The I'm Bored Thread

"Without interesting failure states, the success in the game is less meaningful."
- Will Wright

The Sims 4 has always felt sterilised to me when it comes to things like consequences. It tries so, so hard not to get in your way or throw a spanner in your plans and that right there is where it stops being a life simulator, I've said it before and I'll say it again. In life we all have plans and hopes and dreams and all that but more often than not something comes up that prevents us from achieving them. There's so many things that just fall flat.

In the original game back in 2000 fires were utterly devastating. Sure you could get the fireman over pretty quick if you had an alarm, but there was always the chance that when a Sim was extinguishing flames (including a fireman) there would be a bad reaction that would cause the fire to spread to about eight or ten squares instantly, which pretty much meant your kitchen was gone. On top of that fires killed Sims in a matter of seconds, and only another Sim could extinguish them - they couldn't save themselves at that point. In 4 you've got a sprinkler and fires might as well not be in the game, they're so inconsequential. Will had personal experience with fire and so he made sure it was a serious deal.

In 1 and 2 children or teens would lose an entire grade at school if they so much as missed one day. In 4 I've had teens take a week off and not lose a grade. The same goes with jobs for older Sims - in the past if you missed 2 days in a row you were fired outright whereas now it takes ages for the performance bar to drop. Sims who get bad grades in 4 get a sad moodlet. Sims in 1 and 2 who got bad grades were sent to military school and removed from the household.

In 2 and 3 if a partner was caught cheating then they could potentially be kicked out of the house right there and then, boom, gone. Relationships plummeted due to bad events like cheating or fighting because there was the fury system, an actual consequence for these sorts of things. Sims wouldn't be able to have a normal conversation for hours or days depending on the offence. In 4 it's all good, just high five your wife and all that.

In 2 if you had a teen in the house and you didn't look after their needs, aspiration or friendships then there was a chance they could run away. Reporting them as missing to the police within 24 hours made it likely that they would be found but if you didn't then there was a good chance they'd stay gone, only returning the day before their birthday. There were unique failure states for different age groups in that sense.

In 2 a vampire would die within less than a minute if they were so much as awake during the day, it didn't matter if they were indoors or not. Daytime equalled an untimely demise in true gothic fashion. Nowadays having an empty thirst bar won't even kill a vampire. In 3 vampires died by low thirst and had a really neat ghost (black with a visible, beating red heart and veins).

Chance cards in 4 are borderline meaningless little boxes of text that have next to no impact, either giving tiny rewards or moodlets, or moving an arrow a few centimetres along a performance bar. In 2 they had impacts, you could get demoted or lose your job for a wrong choice, or lose a day's pay, or on the opposite side of things, earn an instant promotion or a cash bonus. 3 had opportunities that could be anything from simple tasks like "repair this" or "go to this event" all the way up to going to travelling the world.

The Sims 4 just feels so utterly weak and stagnant. It tries so hard to be inoffensive and unproblematic and as such it's just dull. It hasn't been sterilised for kids, it has been sterilised for sensitive adults. Moving the Tom and Jerry level slap animation from the mean category to the mischief category because it could be construed as abusive? This is a game where you can lock your neighbours in your basement because your vampire doesn't feel like getting a take away.