Positively impressed with TS4 (after playing TS3)

(OP edited thanks to the January 12, 2017 Toddler Patch :smile:)

Brief but necessary insertion, as @OEII1001 suggested (and here I quote every word): TRIGGER WARNING: (may directly or indirectly contain) Assertions that The Sims 3 is imperfect.
This post contains my personal opinion on the features that I feel have greately improved from TS3 to TS4.
This post does not want to trash TS3 in any way, since I like TS3 a lot and I'm still currently having fun with it. It's a great game.
This post's only purpose is to give TS4 credit regarding features that - in my personal opinion - are much better executed compared to TS3.

You have every right to disagree with me and my opinions, you're intitled to your opinion and to keep it till the end of time, but there's absolutely no need to get defensive about a game that I too enjoy. Instead of attacking each other or being rude in the comments, if we truly can't agree on anything then let's all politely agree to disagree and move on without turning this into a pointless war.
We all have the right to freely speak our mind, as long as we remain respectful of each other's differences.


(OP)
I never knew when was the right time to give my honest feedback on the game, but after a lot of waiting, playing and postponing I've finally decided to do it.
This is my own personal opinion and, since I can already tell that the majority of the simmers coming to this forum is going to openly disagree with most of it, I'd also like to specify that I'm not posting it to have a heated "discussion" with anybody, that I simply don't care about the opposing opinions you're totally free to have and that I'm writing this just to let the devs know, if they'll ever read it, what I like and don't like about the game, what I love to bits and what needs serious improvement.
I'll begin by saying, first of all, that TS4 was "officially" my very first sims game. I had a brief encounter with TS3 years ago, thanks to my older brother, when I watched him play from time to time, even if never more than fifteen minutes at a time. Our parents didn't allow us to play games or even just dream to buy them, so I literally had to wait to grow up, find a job and be as economically indipendent as possible in order to buy something. So, remembering how fun TS3 had looked at the time, as soon as I heard about the release of this game and I could finally afford it, I decided to give TS4 a try. Overall, I'm really glad I did.
My relationship with TS4 had its ups and downs, but it's been enjoyable and fun for the course of two whole years.
One of the things I wanted to do most, though, was trying TS3 out with the same dedication and passion to get a better idea of the progress or the regression made within the series, and most of all to understand why so many players - in this particular forum, to be precise - seem to be extremely critical about this iteration. I wanted to play with toddlers like crazy, since I've always felt like I needed that life stage in TS4 (to the point that I even stopped playing for a couple of months), I wanted to see how the open world could change the immersion of the game, and I wanted to fall in love with the sims just as much as I do in TS4. Since I'm a legacy-rotational-storytelling player, the thing I wanted to experience the most was the so applauded "family play" that's supposed to be all there and instead completely missing in TS4. So, this Christmas I finally decided to buy TS3 and give it a try, and I bought everything that I want most for TS4: Generations, Seasons, Pets and University.
... after a week of nonstop play, I only love and appreciate TS4's progress even more.
I had fun, yes (edit: still am, after almost a month, and probably will for many months more, because TS3 is a really good game with several strong features). But now, thanks to this experiance, I truly see how far this series has come.

I'll begin with what seems to be the most expensive and time-consuming feature in TS4, but that for me is a complete deal breaker: multitasking. I can't play without it. Or- I can, if I have to, but I truly hate it. Multitasking is a feature that's not 100% refined yet (*coff* musical chairs *coff*), but it's something that makes the game come to life. It's what makes a family act like a family, or a party act like a party. It brought the game from a linear "all sims for themselves (beside x situation happening)" type of play to a true life simulator.
When I play TS3, I have the impression of playing several parallel lives all together, lives that only intersect in a few staged occasions, like conversations, watching tv together, dancing, slow dancing, one on one interactions between sims. When I play TS4, on the other hand, I immediately get the sensation that sims are aware of multiple things in their environment at the same time, and it never seems like I'm playing a sim stuck in its own single and linear life. I personally found more family play by having casual chats at dinner with the kids, all sitting together in front of a table, while eating, laughing, teaching vaulable lessons and maybe even listening to the music at the same time, having all sorts of conversations at once, together, instead of having all the sims sit in silence in front of their plates, only to say a word after they've finished the meal and unable to recognize more than one other sim at a time if another doesn't "ask" to join the conversation. Having sims being able to interact with each other no matter the action in progress, while maybe doing a couple of other side things too like reading, dancing, listening to some music or watching movies, is huge. The developers really did a good job on this, and I want them to know that I greatly appreciate it even more, now. The very scarse instances of apparent multitasking in TS3 don't come close to this in the slightest and to me they seem completely fake, staged, it's a whole different experience that one can or cannot appreciate, depending on how they prefer to play the game. Yet, I find it to be a colossal step forward and I really understand now that I can't play without it.

CAS is also something that's absolutely outstanding in TS4. Not only the interface looks much better, but creating sims is also a much much smoother experience. It's easy, immediate and responsive with the constant switching from tab to tab and with the loading of hair and outfits, and overall so much more accurate. That's where my "storytelling" begins, after all. The amount of detail I can put on a sim and its face is what inspires me with creating its story, and it's also the first "bad" impact I had with TS3. Although I wish we still had the "create a style" feature, which was truly great and malleable, an amazing feature that I now miss, I don't feel limited with clothes and hair, there's literally nothing lacking there, the choice is vast. As a matter of fact, in TS3 I felt like there were very little options of clothes despite owning four expansions packs. With the three TS4 expansions, the amount of clothes feels basically doubled. And don't get me started on how much the gender patch released this year changed TS4 for the best. That patch was life. It's the feature that should have been in the base game of the very first sims game and finally, after the longest wait ever, it's here. It tore down a huge wall and brought creativity back into the game, which is the thing that I appreciate and hold dear the most. So, even on CAS, a huge thumbs up for the devs that nailed it in the best way.
Similarly, build mode was also greatly improved and simplified. I'm not a good builder and I don't spend too much time building, but in TS4 everything is so much more intuitive, simple, fast. The amazing creation in the gallery speak for themselves on this matter.

A feature that made me critical towards TS4 and that now I appreciate much more is the emotion system.
It's one of those things that I didn't imagine I could miss, at all. I still think, even now, that the emotions in TS4 need a lot of work and tweaking and that the "rainbow" moodlet effect should be fixed once and for all, to avoid having a sim jump from emotion to emotion in a short timespan when they collect too many different ones. Emotions are not the "best" feature of the game. And yet, I immediately noticed how sims seemed lacking in TS3. Beside the death of their parents, that made them cry for days, my TS3 sims seemed to go only from a "good" to a "bad" mood with nothing in between, and their facial expressions depended simply on that. I soon realized how much I actually missed seeing my sim stomping around and slamming refrigerators doors when they're angry, looking all smug and hot when they're flirty (and not necessarely because of a romantic interaction), looking completely hopeless and shy for being embarrassed and so on. Emotions might not be perfectly coded yet, but they give more character to the sim, they change their gestures and movements and definitely give them a little spark of life. (Yup. That one time I killed Bella Goth by enraging her is still one of the funniest memories I have of this game. I won't ever forget it).
(!)Edit: now that toddlers are out, I'm in love with emotions. Emotions work wonders on that life stage, I have never been more impressed.
Emotions have brought to life toddlers more than anything.
This gives me lots of hope about the addition of pets and seeing them too having their own special emotions and moodlets.
Great job.


On the topic of the open vs close world, I'm a little conflicted. Although the open world looks much more immersive, I love the fact that in TS4 you can visit any world with no restriction and that every single public lot is not (never) a rabbit hole. I also like that there's no public space that feels "empty" and that wherever I go TS4 doesn't feel like a ghost town. Every TS4 world feels lively, full of sims. I also like that there's no case of "grey" objects around and that all textures are always loaded immediately thanks to the world loading one lot at a time, but also that when you travel you don't waste precious sims hours to move from one side to the other of the map. I find TS4 art and aesthetic much more attractive anyway, and that's obviously my personal preference.
Don't even get me started on how much TS3 open world seemed to impact the performance and stability of the entire game. It was painful to watch.
I would have preferred an open world with the mobility of TS4, but in the end I don't mind having a five/ten seconds loading screen to move out of the house and I know that there's absolutely no way to change it now.
A form of transportation should definitely be added to the game, though. Not necessarely a fully functional transportation, but at least cars and a bus that bring our sims to work and school, instead of having the sim constantly vanishing at the side of the road. This is a shortcut that I personally don't like at all, just like not having the animations for elevators in City Living.


Now, to move on the thing that I wanted most for all this time: toddlers. The disappointment is real.
Not only the disappointment for not having them yet in TS4, after two years (edit: oh, if only I knew... :joy:), but especially the disappointment for having finally played them on TS3, when I was expecting them to be this revolutionary life stage that would have changed forever the way I play families. I couldn't wait to play them to see what I was missing and... man. I was so wrong. Now I finally understand why the majority of players (following what telemetry told us and the devs) wasn't playing with them or was aging them up as soon as possible.
I'll say it as clearly as possible: I want toddlers, but I don't want TS3 toddlers. I think they were atrocious. Not only their one purpose seemed to be a "chore" of extremely boring repetition, but they literally could do nothing. They had a few objects to play with, and that was it. They could be hugged, changed, cleaned, tickled, and that was it. They didn't even react and interact with other toddlers, for the love of god. If you put one toddler next to the other, it was like they were two lifeless dolls unable to recognize the other's presence. They seemed so horribly oblivious to their enviroment and the objects around the house, that to me they looked like nothing but crawling, crying and pooping dolls to feed from time to time, and not even a little sim with personality. Sure, they were super cute and adorable (when they weren't screaming), but that's not the only reason why I want toddlers in my game. Forget cuteness, I want toddlers to fill a huge age gap that doesn't make sense in the game, and for them to be sims, not just tasks to complete in order to be able to choose their traits. I'd like, for example, for a toddler to learn to walk simply by crawling around and lifting themselves up on forniture like chairs, beds, sofas, toilets, and to learn talking by interacting with adults, teens, children or other toddlers too, or watching the tv. I'd love for toddlers to be able to interact with the world surrounding them just like any other sim, but in their own way. (Edit: and I've been blessed with exactly this, apparently, so I can't and won't complain). Like, for example, maybe having the chance of falling down the stairs and feeling dazed and sad after that, why not? They could have the option of crawling up and down the stairs, but with a chance of failure. I'd love for toddlers to interact with other toddlers in a friendly, funny and even mean way, and not to be stuck in their own dollish bubble playing a xylophone (Edit: once again, totally satisfied with what we got now). And, oh my god, if we ever get the chance to go for a walk with a stroller, don't make it disappear every single time they go up a hill with an oblivious "put in the stroller - off the stroller - in the stroller - off the stroller" animation. It was so bad, slow and glitchy that I wanted to scream at the screen.


In regard of stability and playability, TS4 is a true sigh of relief.
The glitches and bugs that I encounter playing are so scarse compared to how TS3 performed in a single week (Edit: still glitching and crashing, with no cc, mods or too high settings), that I can't but be extremely happy about it. It's clearly better optimized, and even if a lot of things can still be fixed and tweaked, there's no possible comparison to be made with its predecessor: TS4 playes much, much, much, much better than TS3, on much higher settings.



Overall, my positive attitude towards TS4 has been reinforced by my TS3 experience.
I now feel even stronger about how much this game has improved and how incredibly solid its core and foundation is.
The sims feel more alive, fun and no longer robotic, their emotions truly shape their attitude and their "default" faces in very enjoyable and different ways. They're not always creepengly smiling by default. They're also very grumpy, or very gloomy and shy, depending on how they feel - and not necessarely how their needs are -. They're also smarter: no more endless tapping of the feet because there's a cat that won't ever move in front of a door, a bed, a high chair or a counter, so the gameplay moves faster and there's almost no pause due to annoyance or rage on my behalf. All the animations look exquisite, compared to the ones of the previous game, and it really does feel like they've put a lot of effort into it, to make them look smooth and natural and no more pathetically robotic. The interface is intuitive, simple and responsive. CAS is outstanding. TS4 art style in general looks beautiful and fun, at least to me (it's my personal preference), and the light transforms the ambiance into a little masterpiece. The gameplay runs really smoothly the vast majority of time, the sims have very little routing issues compared to TS3. The sims feel more real and alive, and to me they're much more fun to play because of their deep costumization.
Despite cuts made at release (that were and still are being addressed with constant free patches) and scrapped features from the previous game, in the end TS4 doesn't feel to me like a step back, but rather like a fresh start, a new found base that has the stability and capability of holding amazing expansions (if/when they'll ever come). It also gets constant updates and monthly fixes, which is something that I appreciate a lot.

But.
Since I've played and loved this game for two years, I can't but address also the features that I want to see implemented the most, the issues I think need to be fixed and the mistakes that were made with the past packs.

1) The first thing that I feel this game lacks is depth of gameplay within early life stages. Babies are not only stuck on cribs, but also not costumizable and purely "objects" with no sort of genetics, which is a big "meh" to someone like me that loves playing with sims genetics. I would be completely fine with them remaining stuck inside the cribs for the rest of this game, if only they had some sort of costumization. I mean, even The Sims Freeplay gives you the chance to change the baby's outfit. Come on. I would love for them to have functioning genetics, even if something as little as the color of eyes and hair. I feel like this alone would be a great step forward in the right direction.
On this topic, there's obviously the absence of toddlers that will never go unnoticed and that I hope gets addressed soon, not by giving us TS3 toddlers 2.0. I truly hope that when toddlers come, they're done right and that they function like any other sim, even within their age limitations, that they can interact with their enviroment and not just their toys and especially that they can interact with each others or other sims, not only to be tickled, fed and changed like dolls. I also wish for preteens to come at one point, if possible, so that the other gap child-teen is addressed. I wouldn't want or feel the need for preteens in TS4 if teens were a little shorter, but for right now only some serious edit in CAS can make them look like teens and not adults. I think a pack for teens only is really needed, like we had for children, to make them feel even more unique.
Edit: toddlers are finally here, and they're exactly how I hoped they were going to be. I can't even believe that they're exactly how I tried to describe them in this very post. They're aware, responsive, they interact with the enviroment and other sims, they're emotional and smart, as if they have a little mind of their own. They learn skills not just through a repetitive chore that depends entirely on an adult sim, but by doing actively anything, with literally anyone. They can climb stairs too, just like I pointed out here. I'll be honest, I'm still emotional over this. I can't believe it finally happened, and just like I wished for it to happen. Thank you, developers. You truly put your heart and soul into these toddlers, to make them worth playing and to fit into the TS4 universe. They're not just adorable, they're little sims. They're so well done that I can't even compare them to what we had before, it would be utterly unfair. Thank you for delivering, and thank you for listening to the community. Great job. Great great job.

2) Social events need a serious revamp and we need more of them. Stuff like: slumber party, baby showers, funerals, hen party. I have the feeling that after the release of clubs (which is a great feature), social events started to feel almost pointless. And it's not just that. I'd especially like for my sims to be invited to weddings and other social events from unplayed sims and friends, just like now they can be invited to birthday parties. It would make the world feel even more alive and immersive, since now it's like only the played sims has stuff happening in their lives. The possibility of my sim to be invited to a wedding (and maybe messing it up) sounds like real fun.

3) Never ever again with the missed opportunities.
I'll give you an example: Get To Work. Cool expansion, loved it a lot when it first came out. After a few months of gameplay, the "missed opportunities" started ruining the fun. Every single one of the three careers was clearly well thought and made with lots of care and detail, but none beside the scientist was truly versatile and enjoyable outside of the workplace. Basically, no career "changed" the gameplay and the immersion of the game unless you were actively playing the career and moved to their special lots. I'll explain myself: you introduced sickness. Cool! Loved seeing my sims finally getting sick. We had the hospital and the doctor career... yet, we could't travel to the hospital to get cured there or even call a doctor to visit our sims at home. All we had to do was buy medicine online or drink tea and orange juice. It's still awesome being able to go to the hospital to give birth, it's a really well done feature, but not being able to go there to be cured is a missed opportunity that could have enhanced immersion even more. Another example: you gave us the detective career. Truly fun and enjoyable at first, but... completely locked in its own work space. If my detective is off work and sees two sims fighting, there's no special interaction to intervene. Also, our sims never get robbed, so the need for detectives is still absolute 0 besides the "fun" of actively playing them during their working hours. Those are essentially the kind of stuff that disappoints me the most, because the potential for great universal features is all there and yet you missed the chance.

When you create content for the game, you obviously do it with a clear concept in mind, knowing all the limitations and possibilities for that to work. I'd like you to also and especially think about how that content can impact the most our gameplay and work towards that objective, and not to give us only a new shiny fun tool that, in the long run, you even forget it's there because it has no effect, impact or point to be.
Missed opportunities are what differentiate a good pack from a great pack, and collecting them one after the other is what you should avoid as much as possible.


I think in the end that this game is a really good and stable game, a solid foundation for years of fun.
From what I can see, it has lots of potential. It's my personal belief that, once the issues this community holds dear get addressed, it can be enjoyed by more and more players.
So, thanks for the hard work, devs, and thanks for the constant updates and fixes that keep the game running.
Edit: thank you for delivering the best toddlers in the series with a free and unexpected patch. I'm speechless.
I wish you all a happy new year... hoping for nice things to come! :)
I can't wait to see what 2017 holds for us.