RoM....m'eh?

Well, it depends on what you're looking for in the pack.

I ignored the prebuilds in Glimmerbrook because I always do that with premade houses anyway (for anything other than occasionally getting some design ideas). The variety of BB items is awesome though and I've spent hours with them so far, building with them as the focus and figuring out what other pack items they fit with (conclusion so far: Get Together and the recent free BB items)

Surprisingly, I even spent time in CAS, again mixing and matching the new things with the old. I don't feel like there are fewer items in RoM. But also, I have an unexplainable love for thumbnail sweaters and hoodies so those items were a win. But if the style isn't your thing then I get that it'll not feel exciting.

As for the general gameplay, for me a lot of it comes down to the difference between what you *can* do and what you need to do. Just because you don't have to be in the Realm to progress as a spellcaster doesn't mean you can't choose to learn there until the Sim has all the perks and progress you want them to have. Just because you can buy specific potions doesn't mean you have to, you can make it a point to only brew them once you have the necessary ingredients.

I really love that they've left the options open for affiliation to a certain school of magic. I mean, sure, you can max out all of them, but you can also just have a Sim learn the practical spells and some potions and be done with it. Or you can make them an Alchemist only. You can still shape them into a specific kinda magic user, the game just doesn't restrict you to one choice. And then if you want them to do more, they can, without there being a restriction to only one of the branches. I also love the possibilities that the spells open: Repario, for example, is miles better imo than maxed out handiness: you can use it often (well, unless you overcharge lol) and there's no cooldown like with Insta-Repair. Scruberoo makes cleaning faster.
And like nerdfashion said, there are definitely consequences. The curses, while they may seem relatively simple, can throw a spanner into your plans all too easily. Some of them are more showy but some others definitely affect gameplay. It's worth trying to push a Sim to overcharge or try harder potions so they end up with with a curse and then try to navigate around it (again, just because the spell and potion are there, doesn't mean you have to use it. let them suffer for a while :P)

Agreed on the brooms/wands/familiars being more a collection thing than massive gameplay additions. For some, that's enough though. (the falling of the broom at landing animation is funny too :))

I hope you do find enjoyment in the pack eventually. I've personally been playing for the whole week and still haven't even touched my pre-RoM saves to add magic into those worlds. That's a whole different layer to gameplay (balancing the new with the existing) that I'm looking forward to try.

I'll have to agree. For a concept that allows the imagination to run wild with possibilities, the kind of magic we got in RoM is tame, safe, and uninspiring with a few exceptions. Personally, I was impressed by the cloning spell, even if you could already do that in the game. But the spells themselves to even their animations are just not very interesting generally. Most of them use the same casting animation which I wouldn't mind so much if the casting itself was impressive. In TS3, the effect was big, flashy, and just cool to look at. In TS4, they're just sparkles.

I agree that the realm itself is very nice to look at, but it's sad that it's actually the most inspired feature in the pack. It's still as hollow as a lot of the other worlds.

The schools aren't that different from each other either in the sense of creating the kind of spell caster you want. The trailer says you can choose to master one school or all of them... but if you were creating an evil spell caster, for example, why wouldn't you master all the schools? An evil Sim can still use Practical and Untamed magic for evil purposes. Personally, I would've liked more themes put into the pack, either by elements or by "Good, Evil, or Neutral".

So far, the most impressive occult is still Vampires to me because they allow you to create different kinds of vampires with traits that actually flesh out the vampire's personality (crying too much or having no emotions, for example). You can choose whether that vampire can sleep in only coffins or beds as well. If they're immune to sunlight or not. If they're a social butterfly or a plasma-sucking monster that alienates everybody around them. Vampires actually fix some of the problems with the Sims themselves... minus the fact that your Sim has to be a vampire to get flaws in their personalities and some depth. With spell casters, there's no true difference between them.

There's even little details missing from the pack that I hoped would be there. For example, in TS3, your Sim will use magic to light a fireplace or to cool it down without having to select the spell itself. Once I learned the fire spell in TS4, I chose the option to light it. Instead, the Sim brought out a lighter which makes me question the "smarter Sims" claim in the marketing. Curses are just minor annoyances that can easily be solved by purchasing a potion with your satisfaction points. There's no real consequence to actually being cursed except your Sim doing things you don't want them to do. Which is already a problem in the base game.

In my opinion, this pack was about on the same level as Strangerville. I like what it's trying to do, but I do not think it did it well at all.

I think it’s pretty dull because most of it is already in the game in some form. It just makes your sims already perfect lives easier and turns the town into spell casters.

"OEII1001;c-17253002" wrote:

"To7m;c-17252913" wrote:
Besides sunlight (which is part of vaunt a vampire) what other consequences do vampires have? Tbh, vamps are pretty consequence free. They can’t die from most deaths, don’t need the toilet, can’t die of thirst. What else is there? Lose a duel?

EVERY sim or potion has a backfire or curse. Trust me, overloading your power is the least of your worries.

—T

While you can min-max your vampire, you can also make them pretty miserable. So, yes, you can have a vampire that is wracked by random bouts of extreme sadness, is tense from sun-up to sun-down, still has to bathe, and chat, make all social interactions far more difficult, and be constantly famished by having their thirst motive decrease faster while requiring them to drink more to fill it.

Spellcasters don't really have any of that. They're playing something like 2nd Edition where you only get stronger as you level, while vampires are playing GURPS, where your perks per level are balanced by quirks.

Exactly! You could have aspirations to make a Good Vampire or Master Vampire. Two very different paths.
You could have a vampire who is a guilty drinker or a vampire that gives a negative aura to other Sims. Very different traits and technically you still could pick everything but it gave you a path to go down.

The Spellcaster traits are different variations to just getting better at Spellcasting. That sort of thing works in an RPG but for a life simulation game I feel it should be more personality driven.

Realm of Meh Lol

"Oldeseadogge;c-17285112" wrote:
In TS2 witches have a specific alignment, initiated by who brought your sim in, developed by the magic studied and spells cast. Does ROM have that sort of thing, or is it simmer take all? Going by the various comments in the several relevant threads it appears that ROM is one more in the long list of packs that had great potential but were let down by inadequate development. Again a missed opportunity.

It doesn't even matter which of the three sages you start with. You can talk to them at any time so really it just kind of makes the whole thing up to the player. You can learn all the spells and potions in the game. You can max out all the perks. They all cast the spells the exact same way it seems. There is no difference between practical mage and something like untamed Magic.

It's just kind of disappointing in a way.

"Bearpal64;c-17285238" wrote:

"Oldeseadogge;c-17285112" wrote:
In TS2 witches have a specific alignment, initiated by who brought your sim in, developed by the magic studied and spells cast. Does ROM have that sort of thing, or is it simmer take all? Going by the various comments in the several relevant threads it appears that ROM is one more in the long list of packs that had great potential but were let down by inadequate development. Again a missed opportunity.

It doesn't even matter which of the three sages you start with. You can talk to them at any time so really it just kind of makes the whole thing up to the player. You can learn all the spells and potions in the game. You can max out all the perks. They all cast the spells the exact same way it seems. There is no difference between practical mage and something like untamed Magic.

It's just kind of disappointing in a way.

Gotta save budget on those animations, am I right?

My biggest disappointment is that a majority of the spells seem to be copied from other areas of the game and just turned into spells. If I make a scientist vampire that completes every aspiration in the game to get all of the trait rewards, then that vamp would be able to do the majority of the spells in the original way. Chilio copies the freeze ray. Despario copies the trait from completing the public enemy aspiration. Etc.

In Sims 3 you had to work a lot harder to get your high end spells, they didn't copy anything that was previously in the game, and there was a lot of new unique things you could do. You could be a fortune teller, curse sims, charm them, cast spells on objects. And when you turned a sim into a toad they became a toad-sim and stayed that way until someone gave them a cure elixir or cast sunlight charm on them. They didn't just turn into a lifeless object for 5 mins and poof back to normal.

And there were 4 witch-related aspirations as well: an evil witch to raise zombies, a good witch to cure all the zombies and cursed sims, a genuine fortune teller that wants occult knowledge, and a fraud fortune teller that just wants to scam people out of their money. And fortune telling wasn't purely a rabbit hole career, you had to read your clients fortunes to them outside of your rabbit hole work hours to be able to get a promotion.

Gathering ingredients in Sims 3 took a lot more time too, and you had to grow a lot of them yourself. It was both more challenging and more rewarding. In Realm of Magic it's insanely easy to learn all the spells, only for most of them to be stuff you could already do in the game anyways. Having witches be a game pack instead of just giving us a Supernatural expansion was supposed to mean that witches would be more in-depth and would have more resources put into making them noticeably better than the Sims 3 version. But they aren't. Maxis did a great job improving vampires from their Sims 3 version, but they focused too much on the aesthetic for Realm of Magic and just copied stuff that was already in the game when they ran out of resources to put into actual gameplay development.

"Sheepiling;c-17287659" wrote:
My biggest disappointment is that a majority of the spells seem to be copied from other areas of the game and just turned into spells. If I make a scientist vampire that completes every aspiration in the game to get all of the trait rewards, then that vamp would be able to do the majority of the spells in the original way. Chilio copies the freeze ray. Despario copies the trait from completing the public enemy aspiration. Etc.

In Sims 3 you had to work a lot harder to get your high end spells, they didn't copy anything that was previously in the game, and there was a lot of new unique things you could do. You could be a fortune teller, curse sims, charm them, cast spells on objects. And when you turned a sim into a toad they became a toad-sim and stayed that way until someone gave them a cure elixir or cast sunlight charm on them. They didn't just turn into a lifeless object for 5 mins and poof back to normal.

And there were 4 witch-related aspirations as well: an evil witch to raise zombies, a good witch to cure all the zombies and cursed sims, a genuine fortune teller that wants occult knowledge, and a fraud fortune teller that just wants to scam people out of their money. And fortune telling wasn't purely a rabbit hole career, you had to read your clients fortunes to them outside of your rabbit hole work hours to be able to get a promotion.

Gathering ingredients in Sims 3 took a lot more time too, and you had to grow a lot of them yourself. It was both more challenging and more rewarding. In Realm of Magic it's insanely easy to learn all the spells, only for most of them to be stuff you could already do in the game anyways. Having witches be a game pack instead of just giving us a Supernatural expansion was supposed to mean that witches would be more in-depth and would have more resources put into making them noticeably better than the Sims 3 version. But they aren't. Maxis did a great job improving vampires from their Sims 3 version, but they focused too much on the aesthetic for Realm of Magic and just copied stuff that was already in the game when they ran out of resources to put into actual gameplay development.

Great post, I think this is my main issue with RoM too.

"Sheepiling;c-17287659" wrote:
My biggest disappointment is that a majority of the spells seem to be copied from other areas of the game and just turned into spells. If I make a scientist vampire that completes every aspiration in the game to get all of the trait rewards, then that vamp would be able to do the majority of the spells in the original way. Chilio copies the freeze ray. Despario copies the trait from completing the public enemy aspiration. Etc.

In Sims 3 you had to work a lot harder to get your high end spells, they didn't copy anything that was previously in the game, and there was a lot of new unique things you could do. You could be a fortune teller, curse sims, charm them, cast spells on objects. And when you turned a sim into a toad they became a toad-sim and stayed that way until someone gave them a cure elixir or cast sunlight charm on them. They didn't just turn into a lifeless object for 5 mins and poof back to normal.

And there were 4 witch-related aspirations as well: an evil witch to raise zombies, a good witch to cure all the zombies and cursed sims, a genuine fortune teller that wants occult knowledge, and a fraud fortune teller that just wants to scam people out of their money. And fortune telling wasn't purely a rabbit hole career, you had to read your clients fortunes to them outside of your rabbit hole work hours to be able to get a promotion.

Gathering ingredients in Sims 3 took a lot more time too, and you had to grow a lot of them yourself. It was both more challenging and more rewarding. In Realm of Magic it's insanely easy to learn all the spells, only for most of them to be stuff you could already do in the game anyways. Having witches be a game pack instead of just giving us a Supernatural expansion was supposed to mean that witches would be more in-depth and would have more resources put into making them noticeably better than the Sims 3 version. But they aren't. Maxis did a great job improving vampires from their Sims 3 version, but they focused too much on the aesthetic for Realm of Magic and just copied stuff that was already in the game when they ran out of resources to put into actual gameplay development.

I'm also gonna quote this cause yes it's a major issue with most of the latest Packs but especially this one. This one could have added so much to the game play. But unfortunately it just copied stuff from the game and didn't add a whole lot. What's even more funny is that some things it should have copied it didn't.

I wish magic had more things like clean the whole lot or mass clean a whole room. I wish you could customize the magic effect. I wish there were more epic spells the higher you got up the ranks

I wish I wish I wish.