"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.
