Sims Four Live Mode is Lacking

"Jordan061102;c-16614281" wrote:

"Sk8rblaze;c-16612584" wrote:

"JoAnne65;c-16609163" wrote:

"Sk8rblaze;c-16608897" wrote:
It’s because it lacks design as an actual game.

The Sims was always a game (especially the first one) where you had to be very particular in how you strategized playing. Planning, budgeting, and the possibility of something randomly going wrong were constantly on your mind. It was truly designed as a strategic life simulation.

Now, it’s too focused on aesthetic. The developers literally call new objects that ONLY have new animations tied to them as new gameplay. How is gameplay watching my Sim do something that has little effect on the game itself?

Additionally, the systems in the game, such as collecting and gardening, feel useless because the designers seemingly don’t know how to make them interesting, fun, and relevant.

In another life simulation game, called Animal Crossing, collecting is one of the core parts of its gameplay. You donate whatever you collect to the museum or you can sell it for money, however, a completed section of the museum grants a very special golden version of the tool you used for collection (e.g golden net for bugs). In Stardew Valley, crafting is a core element of the game. And unlike The Sims 4, crafting in Stardew Valley actually has a purpose; crafting better gardening tools for instance makes gardening faster.

In The Sims 4, the design of things like collecting and such are so incredibly weak. Tell me why would I want to collect My Sims figurines or snow globes over and over in The Sims??? Why would I want to bother spending time collecting bugs when time flow in this game is so limiting, and my Sim would make more of a profit doing other things? Mind you — it goes further than this. I haven’t even delved into how poorly designed emotions, traits, whims, aspirations, etc. are.

This is what happens when you hire a base game producer that primarily designed Facebook games and not PC simulation or RPG games.

Ex. Act. Ly. I've been strictly a simmer for years, but currently I'm playing Animal Crossing and exactly what you say has crossed my mind. How come (and I'm in fact also looking at Sims 3 in that respect) I find things like collecting and fishing so addictive in AC and a bore in Sims. It's because in AC they found the perfect balance between making it rewarding (it's fun to walk through your museum and watch everything you collected over time and it's great to catch bugs/fish you know will make a lot of money), being not too hard and not too easy (I'm not ashamed of the trademark casual player, I am and proud/quite satisfied to be) and on top of that they added gameplay to the collecting/fishing itself. The action. Catching bugs or fish isn't based on luck, it's totally up to the player. Same with growing flowers and digging weeds. The way they've done it would perfectly fit and be fun in a Sims game.

Yup, I agree entirely. In that game, you have a really good balance of customization, while also having these elements which make it an actual game. For what some people describe as such a laid back experience, I honestly feel like Animal Crossing provides more challenge than The Sims 4. Making money isn't insanely easy, and actually requires me to perfect the various ways of collecting things in the world (fish, bugs, diving, etc.). To put it short, every kind of feature the game possesses just flows nicely with one another, and the core of the game itself.

In The Sims 4, it feels like everything is all over the place, if that makes sense. Features in the game do not work well with one another, or well at all. The various skills in the game should rely more on one another (such as gardening and cooking), and features like traits and emotions feel as if they should matter more. Generational gameplay was an afterthought -- we had no family trees at launch, and we still have no way to pass down our Sims' wealth. Sim personality isn't at all dictated by our Sims' parents, either. Skills feel repetitive after maxing them on one Sim once. Aspirations are grindy and repetitive. Careers have improved, but the GTW careers were absolutely horrid for a 40 dollar pack -- the idea of having the game control how I play was horrible. I'm all over the place, but I feel like at every corner, there is a problem with a feature in this game in some form.

I personally feel The Sims 2 is hailed as the pinnacle of the franchise thus far because the developers understood replayability is crucial with this game. They designed it with the mindset people are going to be playing generations of Sims (many, many hours), and they made sure to include features that make playing the game and doing the same things repeatedly fun and exciting. We didn't have the ridiculous festivals of The Sims 4 which are insanely useless after the first time looking around in them. TS2 rewards playing big families, and more Sims, while also hitting us with a good amount of challenge in taking care of all of them. In fact, the addition of the random risks and challenging content make the game way more fun to play repeatedly.

Then you have The Sims 3, which, as you know, is just filled to the brim with a massive amount of features, and huge open worlds to offer unique gameplay and lots of customization, as we can control/customize every little part of these worlds ourselves. It really feels The Sims 4 contributed the least to the progression of the franchise.

Also, semi-unrelated, whenever I boot up TS4, there is always some kind of strange glitch I cannot avoid. It's insane, because I've never played a Sims game where bugs were so blatantly in my face at every turn. For instance, I loaded the game up and I had trees in winter mode, when it was a heat wave in summer. I had to reboot it to fix it. (Can we also talk about how poorly designed that public area is, with a skate rink plopped right on the sidewalk? Really?)

https://i.imgur.com/aV6VpNY.jpg

I love reading comments like that, and I really hope they are reading here to go in the right way. And I hope all the amazing feedbacks that we gave to them since the launch of TS4 will help them to make TS5 better. But the question is, are they enough smart to finally realize that the gameplay is more important than the look of the game or will they continue to give us poor games? In any case, I know that if they make this Franchise go in the right way, they could recover a lot of fans. But I don't think they are enough ambitious...

TBH If they make a Sims 5 I'm not buying it. After all the feedback they got from TS3 and TS4 turned out the way it did... Yea I'm good... I can easily say I'm done with this company after what they've done and continue to do with this iteration.

I will continue to try and make the best of what expenses I've spent thus far on this iteration, but I can surely say I will NOT support future iterations made by this company.