"meshpet;c-16918017" wrote:
I just watched the sims3 vs sims4 party and wow, the sims3 party looks like a REAL party! And holy heck the differences between evil sims in both games is staggering. I can't tell who is an evil sim in sims4 because everyone acts nice. The vamp guy broke into my house bit my sim and couldn't leave cause I locked the door. I tried real hard to be mean to them and they still acted nice right after each interaction. Plus even though they bit me and broke into my house I think I got a bad rep from being mean to him. Unf... Talk about restrictive. Also feels like you get punished and there's very little reward or reason to be anything other then a good wholesome person. Atleast it feels that way to me. Trying to be anything other then 'nice' just feels immensely out of place.
I often go back to Knights of the Old Republic as a point of reference when it comes to things like "bad" and "good" in a game. Interestingly, you say it punishes bad and rewards good. In Knights of the Old Republic, it was pretty much the opposite. The general idea was that being "bad" made the game easier, but you had to face the (sometimes cinematic and voiced) reality of certain scenarios and harm you were doing to people in the process. Then "good" made the game a bit harder, but you got to feel more virtuous. In other words, the difficulty of being bad was not gameplay, but rather the empathetic response of confronting what you'd done.
And I think the message that doing what's right can be harder is somewhat true to real life, but there is also the factor to consider that angering a bunch of people in social circles may make it very difficult to get anything done, which I think is more or less what they were going for with reputation.
That said, I think it is genuinely challenging in this game to be evil, but unfortunately not in a which that is stimulating. It's more of a character-breaking problem, as you describe, where even a vampire who has broken into your house will tend to act nice if you converse with them.
I get to wondering if it's just a design choice to squeeze out "meanness" to such an intense degree, or if it's like only showing the front of the backdrop in a movie at a certain angle because the rest of it is fake; that gameplay surrounding being "evil" or "mean" just doesn't really exist and so it's consciously designed to steer you away from that realization. But I'm probably overthinking it, which I tend to do (I even made a mod with an aspiration called Overthinker). In Get Famous, for example, there's the whole thing of being able to steal from vaults. Granted, it's also a thing you have to set up consciously, I'm pretty sure.
It may be as shockingly simple as the conversation system alone; that it is the entire source of "bad" being difficult to maintain on a character level.
If that was the case though, I don't know that it would be so shockingly simple to "fix." I think perhaps just focusing on evil/mean sims being very unlikely to choose friendly conversations options on their own and being very likely to reject attempts at being friendly from other sims. Or perhaps just Mean itself and leave Evil out of it. After all, "Evil" people can be charismatic and charming. Then "Mean" could work as a sort of switch if you want your sim(s) to be more combative.
There are other, more specific ways these things could be addressed too, I think. For example, have a vampire that's breaking in get something like half a bar of enemies with any sims who are home if they haven't been introduced yet. Might help set them at odds to start off.
