The Biggest Problem with The Sims 4

"Onverser;d-978665" wrote:
So I was thinking about the packs in the game, and I realised that the pros and cons for basically every single one is the same. The Sims 4 seems to have a running theme of style over substance. For most packs the worlds are visually beautiful, the CAS is full of nice items, and there's tons of really nice build-buy items and these things repeatedly become the star of the show. Rather than the gameplay, which tends to fall short.

For example; Eco Lifestyle. The overall response seems to be that people love the build-buy stuff and the CAS, but don't like the gameplay features.

Then in Island Living - the world is stunning, the build-buy is nice and so is the CAS but again, the gameplay isn't all there.

Then in Get Together, people praise the world all the time and there's so much love for Windenburg, but the gameplay elements of the pack are nowhere near as popular.

City living, it's nice to have apartments and everything looks nice but there's not really much else to the pack.
Realm of magic - beautiful visually, lacking interesting gameplay. You get the gist.

In past editions it seemed to be the opposite way around. If you look at packs in TS3 for example, the build-buy and CAS generally aren't very exciting (in my opinion at least), they're heavily themed and are generally just there as an add on to the gameplay, there isn't many items that are usable in every day gameplay. Whilst in TS4 every pack is full of tons of really nice items, and it's almost like the gameplay is an add on to the visuals.

It just seems like as an over all, in TS4 the majority of the focus is put on the visuals and making everything look nice rather than creating fun gameplay. Essentially, the game is like a pretty building simulator and character creator first, and a game second. And I hope that changes with the next edition and we'll get to see more gameplay focus, rather than visual focus.

Well, I don't think this is a problem. Worlds and objects are like maybe half the game, and at least everyone agrees that the worlds and objects are nice looking. This means they have good artists and art director, or whoever decides how things should look like. The gameplay is down to coding and another team of people does that and could probably be improved on if they wanted to, especially as I understand this is something they do themselves, not outsource it. With gameplay however, many people want different things, so I guess it's difficult to implement everything so it satisfies everyone. Some want open world, some want more or less autonomy, some want rampaging vampires, some don't want them at all. There are also 3 previous iterations to compare current one with and the team wants the players to accept a sims MMO as TS5.