Smarten up TS4
The Sims 4 has boasted about having smarter sims with wacky stories. So far, the stories are lack luster because of limited game play options and the sims are as smart as rocks. Here's just 1 exampl...
Forum Discussion
"tonicmole;c-16485583" wrote:
The problem is that Will Wright is a programming genius. His genius was in building a Sims personality thru a handful of common traits. Shy/Outgoing, Lazy/Active, Grouchy/Nice, Sloppy/Neat, Lazy/Active. When you combine these handful of traits they spawn a limitless number of behaviors and what appears to be true AI. "Traits" from Sims 3 and 4 are just silly and nonsensical. Honestly they feel lazy and their effects limited directly to a specific activity instead of being dynamic like Will Wrights original system.
Ideally Maxis should bring back the Zodiac based personality system, and then allow players to choose traits to modify that base personality. Then they could weight activities and objects based on those personality traits. For instance a television would have a stronger draw for less active or playful sims. In conversation a playful Sim would be more likely to tell jokes, and a grouchy Sim more likely to react negatively. On top of that you'd have the modern idea of traits like "nerd", "Snobby", or "Loner", but much like the personality they would function in a more dynamic way with weighted objects and behavior.
I could go on forever, but simply put it'd be really easy to create truly dynamic Sims without even applying much effort if Maxis just actually looked back at Will Wrights original work and learned why it was so amazing to begin with.
Though I don’t agree with this completely (I don’t think traits in 3 were silly and nonsensical but I will agree they could have been so so so much better than they are; the system as such isn’t a bad one imo and I don’t agree it’s a lazy system either), I do agree with the essence. It’s highly important to this game someone who knows how to build a good, solid personality system in this respect is the bottom line of a good Sims game. In any case (and if they use a Zodiac system for that that’s fine by me) taking sim’s personalities as a starting point in relation to everything else in the game is highly essential indeed and they’ve completely left that principle in Sims 4.
