Sims 4 game balance is a joke

"TOLKIEN;c-17858052" wrote:
I feel this comes down to design decisions made early on when they decided to make the game accessible and marketed to 13 year olds (youngest ESRB allows under teen rating) which apparently means removing any form of challenge and the fact that the team had just come off designing a Sims online game, with that some of that mentality sticking as they designed Sims 4.

Honestly I've never understand the design decision to make the game "easy' no matter what type of game it was going to be, considering that overall the game industry is now driven by challenging players and players want challenge. When a person isn't challenged, or things are too easy players get bored and lose interest. This is universal.

For me this is most apparent in S4 when it comes to forming romantic relationships. Unless a sim flat out insults another sim first, literally any sim can seduce another sim with 4-6 clicks. Married or not, no matter what their personality (lol personality in the Sims right...) er traits are...honestly I've seen sims with romantic traits autonomously approach married sims and flirt with them successfully on community lots.

Why? Well this comes to down scoring system and I recall reading a mod authors notes who wanted to make relationships more challenging, they were shocked to discover when they began writing the mod that Maxis set the required score to successfully flirt with any other sims incredibly low.

So for example a sim needs to have a relationship score of 15 out of 100 points to make a positive romantic interaction which is literally "hello, chat, joke and than flirt.

Overall for whatever reason this was a design decision by Maxis and its definitely hurt this game as people get bored playing since everything can be achieved quickly and without any challenge more so by setting these score values so low it make the game feel unrealistic as a life simulator and can break player immersion.

However there is an easy fix and that would be for Maxis to do a massive balancing pass to all the underlying systems that are scored - which might sound like a huge project but companies do this all the time for their games sometimes completely re-working a games entire balance especially in strategy games such as published by Paradox or Creative Assembly. Now this wouldn't be such a "big project now" if they had been balancing the game over the years.

AND thats the thing - I can barely recall many patch notes over 6 years that didn't change the games playing balance in any meaningful way.

Ironically I suspect if they did now, this forum would fill up with people complaining things are too hard or take too long now too.

So there is that lol...

One other thing is in some ways the game suffers from "buff bloat" by caring over older gameplay mechanics (such as decorated rooms) that add up buffs ontop of buffs until basically sims remain constantly in a positive moodlet. I feel like some of these gameplay mechanics actually should have been removed or toned down but again this comes down to balance.

They can overcome this by creating different modes, storytelling mode and challenge mode. The first being the game as it is, the latter being a revamp of the buffs, traits, scoring, and advertising.

During this sale they're having on steam...I know a few people that bought the game because it's like $4. Well, they tried it for about an hour and were so bored...they literally messaged me WTF is this it's not a sims game. I do play, but my game is so heavily modded that it's nothing like the actual game. I know that when I came back to the game, I was bored really quickly, too. I'm hesitant to mod because of the update schedule, but honestly, without mods I can't find enjoyment in actually playing the game. Build/buy and CAS are on point, but that's really all this game has to offer people that actually want to play a game.

I'm like @Chicklet453681 and @NationalPokedex in that I like my sims to guide me where their lives want to go so when I assign traits, I expect the game to make my sims act within the limits of those traits. It's game breaking when they don't because they should and always have in previous games. I don't think it's too much to expect the game to behave similarly as the series progresses.