The Sims 4 Feedback Thread - come share yours

> @Nikiv said:
> Ah, so much to say. The overall opinion I have so far, is: I pre-purchased, I have played since Sims 1 launched, I eagerly awaited the launch and woke up early to catch it first hours of birth and dive into it! Then....I got disappointed. Overall I feel the game has a more arcade-strategy feel to it than a simulation game. And it has definitely sacrificed evolution for practicality. What I try to say is, it went from an awesome life-like world to a sims 1/ sims 2 merger with better graphics (even when cartoonish) to i.e.: Travel faster to a lot. I never minded sacrificing five minutes to be able to go to a lot or a vacation, but the whole world was at my feet to do and undo, to move in and out, see my neighbours age, have children, get married and their offspring move out. I feel like the things "fixed" were not the ones to fix in order to make a better secuel.
> I do like the emotions, and the collections, and the new building features. But that's it. The rest bothers me so much, I get bored easily and wish I hadn't uninstalled TS3. Ergo, all my friends used me as guinea pig and are happy I proved them right on not spending their money on it :(
> Exact things that set me off:
> -No Pools or Toddlers ( I know! But COME ON, deal breaker for the 50% of players)
> -lack of world control/neighborhood customization.
> -Super small neighbourhoods.
> -No "move out" option for the children once they grow up.
> -The freaking drop down menus for EVERYTHING.
> -Lack of furniture or clothing, hearstyles, etc.
> -Babies are back to a clickable bassin.
> -Few community lots.
> -Sims get a "loss of a loved one" only if they are in that room when their dear mother dies???!
> -Have not seen a single ghost yet.
> -Even though there are amazing building tools, they are not very intuitive, i spend more time trying to make that deck lose the part of fence where the stairs go than building.
> -So many emotions, and they are extreme, so i spend hours trying to neutralize them instead of enjoying.
> -Days are too short, cannot manage more than 4 sims without them going south on needs.
> -Cannot move sims out or in without managing households.
> -Well, no pets, cars, etc. The good stuff is gone and we wait to repay countless EPs.
> -Whims, they are too few and impossible to manage in such short days along with career, needs, emotions, ambitions, whatever...
> -Cartoonish looks and foolish animations, makes it even more unrealistic. I do appreciate breastfeeding though.
> -Static neighbourhood. They are puppets that stay the same, really?
> -Careers. There are a handful of them. I can have a thousand different hippies, but no educated and ambitious sims. Not even a doctor!
> -Unlockables. Really? So little content that I need a writer to reach career level 10 to unlock a door.
> -They pop-in and pop out. Nobody uses transportation.
> -No gardner, no repairman, no nothing.
> -The emotion auras spoil the entire game. You place a bucket of ice with champagne from a date, and everyone is horny in that room, no matter what their personalities are.
> -No bookshops.
> -No Newspaper.
> I could go on and on. It is quite disappointing. The bad things outnumber the good things, because it is supposed to evolve entirely, not take some things out completely and super-evolve three aspects. I am quite confused.
>
> Thanks for the space to vent.
>
>
True That!!

OK... First what I liked about the game and than what I disliked.

What I liked....

1. Graphics are nice..
2. Sims can do more than one thing at a time. Nice....
3. No more little rabbit holes to clutter up the neighborhood, just one big one. Though I miss the movie theater and Colosseum games. Rabbit holes are gone. Yay...!
4. Smooth moving game....
5. CAS, manipulate face and body structure so easily and hats separate from hair style.


What I disliked....

1. No pick a pattern or color wheel. Don't know why this was left out in the first place.
2. No sprinklers available to water the garden. Takes to much time to water plants.
3. Sims needs go down to quickly.
4. Days go by to quickly.
5. Loading screens interrupt game play. Example sending a sleepy Sim home, while trying to play another Sim on a community lot. At least have the home lot open at all times, while Sims are on other lots.
6. Can not assign beds to Sims.
7. Sims don't lock doors behind them when using a bathroom.

I have to say I love this game so far! I spent 2 days (my play time depends on nap time for my granddaughter so it has been a bit limited)building a house & getting used to the new camera controls. It was a bit hard with the camera at 1st but I've gotten used to it (and I know there's an option to change to Sims 3 view but I wanted to get used to this game as the new game it is).

I think the world is absolutely beautiful! I like the no open world, you can still walk around the neighborhood without slowing down the game. Everything runs smooth & quick for my, loading screen wait time is very short. (I was super tired of the lag in Sims 3 that I've hardly played at all in the last year or so & my pc more than covers what is required and I don't use cc, just store stuff).

I spent yesterday playing around in live mode and was having lots of fun. One thing I really like a lot is how the gardening shows the different color faces depending on health of the plant. And looking for frogs is a lot of fun too. :)

I can't wait to see what the ep's will bring to the game in the future but for now I'm very happy with the game!

Finding new things everyday. Here is some stuff that I LOVE so far . . .

Worries about the "world" being too small are unjustified. I love that you can travel and move between towns. I'm sure EA will sell me more towns in the future and I am okay with that. Just how their business model works. But that opened up so many more lots and places to explore.

Love that you can build on community lots while you are in them. Did you go to the park to earn tips and forget your guitar (or were too broke to buy one). Just hit build and plop a guitar in the park. Voila!

I can edit my neighbors houses! I always thought it was so silly to go to a neighbors house that had three kids and a grandma and one twin bed. Now I can edit their houses. Without spending my sims money! Plus, I love the decorating so Yay. Also, if I am friends with them, I can throw my dinner parties at their houses, which is great because I don't want a bar in my house!

I can pick and choose which other families "progress" with me. I've seen a lot of complaints about the loss of story progression, but I don't think people realize that you can manage which sims in your town progress with you. If you go into Options, World Manager there is a screen with all of the sims in your game. If you designate a sims as "played" and choose the option (in game settings) to have all played sims "progress", then those families will age with your Sims in real time. Also cool because I can create a family I want to play later. Put them in game and leave them unplayed and they won't age until I play them!

I do miss the family tree :(

Love the multitasking. Still getting the hang of all of the things I can do at the same time (eg read skill book on the toilet!). And its so much more fun to make friends by being able to hold group conversations. Sims 3 tried to make this work and it just never really did.

The straight from baby to kid is kind of hilarious. But toddlers were such a pain and didn't add anything to the game in my opinion. And, getting rid of the forced maternity leave is awesome. Now I can actually play a female sim and progress her career AND have kids. It got pretty tough to do in Sims 3 if she had more than one kid because she was never at work. Plus, the breast feeding option is a nice little realistic touch.

I do miss pools. I am sure they will be back. Kind of how I missed spas when Sims 3 came out. Oh, and I miss those too. And dishwashers. So silly to have this spectacular kitchen with no dishwasher!

That's all for now. Having fun. Thanks development team. I've played all the Sims and was really wondering how another iteration of this game was going to be any fun. It is!

I have been playing "Sims" since the beginning. I just don't understand why they took a step backwards? TS4 reminds me of TS2. I see other games and the graphic are amazing and the things you can do with gaming has really advanced since the Pacman days. The cost of computers had gone down in the past 5 years, you can buy better computer for less money. So I am just not understanding why I can not have amazing things in this TS4 game. I had to paid more for it and I don't have weather or pets? Why? I want to make the walls and the table the same color. I want to be able to create my own SIMS world. Why can I have a stream to go fishing in front of my house but, not a pool in my back yard. I know they have the technology to do it. So, we as the customer has to buy a $50 expansion pack that has about 20 new things in it. Come on EA.

Things I enjoy:

- Create-A-Sim Mode

Despite the lack of color palettes, the CAS is so much better from TS3. Like always, spot on with that feature. It was also about 10x less laggy and glitchy than TS3's CAS.

- Build/Buy mode

Much more streamlined, it is much easier to navigate for what I want and need. Building new additions is much easier as well, and I'm not wasting money trying to fix issues that shouldn't have been issues in the first place.

- Separate Neighborhoods

Given how badly the neighborhoods were affected by lag and performance, especially in later additions to TS3 (coughlatenightscough), I'm grateful that there's a short load time going to and from different areas. No longer does my machine have to decide what Mary Sue across the town is doing.

- Skills

Skills, skills everywhere. I like that there's a lot more variance in skills and what you can do for/with them. The fact that certain emotions help build different skills makes me quite happy.

The problems:

- Working Characters

There are a lot of problems with working right now. The first is that people who are working are unviewable. You can't tell what their needs/wants are, you have to guess from their moodlets. You can't tell how they are performing at work, a feature that's been in place since the first Sims game (Reeallly... why?), the daily tasks are a chore at best, and an absolute waste of time at worst, and you need friends to advance levels in all jobs, really? Not a well designed feature, considering how core working is to any Sims game.

- Too much time spent on managing Sims needs.

It takes forever to eat. It takes forever to shower. It takes forever to pee. It takes forever... are we noticing a pattern? Everything takes too long, leaving you with little to no time in the day for learning skills or doing anything outside of the house. In fact, it was so bad I merely turned it off. I dislike cheating in the game, but frankly, it needs a fix before I consider playing normally.

- Loading screen

Is frankly awful. I liked the dynamic loading screens for TS3, as at least you were looking at something, rather than a shittily animated plumbob. If I have to spend so much time on load screens, at least let me know what the progress is, as well as giving me something to look at.

- Bare bones

In fact, I think you cut off a few of the bones. This is the most sparse Sims start, including the original The Sims. Very small amounts of furniture. Locked objects. No cars or bikes. No ability to modify your town. Very tiny amounts of lots per "town." I think the original Sims game had more lots on the first game than 4 does. No pools, no toddlers.

- Friendship is difficult

It seems like the half-life of a friendship is about one day, and it is extremely difficult to become friends with anyone. It shouldn't be nearly as difficult to have a person become a friend, and it shouldn't be next to impossible to keep them as a friend.

Please delete this post: No cancel option available and I'm tired of seeing the Saving Draft notification when I come to view this topic.

After playing for 10-15 hours this is my feedback.

#1 most thing I enjoyed is multitasking. My house is pretty small due to budget constraints so my living room and kitchen area is an open floor plan and one night they all sat at the table to have dinner (2 children, parents) and they all conversed while eating and even the mother turned on the TV to watch some comedy from sitting at the dining room table!

#2 When I reached five household sims the micromanaging got a bit overwhelming. When I'm trying to get the parents and children peed, showered, and fed before school or work I had to lineup a procession line of orders so that they would not be late. Sure, I could just allow them to autonomously do it, but then you have sims wanting to use the same bathroom time or there is a few minutes where the sims have to autonomously pick up what is their lowest need and do it. To me it's just easier clicking toilet, shower, fridge and have them complete it in an hour vs waiting for the auto-pilot to come on. Don't get me wrong, the new sim system is great and 100% better than previous expansions.

#3 I love the gardening aspect since my female sim is a cook, but when I have six plots (big boxed garden plots) to take care of the length of time for my sims to do it gets very lengthy and takes up a lot of time to weed, water, and harvest them all. I can simply fix this by making one of my family members pitch in so the job gets done faster. Since my sims have full time jobs and come home dead tired (passing out on the front door), I have to usually wait to tend the garden on a day off.

#4 Having to complete job objectives in order to advance in a career. I found this a tad annoying since I was already micromanaging five sims and sometimes my sims would come home so dead tired and needs in orange-red that the job objectives would be put off until I could squeeze it in between making sure they were happy/fine with OK need stats and before another day's work. I only discovered this when my sim had been a dishwasher for 4-5 days with her job performance in dark green. I don't like this aspect since you HAVE to complete the objectives in order to advance (no matter what your performance is) or your sim will never advance in career.


Overall I still enjoy this game immensely and I am waiting for the first expansion and stuff pack to come out already! :D

Thanks for reading!

Why is it that the expensive homes already in the game don't come with higher end furniture & appliances? I've always wondered this with the all the Sims games. It irks me when my Sims move into a higher priced home and there's low comfort basic furniture.

Only played for a short while, as I had to redownload and reinstall because I couldn't chose the language I wanted to play in otherwise.

So far I really like how smooth it runs on my computer, never managed to sort out the regular freezing for a few seconds here and there in the sims 3, despite having an extremly overpowered computer for the job. I don't mind the loadscreens because I know it makes it smoother and I don't miss the open world all that much even if the new way might take some time to get used to.

I still have to explore the emotions further before I know what I really think but so far I like it.

There are however a few things that will probably keep me from buying EPs for this game. The game is good for a fast paced short game, but the lack of story progression will make longer games like the ones I played on TS3 unmotivated and those games were what kept me playing and buying more content. I will probably enjoy TS4 for a short while and then likely go back to TS3 for longer and more substansial play.

I also realise that it isn't fair to judge and compare a game that has just been released with a game that has been patched and built on for years so I will definitely keep myself posted on what is happening with TS4, but it would probably take a minor miracle for me to keep expanding on it.