the example of the features that makes the sims great.Those are goal-driven aspects of the game. If we remove the goal aspect of the game, The Sims 2 wouldn't be as great as we know it, The Sims 3 will lack the basic simology.

That is one of the problems in The Sims 4. The Goal-driven aspect was out of balance. Look at the Whims. A lot of us want them to improve. Yes it is one of the Goal-Driven aspects of The Sims 4 but they are shallow. Sims autonomously don't follow their whims. They are just there. They lack depth. It only adds to the problem that sims lack personality. Goal-driven are important for this franchise. Also, didn't we get too much content for everyday life in the past year? Parenthood, Bowling, Toddler Equipment, Gym stuffs, Pets. The last goal driven game for us imo was Vampires, and just like Jungle Adventure, it changes the normal sim routine on their everyday life.

hen, there is the empty packs and the poor base game problem. I know that the base game can’t have all we want. Companies should make money. Ok. I think the solution is, as always, a mid approach. We can get a base game with a little bit of everything, just a little bit, and then an EP taking that little bit and developing it for a whole and complete experience. For example, a base game with some kind of weather: rain, wind, snow, etc., but without much implications. After that EA could release a Seasons EP developing in more depth all the features and aspects of that, illnesses, control over the temperature and seasons, activities depending on the weather, etc. The same with Pets. We could have two different pets in the base game (cats and dogs) and in an EP we could see a complete experience with much more activities with pets, more different pets, vet job and vet clinic, and everything we can imagine. EA could make a better EP because they would have more time to develop the ideas and make the experience more complete because part of the work had already done in the base game.

The thing is the base should be the foundation of the iteration. The Sims focuses on the sims themselves not animals. Each Sims games had three years of development time. A huge example of this was The Sims 3. According to the information that I learned, The Sims 3 begun development after the release of Open for Business, which was on February of 2006. We also know that The Sims Studio was founded on the year 2006. After its establishment they began working on The sims 3, in which the obvious proof of this was The Sims 3 was the very first game that this studio had ever developed, From 2006-2009 their main focus was on the base game. They focused on Creating all the tools, (CAST, CAS, BUILD, BUY, Exchange, The online movie editor), add depth on the sims, Implement an improved engine, Create a new environment, a new world,
overhauled personality system, plus tons of QA Testing, in addition to all the lifestages, Non Playable Characters like the Tragic Clown, Police, Special NPC behavior, implementation of the death system, recording of Music from Build and buy, to cas, to live mode, to testing the animations on all the gameplay objects to expanding interactions across all the sims with features transferring from The Sims 2 expansion packs to The Sims 3 Base game.

With three years of time all of their hardwork has paid off. Now add Pets in the roll, will result to the double amount of animation for the Base Game, engineering it to support for legged animals, etc, will result to cutting a lot of content to fit on three year schedule. It will result for the sims being shallow as the time for development that can be used on them will be used on pets. It is not always on how much content we will receive for me, but on how will the developers spend their resources. The Base Game alone that only focuses on Sims already took two three years to develop. Not to mention if Pets where in the Base Game, then expect CAS to be shallow as well as they will have to share resources for the Create A Pet, even voicing with sims and Pets, traits, etc. Its better to have the sims team focus on the sims first rather than focus on to many things in one time which results on making them shallow.

The Sims 4 only had One Year(if the rumors are correct) of development time for an full offline sims traditional experience, and I'm glad they didn't put pets in the base game. Even with all the time restraints from EA I still find it amazing how the team launch it from a total mess because of the publisher, to now slowly making it great and worthy the "Sims 4" title it has. There are just some aspects that we should include in the base game. Like Pets. If the main focus of the Game was about sims, then let the devs have them fleshed out for three years instead of cutting resources on those sims just for the inclusion of pets in the base game.

Anyways those are just my thoughts. While I disagree with you, I had one same opinion about you, These sims need more personality. They will be the foundation of the enjoyment of the packs. That is the only thing I need from Maxis and EA.

"mcorral;d-935146" wrote:

TS4 has good graphics and runs smoother. Just that. I don’t feel part of anything. It’s just me inside my lot. I can go to another lot and it’s me again in another lot with the same people showing up but I go to another lot and again it’s me with different people. Everything is lot-driven. There is nothing outside, just the lot. Nothing is connected. I don’t feel part of anything, it’s just me in a lot. I play a story in that lot and when I get out of it it’s gone, erased. It’s like it never happened.

Loading screens is not the problem for me. It’s ok to have loading screens if that makes the game runs better. The problem is that everything outside the lot you are in is dead and does not exist until you go somewhere else. There is no continuity in your actions.

"mcorral;d-935146" wrote:
Hi,

I’ve been playing The Sims for a long time since The Sims 2. I think it is the game I’ve played the longest time. I love, The Sims, but I’m sad watching the game getting into the direction it is taking. It’s not improving, but getting worse.

I don’t post in these forums much, I really don’t know about the sales of the company. I just chat with friends who like playing The Sims and I think that I’m not alone with this kind of frustration with The Sims.

I will not make a vent post. No. I’m a positive person and I’ll try to give my humble opinion and try to give EA feedback and some things I would change.

Each version of the game had something unique that made it special in its way. TS2 had lots of actions and depth in each activity that made you discover something new each day. TS3 had an open world where you felt like part of a whole. Everything was alive in the world, every sim was progressing or doing things by themselves throughout the world. You could sit in your couch and think: “where is my friend now? What is he/she doing?”. I could take my bike and have a ride to the mountains, watching the scenery, have a sandwich in a park, fish in the pond, run across a friend on the street and go with him/her to a coffee and chat. You could recolour and place different patterns on every object. You could have generations and generations of your family, everything was connected in some way. Everything was alive in that very instant.

TS4 has good graphics and runs smoother. Just that. I don’t feel part of anything. It’s just me inside my lot. I can go to another lot and it’s me again in another lot with the same people showing up but I go to another lot and again it’s me with different people. Everything is lot-driven. There is nothing outside, just the lot. Nothing is connected. I don’t feel part of anything, it’s just me in a lot. I play a story in that lot and when I get out of it it’s gone, erased. It’s like it never happened.

Loading screens is not the problem for me. It’s ok to have loading screens if that makes the game runs better. The problem is that everything outside the lot you are in is dead and does not exist until you go somewhere else. There is no continuity in your actions.

I think EA also keeps doing the wrong choices about Expansions, packs and stuff. It is good to have different activities like going to a Jungle Adventure, for example, but once you’ve done that, you will probably won’t do that again. People keep asking over and over and over for a sandbox game, not a goal-driven game, or one-adventure game. We need more daily things to do.

I need more reactions to some situations, more specific personalities that define my sim behavior, not just some cosmetic traits that do not affect the sim much. I would like that traits were much more important in my sim life. I would like that my sim behaved differently according to the situation and other sims. For example: the way I speak to my boss should be different that the way I speak to my father.

I want to do some cooking and discover that I don’t have some ingredient and have to go to the grocery to buy it, not magically get it by opening the fridge. I would like to go to a store and buy the clothes I will wear, not just have them free. When I want to go to a lot, I need my sim at least go to the door of my house so I think: he’s leaving the house to go to the lot, not just see my sim in the couch and then in the gym. It’s not realistic, it’s just something weird which breaks continuity. If I had an argument with a friend or with my partner, I would like to have a feeling about that, not just go home and smile like nothing happened.

Nightclubs. I love nightclubs, but these are boring. I miss a mirrorball, some other effects like fog. I miss different kind of Nightclubs: posh places with disco music, old garages or warehouses with techno music, etc., each of them having different actions, styles, activities, music. I would like to be able to create new styles of music and feed them with my own music. That’s a sandbox.

Killing a NPC sim has become, at least for me, almost impossible. I tried to play an evil vampire who invited people into his castle and kill them. I tried to kill six different sims and after a sim-week they were still alive even with no food. No robberies, no evil jobs, no sarcasm in some actions. Everything is so pure and perfect that, in my opinion, is so childish. Sometimes I like to play a real life, with the good and the bad things a real life has to offer: getting robbed, be cheated by my partner, get insulted, fell on the floor, have an accident, or whatever. That’s life, not just a child tale in a Walt Disney cartoon.

Decorations are not my type as well. ¿Pink trees? ¿Trees with no leaves but some kind of green big ball up? It’s like a Walt Disney cartoon or a fantasy world. What about the city? That’s not a city.

Customization is very limited. People like me who are control freak and like to have control of everything and customize everything, don’t have the chance to change many things. Everything is so driven by the codification, so fixed, so stiff. Some worlds are so small that it’s impossible to customize to your liking because there is no room to make changes. You can’t even change trees, roads, the orientation of a lot, not even the size of the lot. Why not letting people change some aspects of the world with some prefixed patterns? Playing the game is very frustrating for me: I can’t do this because it is not allowed, I can’t do that because of the coding, I can’t place this here because there is a restriction, I can’t… I can’t…. This is not an open game. This is not a sandbox game.

Some of these changes are possible because modders are doing incredible things improving the game. Why EA doesn’t do anything at all? Shame on you!

Then, there is the empty packs and the poor base game problem. I know that the base game can’t have all we want. Companies should make money. Ok. I think the solution is, as always, a mid approach. We can get a base game with a little bit of everything, just a little bit, and then an EP taking that little bit and developing it for a whole and complete experience. For example, a base game with some kind of weather: rain, wind, snow, etc., but without much implications. After that EA could release a Seasons EP developing in more depth all the features and aspects of that, illnesses, control over the temperature and seasons, activities depending on the weather, etc. The same with Pets. We could have two different pets in the base game (cats and dogs) and in an EP we could see a complete experience with much more activities with pets, more different pets, vet job and vet clinic, and everything we can imagine. EA could make a better EP because they would have more time to develop the ideas and make the experience more complete because part of the work had already done in the base game.

I know it is almost impossible to release something that everyone would like. There will always be someone who does not like this and that, but what people is asking, demanding and shouting desperately is a sandbox game. And instead of that, EA is going to the opposite direction. Why?

I bought all the EP and many of the packs hoping the game would get better, but it is not. I love The Sims, and I really, really hate to see this game getting into this direction. I’m trying to like it, really, trying hard, but there are so many things that I don’t like that the game is not appealing much to me anymore.

This is a desperate call to EA. Please, do something about it. You can’t leave The Sims like this.

Thank you for reading me.

PD: Sorry for my mistakes. English is not my first language.

"mcorral;d-935146" wrote:
Hi,

...

I think EA also keeps doing the wrong choices about Expansions, packs and stuff. It is good to have different activities like going to a Jungle Adventure, for example, but once you’ve done that, you will probably won’t do that again. People keep asking over and over and over for a sandbox game, not a goal-driven game, or one-adventure game. We need more daily things to do.

I need more reactions to some situations, more specific personalities that define my sim behavior, not just some cosmetic traits that do not affect the sim much. I would like that traits were much more important in my sim life. I would like that my sim behaved differently according to the situation and other sims. For example: the way I speak to my boss should be different that the way I speak to my father.

...