Hi there EA/Sims team.
Firstly thank you for the opportunity for console players to provide feedback.
I am a long-time sims console player who frequently switches between playing on PC and Console.
Although I have used the mouse/keyboard support since it was added to console, please find my controller feedback below.
1. How do the controls feel?
Much more streamlined. I can see why these changes were made, with the intention of cutting down time in menus and messing around with the thumbsticks to get to where I want to be.
2. Where do you struggle most when trying to play with a controller?
With the current state of the controls with their overhaul, I wouldn't say I'm struggling, more that I have identified an area where I believe more streamlining is possible. I will cover this more in point 4.
3. What experiences or features are difficult to use?
The new features / controls are not difficult, just different. I believe because so many people are so familiar with the "old" system, it'll take players a while to adapt to the new controls.
I will comment that not having an option in the family bin to "deselect all" is a major annoyance which can be added across all platforms.
4. Which buttons do you wish behaved differently and why?
As mentioned in point 2, I have found one area of the new controller controls overhaul quite annoying.
While I am in Sort By Room mode, in the dining room category for example's sake, and have placed an object, toggled my controls to be the free-moving cursor to move other objects around etc, if I toggle back to the menu options where I can use my LB/RB and directional buttons to navigate the menus faster, I should not have to reselect "Sort By Room". At the moment once I want to toggle back to the dining room menu after using the free cursor, I have to click A (Xbox) to reselect the sort by room option before being able to access the dining room tab again. If I toggle back from the cursor and immediately try to use my DPad, the menus all over the screen are highlighted instead of just navigating the dining tables, bars, and chairs in the dining menu instead. I believe instead of having to reselect sort by room, the natural flow should be for the toggle to take us directly back into the room we were sorted by, and then choose to back out into the sort by room / sort by object menus once we are done. I believe this may solve a lot of the frustrations, especially while getting more familiar with the new menu navigation.
TDLR: while sorting by room or object, the toggle from free cursor back to menu should go directly back into the menu we were selecting objects from, rather than back to which sort option we want.
Thank you again for the opportunity to provide our feedback. I hope you are able to take all these console player comments back to the devs and figure something out to make the console experience even better!
Edit: After playing around some more, you really need to bring back the option to scroll through the catalog with the Dpad. The current solution is not ideal.
Community Manager
