*Updated*Aspirations: love them or hate them?

I just voted on the other one, but I'll vote here again.
It really depends on what I'm doing in my save whether I focus on aspirations or not. And if I need the reward items, I usually cheat to unlock it. I don't think I've ever cheated reward points to buy traits. I do buy reward traits when I have enough points though.

"MDianaSanders;c-17024998" wrote:
I just voted on the other one, but I'll vote here again.
It really depends on what I'm doing in my save whether I focus on aspirations or not. And if I need the reward items, I usually cheat to unlock it. I don't think I've ever cheated reward points to buy traits. I do buy reward traits when I have enough points though.

Thanks, sorry about that... My tablet's been glitchy and posted it before I had it the way I wanted somehow. So weird. I wish we could delete our own posts.

Definitely a fan of aspirations, especially in this version of the sims since you can switch between all of them. That was a feature I wanted all the way back in the TS2 days.

The Sims has aspiration since Sims 2...so I haven’t known it any other way. We all have aspirations so it adds realism to the game. Now adding in the goals and tasks to get there that’s another story...

"bobbyjo727;c-17025036" wrote:
The Sims has aspiration since Sims 2...so I haven’t known it any other way. We all have aspirations so it adds realism to the game. Now adding in the goals and tasks to get there that’s another story...

Yeah, maybe I should have specified the TS4 aspiration system.

I do really love aspirations because they sort of set out the map of my sims life. I use them to guide who my sim is, what's going to drive them during their life, and what their values etc are. BUT, I'm not a huge fan of the TS4 aspirations, because I feel like they are quite niche and specific and don't give me a huge amount of variety. I LOVED the ones from TS2 and TS3, especially the tinkerer ones, and I'd love to see more of those aspirations in TS4, there just aren't enough yet to make my sims more individual.

I like it in that it gives me something to do. I’m a very goal-oriented player, so when I’m not playing a challenge with specific guidelines (example: Not So Berry Challenge), I default to maxing my sim’s career and completing their aspiration before I consider that sim’s life ‘complete.’

I do find it tedious at times though. For example, I really dislike one of the first objectives for the Whiz Kid aspiration. It requires you to have an adult read to the child for two hours, which sounds easy enough, but oftentimes, the adult sim starts reading before the child is even there to listen, and they stop after a few moments to get up and put the book all the way back in the bookshelf so that you have to queue the action up again for them to continue reading to the child, rinse and repeat about 4ish times. It’s really obnoxious.

I like aspirations as it gives variety to my households because they're all working on different goals. Too much sandbox with no goals would get boring quickly.

I think the aspirations themselves are mostly fine. The problem is that there isn't anything useful to be done with the satisfaction points apart from glorified cheating. I also think they're poorly balanced in that some of the easier ones give extremely powerful reward traits, and some of the harder ones provide a very insignificant reward.

Really loved them in TS2 and TS3 (especially the immense variety in TS3), but they're way too easy in TS4. In previous games it usually took me a whole lifetime to finish one aspiration/lifetime wish. Nowadays I can easily finish multiple ones in one life stage (!), so I completed most of them so many times that I don't really bother with them anymore. I always welcome new ones though.