Problems that still plague the game years later
Speaking for myself, as the game has gotten more fleshed out and "not enough to do" is less of an issue (especially with the help of mods) there are still some fundamental problems that stick around.
They are the kind of problems that slightly annoy me at the beginning of a gameplay session and have me feeling exhausted and tired of the game by the end, which is not a feeling I usually have with a game. I'll get bored or need a break from any game, but this is stuff that is deeply frustrating that erodes any interest in coming back.
I'm sure some of this has been mentioned before, maybe even by me, but it's still there, so maybe it bears repeating. I dunno.
Autonomy: Actions dropping, sims hanging / taking forever to take action, sims taking forever to get from place to place which causes actions to drop, walkby sims deciding to leave in the middle of a queued interaction causing it to drop, NPCs queuing up a prompt on your played sim that you don't want over and over. (It seems clear to me that part of the hanging problem is idle animations. I don't know how you fix this considering the way animations have their little specified exit paths, but there are definitely cases where an idle visibly has to play out before a sim will get their behind moving.)
Time: Events with objectives giving you no time to do anything because sims take so long to do stuff and some actions in general have a duration that is too long compared to the timed event length (ex: active doctor career giving little time to assess patients while they just keep coming in endlessly and NPC coworker AI is near useless).
Music: Instruments sounding distorted on faster speeds (I have a decent ear for music and it's painful and disorienting to listen to). Ideally, it'd be nice to have an option like radio music where it won't match the game speed.
No way to customize keybinds (or not that I'm aware of anyway?): If I could customize them, maybe I could handle time speed switching more easily. As it is, there's a lot of tedious stuff like the following example: click multiple times to find an interaction, queue it up, sim hangs, fast speed to get past the hanging, interaction drops, pause game, click multiple times again to find the interaction, queue it up, sim hangs, fast speed to get past the hanging, interaction finally goes through. I do this enough and it just gets utterly exhausting and doesn't feel like a game at all, so much as fighting with a user interface. I mean, the keybinds for time speed on PC are 0, 1, 2, 3. Unless you're using numpad (with a mouse and arrow keys?) 0 isn't even close to the other numbers.
As you can probably see, there's a theme here of time management and autonomy/AI intertwined that makes things frustrating. If this was a game with no clock where time never mattered, maybe I wouldn't get as frustrated. But when things are fundamentally time-sensitive and it's difficult to execute things efficiently and smoothly, that becomes annoying over time. When you give a command and the game queues it up and then drops it, I mean, that's just not a problem that I encounter in just about any other video game (I'm struggling to think of one). I can't imagine playing most games if they had that kind of issue. I think it's only forgivable here because of the ability to pause time or speed it up, allowing you to pause to requeue and then speed up to carry it out.
They are the kind of problems that slightly annoy me at the beginning of a gameplay session and have me feeling exhausted and tired of the game by the end, which is not a feeling I usually have with a game. I'll get bored or need a break from any game, but this is stuff that is deeply frustrating that erodes any interest in coming back.
I'm sure some of this has been mentioned before, maybe even by me, but it's still there, so maybe it bears repeating. I dunno.
Autonomy: Actions dropping, sims hanging / taking forever to take action, sims taking forever to get from place to place which causes actions to drop, walkby sims deciding to leave in the middle of a queued interaction causing it to drop, NPCs queuing up a prompt on your played sim that you don't want over and over. (It seems clear to me that part of the hanging problem is idle animations. I don't know how you fix this considering the way animations have their little specified exit paths, but there are definitely cases where an idle visibly has to play out before a sim will get their behind moving.)
Time: Events with objectives giving you no time to do anything because sims take so long to do stuff and some actions in general have a duration that is too long compared to the timed event length (ex: active doctor career giving little time to assess patients while they just keep coming in endlessly and NPC coworker AI is near useless).
Music: Instruments sounding distorted on faster speeds (I have a decent ear for music and it's painful and disorienting to listen to). Ideally, it'd be nice to have an option like radio music where it won't match the game speed.
No way to customize keybinds (or not that I'm aware of anyway?): If I could customize them, maybe I could handle time speed switching more easily. As it is, there's a lot of tedious stuff like the following example: click multiple times to find an interaction, queue it up, sim hangs, fast speed to get past the hanging, interaction drops, pause game, click multiple times again to find the interaction, queue it up, sim hangs, fast speed to get past the hanging, interaction finally goes through. I do this enough and it just gets utterly exhausting and doesn't feel like a game at all, so much as fighting with a user interface. I mean, the keybinds for time speed on PC are 0, 1, 2, 3. Unless you're using numpad (with a mouse and arrow keys?) 0 isn't even close to the other numbers.
As you can probably see, there's a theme here of time management and autonomy/AI intertwined that makes things frustrating. If this was a game with no clock where time never mattered, maybe I wouldn't get as frustrated. But when things are fundamentally time-sensitive and it's difficult to execute things efficiently and smoothly, that becomes annoying over time. When you give a command and the game queues it up and then drops it, I mean, that's just not a problem that I encounter in just about any other video game (I'm struggling to think of one). I can't imagine playing most games if they had that kind of issue. I think it's only forgivable here because of the ability to pause time or speed it up, allowing you to pause to requeue and then speed up to carry it out.
