This is basically a scam....

"Yoko2112;c-15815224" wrote:

"luthienrising;c-15815091" wrote:

"husseinandali;c-15814606" wrote:

"luthienrising;c-15813045" wrote:

"husseinandali;c-15813039" wrote:

"luthienrising;c-15811125" wrote:
People were flipping out over $20 for "just" Vampires, until the pack came out... and was widely praised for being a deep handling of Vampires. Maybe having just two animal species in a Pets pack would mean we'd end up with better just-two-animals the way the Vampires pack worked. I'd be happy with $40 cats and dogs if they finally made it fun for me to play the way, finally, I find to be the case for vampires and toddlers (which didn't get squashed into the basegame in a lame way, like babies were). Quality over quantity. For me, personally, ten (or whatever) half-done animals for $40 would be more of a rip-off than two really well done, engaging animals for $40.

I remember in Sims 3 days we used to receive quality and quantity all together

If the pack is only cats and dogs I'm not interested

That first statement is a matter of opinion, and you'll see plenty of varying opinion on it. I personally always felt that Supernatural, Generations, Pets, Late Night, and Ambitions delivered more quantity than quality. They were all packs that I ended up finding shallow in actual gameplay. I definitely got my money's worth in quality from Sims 3 Seasons, though. I feel like the Sims teams have found a better quality groove lately, even if it's been at the cost of some quantity.

is it really, would you say those packs didn't have better content in regards to quality then any of the released "expansion packs".

Yes, I would. My opinion on what makes for quality for me, in my gameplay, obviously differs from yours.

For me, the active careers in Ambitions were boring - just small sets of new interactions and a lot of old ones, and piles of going into CAS or build/buy; the active careers in Get to Work have been a lot of fun with piles of fresh animation and objects (I'm a Science career fan), and I love what the Alien disguise feature opened up in gameplay for me, and still does - I have not stopped playing Aliens over the last two full years. I have no interest in GTW's retail side, but I guess retail management (and, for Dine Out, restaurant management) just aren't careers I want to play; three out of four careers is ok.

Late Night's celebrity system was infectious and annoying and shallow; the neighbourless apartment system was frustrating and made apartments nothing but more isolated house; the so-called big city was largely empty, certainly of the things that make a city a city, for me, as someone who lives downtown in a big city. City Living might lack build-your-own-apartment features, but that city? It's a city. I feel instantly at home in it. I could look around in it, at all the activity and the variety of activity, no matter the hour, and it's like going for a walk outside my own door. Living in a CL apartment has some of what living in close quarters really is like, and I love that it works for me as a rotational player. And the optional-work-from-home careers give a new kind of flexibility in gameplay.

I bought Supernatural for the witches, and what I got was a relatively shallow version of witches - nothing that felt EP-level - plus supernaturals I was uninterested in playing and/or annoyed by. For half the price, I got fabulous vampires that I enjoy because I can make my version of vampires, not just one particular Hollywood style. (I know, not an EP.)

One more EP left: Get Together. I never want to play again without the Get Together Club system. The way that feeds my immersion and control over the "human" side of the environment in the game is just brilliant. I'd never seen anything that gave me comparable power in previous Sims versions, and I've played since a couple of months after The Sims launched in 2000. If a future Sims 5 launches without something like this club system or better in the base game? I'll consider waiting till that complexity and creative control over something non-visible is back.

So yeah, I'm going to be somewhat optimistic that there'll be some way in which a Sims 4 Pets might improve on the Sims 2 and 3 Pets EPs, neither of which interested me much for very long. Sims 2 Pets had a lot of limitations in what you could do and much of the pet play wasn't stuff that I cared for. Sims 3 Pets had horses I didn't care about which meant less attention to house pets I did care about, plus annoying strays, plus annoying playing as a pet, which I really didn't want to do. I'm hoping that it's not three strikes on pets for me, because so far it's been two. (Well, more "mehs" than strikes. It doesn't help that I'm not someone who needs pets, including in real life. It takes more than Yay Kitties Finally to pull me in. But I don't dislike pets, and I grew up with cats, one of whom believed I was his, and in real life my neighbourhood is full of people walking dogs - they're part of households, and I'd like to have that feel in game too. I just don't want to be bored or annoyed by them.)

Edited to add: I feel like I was really dissing Sims 3 here. I played and enjoyed Sims 3 a good lot, but there was a lot of gameplay that I played through only once or not at all. I tended to end up using packs for the new worlds in them and the CAS and build/buy. Maybe if I'd been more engaged close-up during gameplay generally I'd have got more out of the pack content too. I feel that there was a sense in which Sims 3 was developed expansively - open world, wide-ranging feature lists in packs, story progression - and Sims 4 is being developed more up close (not the right phrasing there, but the right phrasing is escaping me), and in both the base of the game and the packs, it's been more for me that way. Also I seriously loved Sims 3 Seasons. Like a lot. It kept me in the game when I might otherwise have set it aside a lot more than I did. I didn't hate Sims 3; it just never hit the mark for me the way Sims 4 has. It was made for Simmers who aren't me, and I was a different shaped peg trying to fit myself in. Sims 4 feels like my shape.

I don't necessarily agree with everything on this list ( mainly the GTW side because I think aliens were only half-baked, the careers too repetitive, especially the detective one and retail was missing small things ) but in general I agree that TS4 really brings a sort of liveliness to the series compared to TS3. There's a lot of quirks and little details, specifically in newer packs that make the game much more fun to me.

In my opinion City Living is far from perfect, but it does give a better experience of living in the city than Late Night did. On the other hand, TS3 really shined when it came to open world features like scooba diving, houseboats, tomb exploring, transportation methods, etc.
I like both games, and while I definitely prefer TS4 I do hope that we'll get a Sims game in the future that combines the greatness of each past iteration. One can dream, right ? For now I'm just really excited to see what TS4 still has in store for us, and I want to see what they're doing with pets before I judge them on it.

It feels like the "first" of the packs are generally the weakest -- Outdoor Retreat feels like the weakest of the GPs, and Luxury Party the weakest of the SPs. That doesn't mean that they don't have value in the grand scheme of the game, but when they were all developed the teams were still getting a feel for the game, the game engine and its capabilities, and what exactly the community was looking for. If they could go back and revisit those packs, maybe they'd do something different. Even now they need to tweak a few of them with patches to make them more compatible with current content; allow toddlers to sleep in tents a big one, also allow an adult to take a toddler into the community bathroom for potty and bathing.

We're now approaching the 4th EP. Both Get Together and City Living were better than GTW (despite the bugs in CL like the spawning issues where a food stand will spawn on top of another item or festivals won't completely clear). Yes, I know there were features people wanted that we didn't get like being able to build our own apartments or working elevators we could put in other buildings, but I can overlook that because we did get a lot of value in the pack: festivals, new careers that go beyond "rabbit hole", new foods/recipes, activities like basketball, apartments with real annoying neighbors. I'm thinking that cats and dogs (whatever the title) will be a good pack, with features that no one thought of but will enjoy.