Console Controller Feedback

I do NOT like the changes made to my PS5 controller! It’s not necessary. & makes it more different to use in game. Also I do NOT like that you can’t close the items bar in build mode now. It blocks your view which is very frustrating when you’re trying to place an item that is being blocked by the items bar at the bottom. These are unnecessary changes. Please go back to the old way, which I was not only used to but preferred! 

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. 

I wonder if those who play both PC and console versions of the game are less unhappy with the changes as they are used to the PC version.

However when updating the console version, PC players should not really be taken into consideration over those who only play on the console. 

I don't watch the live streams or know much about the Dev team but I would be interested to know how many play ONLY on the console as it does feel from this and past experiences that there are no console players on the dev team, as another user pointed out. 

I think we should have at least one Dev for each console (PS4, Xbox etc.) who can advocate for console players and feedback to the rest of the team. 

PS4 player here. Few things I’d like to say…

1. Having items stay on screen feels like an overload. It feels harder to navigate.

2. R2 being the ok button felt easier and more convenient once I got familiar with it.

3. The game seems to freeze when I go to “objects by room” or “objects by function” It feels like a hassle for it to open instead of being a seamless action.

4. I prefer using the right analog stick to scroll without moving the cursor to click and drag. I read that the touchpad enables you to scroll, though I haven’t tested this out. If that’s the case, I think it’s better to have scrolling enabled automatically without pressing a button or the touchpad.

Thank you for acknowledging console players and trying to make changes to better our experience. There are additional ways to do this, so please continue asking us for feedback overtime to make the console experience smoother as a whole.

Okay

while, I do like the more pc like experience I have some issues 

1. It’s hard to scroll while in cursor mode

2. When I go off of cursor mode and go to the other, it often won’t let me use it on the catalog.

3. It randomly will switch between the two? Like I’ll load into build mode and it’ll be cursor, but then if I were to do it again later on, it would be the other one,

but, those are really the only problems I’m having with it right now.

So I just did my first full build with the new controls and chose a small duplex apartment from City Living, because yesterday I edited a Willow Creek garden and it was too annoying.

It took me about 3 hours to do, which is a little longer than usual.

What I kept finding was that the old control functions kept returning (🍾😁🎉). It changed every few minutes from new style to old style. I rolled with it and went a lot faster when the old controls were working. So it's obviously bugged too. The menu staying open was a real problem and the item descriptions keep opening up and staying there too. I was having trouble seeing items because the box next to it wouldn't close. Another massive problem, now that we need to click on the colours and not the item, is that it doesn't move the screen to show the item fully. You click on the visible edge of the box in a row of items above the row you can see and expect to view it fully but it doesn't move. If that makes sense. You have to scroll up or down to fully reveal the item you want to select.

Then I got to decor. At that point I honestly could have burst into tears. It scrolls so fast using the cursor that it misses out rows of items. Just choosing rugs was impossible. It was going too fast. My dexterity isn't great but even if it was I don't think it would have helped. I tried to move the cursor slowly but it was just off away with itself. My wrist was aching, my hand was hurting. It was jumping from rugs to fireplaces in one movement.

At that point I thought of all the things we put up with as console players, of all the patches that have broken my game (including the HSY patch that stopped me being able to play again till January for the excessive crashing) this one I expect an apology for. I expect someone to hold their hands up and say we got this wrong, we'll put it right. We pay more for this game because we can't bundle, we don't have optimised graphics on next gen, we have a massive crashing problem and now our controls are a nightmare.

This seems to be an attempt to shoehorn our controls into a PC format (I've played on both since the start). I chose console for my disability.

Edit: I'm now unable to shrink/enlarge items before placement without the filter menu popping up on the right hand side of the screen. I have to place the item first and then resize it...which is beyond irritating as I resize decor a lot. I don't understand why you've assigned so many functions to 1 trigger while removing functions from buttons. It would have been more sensible and useful to spread functions across buttons/triggers/bumpers so that one thing isn't tasked with numerous functions.

I attach images of the problem I'm having where I can't select an item fully with the cursor. If I see the item I want and click on it it still doesn't move to the full image, I just see the edge of the box. I have to scroll to it's row to see it and it's colour choices, but scroll keeps going so fast! Imagine how frustrating it is when I can see what I want but I can't select it, it should move like it used to.