"JoAnne65;c-16902418" wrote:
I realize this is personal but for me it absolutely works that way. It’s why the club system isn’t appealing to me. If I invite a bunch of sims over, there is no fun for me if they all start to cook. I love it that they will do whatever they feel like doing, using all the stuff I placed in the room and when I close the game in the middle of the party without saving and restart the game (I’ve done that in Sims 3 for testing reasons), entirely different things happen. Same save, same sims but a totally different scenario. Though always loyal to how those sims feel about each other (are they lovers, are they friends, are they enemies, what are their traits).
@JoAnne65 Insightful to know. I mean, I know the sims in Sims 4 do this to
some degree (I recall recently playing around with a particular household for some testing reasons and they certainly had some variation on the two different times I played them from the beginning).
But I wonder how your experience compares as far as how varied the behavior seems by comparison?
I do wonder about the fact that some skills are sort of locked in autonomy until the player directs the sim to do them past a certain point (I think usually level 2 or something). Like I recall the sim from that household I did a couple different times, he had the computer whiz aspiration, but he never once chose to attempt programming on his own; this didn't surprise me as I'm pretty sure programming doesn't trigger autonomously until the player directs it to past level 2 or so. But it is an example of how a sim's behavior could end up being more restricted in terms of object usage because of rules like that. Possibly intended originally as a way to avoid sims becoming good at every skill, but it may contribute to the "obsession with TV/computer/games" phenomenon.
Then again, I know certain types of behavior don't trigger autonomously at all, no matter skill level, and it might be more interesting if they did. I don't think writing a book or writing music does. (I was gonna say hacking doesn't, but it looks like it does if programming skill is high enough, there's just not much to push the sim to do it.) Activating many of these as possible autonomy and/or increasing how strong the autonomy pull is may create more of an effect like what you're describing with Sims 3. But then, it might also just create the exact issue as described in the OP of this thread. :tongue: I think the key would be whether there's enough potential variety and if each is tuned evenly enough, for it to start looking more varied and random.
I might fiddle around with it in modding on a slow day and see if there's any noticeable impact to doing so.
