Sims 4 Neighborhood Stories: A Mistake From EA?

I love it, made my gameplay and phone calls more interesting, but then I can’t relate to others who have gotten so many strange calls tbh and I only got from Sims my Sims are friendly with so it just feels like my Sims personally chatting on the phone. The off switch to my mind is to just click no on the options it’s really not a big deal for me I’m hanging up on Bess and turning down festival invites all the time, but maybe in future there will come an off switch in the settings, besides the phone silencer. I don’t really see it like they are asking the Sim to make the decisions, but also asking me as the player, so I like it because I play rotationally and I get to change things without switching houses, like build friendships. Maybe they should make it so that only good friends / best friends ask certain types of questions, like career/pregnancy questions and they should limit ages so adults don’t ask teen Sims etc. and certainly toddlers shouldn’t be using the phone at all. I think there are many things they can do to improve it, like add an answering machine, add more questions like have a friend call saying they found a stray kitten or puppy and do you want to adopt it, or offer donated items like do you want this teapot I’m cleaning my kitchen, fun stuff like that, but I really like it so far.

I agree that players should have options, which ideally includes turning neighborhood stories off completely without mods. So hopefully they'll add that in the future, but I also think the addition of this sort of gameplay is a welcomed change and not a mistake.

I haven't played much since the update, but my Sims haven't gotten any calls from neighbors at all. I had one odd interaction between Sims in my household that seemed like it came with the update, but the interaction was cute and funny.

I don't want an answering machine, because I don't think the data from missed calls is particularly important and would rather the game not keep track of that for a ton of Sims.

If you are not opposed to using mods then Bienchen has a mod that allows you to disable it. I just downloaded it to fix issues with the calls not making sense and I noticed it includes the options to disable it.

I like it. I only have one main household so I'm not too concerned with what happens to the rest of the neighborhood.

The return of Story Progression, or some version thereof, was highly requested by many players from the beginning. Regardless, I was always against it, out of fear that it might mess up the sim world I've spent years carefully creating. So when the Neighbourhood Stories feature was introduced, I did have my doubts.

After playing with it for a while, though, I have to say I find it rather unintrusive and easy to manage. Neighbours will only call after you've socialised with them, and even then, only once until you meet with them again. If you don't like the life changes they're proposing, you can just say no, and in my experience, they will always heed your advice. One sim even turned down his "dream job" after I told him to, because... I gave you the job you already have because that is your dream job, who are you to disagree with my decisions, you puny little pixel person??

However, if they're planning on extending this feature to make it more complex and less avoidable in the future, I hope an OFF button will eventually be introduced. As it is now, I don't have a problem with it.

I think introducing it without an option to turn it off was a mistake because not all players wanted story progression. And the people who find it weird with your friend asking you if they should expand the family will just find the feature annoying because they have to say no.

Personally, I think the sims4 system overall with phonecalls and notifications in the upper right is not a great system...I never liked it. It's immersion breaking and intrusive and some calls feels "fake", sims are calling you to say "this sim is pretty cool!" and things like that. Whats the point? It will only add to all the phonecalls that we are already getting. Like this one.

https://twitter.com/CarlsSimGuides/status/1469886614851706882

I think they should add game options for neighborhood stories, not having the player saying "no" for phonecalls. I always preferred it the way MC Command Center did it where it offered options for the player to customize their game.

tbh my main issue with ts4 is the lack of toggles and controls and that they just add things with no way to turn it off

this is especially frustrating with randomized townies bloating the game and these spammy phone calls for absolutely everything

i think there should be turn off phone calls toggle and it could have separate check box for separate phone call types like if you want school messages but no party invites that should be possible without taking out packs from your game

same goes for this

I like it, as it makes the world seems more alive, but sometimes the calls make no sense, like my already married sims being called by his spouse saying she found an engagement ring and should she say yes, even though she has already said yes and they are married.

And you should be able to turn it off.
Sometimes I am open to progression and sometimes I just want to focus on what I want to do without any interruptions.
It would be nice if I could shut the phone off anyway.

If the point of The Sims was to carefully craft the whole neighborhood/world, then I guess I'm playing it wrong, what with completely ignoring the Premade households, and only playing one household through several generations rather than switching around and playing rotationally to micromanage every household in the game.

But I'm not, because there's no one "right" way to play the Sims.

I do agree that a clear "off" button for Neighborhood stories would be good for those people who do want to carefully craft their neighborhoods and worlds. And there definitely needs to be some tweaking on the coding for who gets what kind of calls from whom. Calls involving other members of the same household shouldn't happen. But I also trust that they're working on making improvements and taking feedback as people complain about things that don't work right for them.

But that doesn't mean that Neighborhood Stories was a mistake. There are a lot of people who did want Story Progression, and MCCC isn't a viable solution for everyone. I'm playing vanilla now, but I have used it in the past and I certainly prefer it over either letting the world slowly empty as families aged up and died off without kids or else micromanaging the whole world. I'm hoping that with future updates, Neighborhood Stories will allow further refinement, with out the random and occasionally nonsensical calls. And I won't have to micromanage the other families in order to play for multiple generations.

As someone that *hates* story progression from 3 and doesn't have a single reason to like neighborhood stories (and I don't, it does nothing for me), no. Really, no.

I guess the pop ups could be annoying, but so long as there are not actually autonomous changes, I do not care. Plus we've been told toggles (and deeper features with them) are coming later.

So really don't think it is a misstep or a step back because it is giving a lot of people what they wanted. Something akin to some of the really popular mods, and something that had been done in the past (story progression). I'm looking forward to the toggles, too, and am terrified of some of the bugs that will happen now that there is code for these autonomous changes, but I do agree in principal a pop up is a fairly opt in opt out way to start this.