Forum Discussion
I truly don't grasp the concept of creator kits. I just outright don't get it.
i haven't bought half of them- because a good chunk of them are womens clothing. I'm not sure if the devs are aware, but we have plenty of womens clothing. Perhaps we could use creator kits to fill niches that actually need filling, rather than giving us another set of womens pajamas? I used to keep track of this stuff and for the bulk of the Sims 4's lifespan, fem frame items outnumbered masc frame items 2:1 if not more. The gap has shrunken a little bit, especially now that *some* items are designed to actually work properly on both frames (another issue entirely...masc frame items generall work on fem, doubling their total options, but fem frame items basically never work on masc).
But regardless of that issue, I don't "get it". It really does feel like paid CC at this point. It's CC creators making CC and we pay for it. I don't care for that. If I'm paying for content I want it to be official content. If we're releasing X amounts of kits a year and Y amount of them are creator kits, that's however man kits worth of official content we aren't getting. I'd really rather have officially made content. If I want CC I'll download CC. (I'm aware console players exist, and I have the perspective that The Sims is a PC game, they're lucky they got it at all this time around, and we shouldn't diminish the core PC experience to cater to consoles, but that's another conversation entirely and a very uncomfortable one yall arent ready to dive into as you learn that catering to consoles is why we're not getting Sims 5...)
The quality control also seems questionable. Seems each of these kits has problems every time, which isn't true of the normal kits so much. Little issues are usually a given, but creator kits especially seem to fall victim to basic quality control problems. Missing swatches, broken footprints, mesh deformations. Creator kits, you would think, would have a little more scrutiny because the creator's reputation is involved, but they keep coming out clumsy.
As for these two kits specifically- I did not get the clothing one, as we do not need more fem frame and feminine items. But it seems that several items are frankenmeshes of existing EA content from various packs, which seems like a really bad look for both EA and the creator in question. Does EA realize this happened? If not, that's a big deal. Did EA endorse or encourage this? If so, that feels really strange for content made in partnership with an unofficial creative. It's one thing for EA to frankenmesh their own stuff- I don't care, as long as the end result is distinct and clearly "a separate item". But something about a CC creator coming in, taking pack content, and smushing it into new content that you pay for feels...sketchy.
The bathroom kit is pretty good, but the textures aren't great (the bath tub looks permanently dirty from the marble texture), the models are broken (the sideboard is two tiles wide despite being a one tile wide object), some textures are broken (the plant's leaves are only visible from one side, so every angle of it looks like a different plant...seriously, how do things like this pass QA? Or even simply looking at the item?), the new shower head is clearly one of those rainfall showers but uses basic shower VFX (and the VFX starts way too low so the water appears out of thin air, a problem with a LOT of showers in the game)...there are missing swatches (the divider has 6 different swatches of one type of glass...and only one of the other), the wall light goes to low LOD too early and is visibly chunky from a very short distance, and worst of all, the items were misrepresented in marketing (the sideboard is depicted as tileable and it is clearly not, and the toilet is depicted as built into the wall but in actuality doing so requires nudging it with move objects).
That's a LOT of issues for such a small number of items. And several of those issues would have been completely obvious while making promotional materials or simply checking them in-game casually. No rigorous QA process is required to find these problems...some are found simply by using your eyes to just look at them, once. And will they ever be fixed? Not likely- other kits with similar issues have not gotten any attention.
(Also as a general comment, the swatch variety is terrible. Base game items had 15+ swatches of primary colors and some extras, nowadays we get, what, 7 swatches? And they're all pale earth tone pastels. It's such a limiting variety. This could've been THE SINGLE MOST VERSATILE SHELF IN THE GAME- and despite it being the basic blender cube smushed down, requring the smallest effort possible to UV map and texture effectively, it has 11 swatches that all range from dull to dim.)
