Hi!
First of all thanks for this initiative! The lack of enough depth and challenge in TS4 has been a recurring concern of the community for years now and I’m hopeful something good will come out of this! I will try to be brief for the sake of whoever has to read through this (because I assume there will be hundreds of responses to process):
1.- Making the game more challenging and in-depth
- The root of the concern: What do simmers mean when they say the game is not challenging enough? As it is, it’s way too easy to create a young adult in CAS, give them a job, make them progress in it and reach the top level of their career in a reasonable time with no setbacks. If their work life is easy, so is their social and love life: there is no challenge building new relationships, making your sim be friends with whoever and making whoever fall in love with your sim back.
- I think this breaks down into three sub-themes: (i) lack of unexpected events; (ii) social and career progression is too easy; and (iii) sim self-fulfillment . I will address these three below and then (section 2) explain how I would implement these in practice, taking into account that some simmers may prefer the game to be less challenging and that’s also something to take into consideration.
- Unexpected events: certain unexpected events make your sims’ lives harder and also make your sims’ lives MORE interesting. Let’s be honest here: the best part of any livestream is when something unexpected and crazy happens and we are all SHOCKED and then the player has to see what to do with what just happened. As things are now, our sims never face any unexpected obstacles that are too hard to overcome, rather, it is us players that HAVE to create those hurdles, and that feels wrong. What kind of obstacles am I talking about?
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- Accidents / fatality: in previous games, it was rather easy to have a sim die from unexpected accidents. In the current game we get so many warnings that if your sim dies unexpectedly it’s almost considered murder by the player. You have to be VERY neglectful for your sim to die in an accident. Things such as: lightning strikes, getting shocked when repairing appliances, even death by overexertion, should have a chance of happening without any warning and at the first attempt (e.g. vending machine death takes 3 attempts, death by electrocution takes 2 attempts, etc. and you always get a warning so you know that if you force your sim to keep doing the activity they will die - this feels like murder rather than an accident).
- More dangerous fires and disabling the ability for our sims to magically pull a fire extinguisher out of their butt and extinguish themselves would also greatly help.
- Other accidents: things such as burglaries, natural disasters etc. would also be unexpected obstacles for our sims to face that would spice up the game for the player.
- Chance cards: chance cards should have more dramatic consequences. I remember in previous games I was actually NERVOUS to answer chance cards because they could result in your sim getting fired or demoted. Now, I just click whatever option because I know the consequences will be mild so I can’t even be bothered to read through them. And the only chance cards that can result in something more dramatic (like gaining fame or getting demoted) ALREADY tell you the outcome!! So there is no surprise element.
Social progression: making friends and finding love is way too easy. I’m afraid there is no way to tackle this issue without addressing the root cause of this: sims’ personalities. Sims should not be able to make friends with just anyone; clashing traits should make it way harder for sims to bond; similar interests and hobbies should make it easier. And the same goes for love: using the preferences system, we could have a very nice attraction system that could be used to make finding love more challenging. Does your sim like your gorgeous neighbour but they don’t like your sim back? Find out what attracts them, and what interests them. Then have your sim work towards becoming an attractive sim for their neighbour, tweaking their appearance, developing new interests etc.
In relation to this point too: one-sided relationships add a lot of challenge too. It would be good if one sim could consider another sim a friend (or be in love with them) without the other reciprocating. Quite honestly, it’s a bit boring that all relationships are like that and it removes all the potential drama. Think for example, how about a sim that falls out of love with their spouse or partner for example? How about that high school crush? Why does it *have* to always be reciprocal? What you did with sentiments was a very good step in the right direction, but it would be amazing to see it in the actual relationship scores too.
In relation to the above and on the “social” and sim personality topic: it would be amazing if our sims’ personalities could become the challenge itself. First of all, it would be important to have more negative traits for our sims (flaws) and it would be very interesting if we had to always choose a flaw for our sim in CAS (because no one is perfect). You also did great with the Parenthood character value traits (which have a positive and a negative side and that you can get over time) and with fame quirks. It would be amazing if our sims could develop FLAWS and STRENGTHS over their life. Similar to what you did with lifestyles too, which I think was an amazing addition (because people’s personalities are not static and they keep developing over their lives!). These, coupled with the point above about harder relationship building, could even lead to a married couple growing apart because they develop different interests, flaws that conflict with their partners’ traits, etc. It would be our challenge to try to build that relationship back by having the sims work on their flaws, develop common interests, etc.
Career progression: reaching the top of a career is very easy. Further requirements for promotions, along with harder chance cards (see above) would greatly help. These requirements could be alternative and not cumulative. What types of requirements am I talking about? For example, in order to reach Level 8 of the business career your sim needs: (i) a degree in Economics or Communications (for those with Discover University); OR (ii) 10 friends; OR (iii) impress their boss in a preset scenario (dinner with the boss).
Sim self-fulfillment: at the end of the day, the sims is a game about making your sims’ lives happy (or miserable). Problem is: only the player is keeping track of it and sims seem unaware of it. So it would be great if our sims could have some sort of sense of self-fulfillment. The emotion system could be used for this, and could have a deeper longer term impact in our sims lives. Sims who are fulfilled, feeling mostly positive emotions etc. would have a higher “self-fulfillment” bar, while sims who are miserable or feeling negative emotions most of the time (or for prolonged amounts of time) would feel unfulfilled and perhaps go into some sort of aspiration failure like they did in TS2. A fulfilled elder sim that dies of old age, should die happily and content because they have had a good life; the opposite should happen to unfilled sims.
A happy vs unhappy death and the chances of more accidental death gives the player a sense of challenge: your challenge is to keep your sim ALIVE and FULFILLED (or if you like to torture them, unfulfilled) and to lead them to a happy elderly demise.
2.- How to implement more challenge in the game?
I am aware that not everyone wants this level of challenge or may want different levels of challenge. I think what you guys did with lot challenges could be a very smart way to add a lot of challenge back.
Most of the features I mentioned, such as burglars, natural disasters, death without warnings, harder chance cards, etc. could definitely be implemented as lot features. And all the challenges relating to social progression (attraction system, interests system, chemistry, etc.) could be optional in the game menu; or there could just be a purchasable reward in the reward store to make your sim super attractive and friendly and annul any challenge in that regard.
Thinking “bigger”, I would ideally implement different difficulty modes (in the game menu): easy, medium and hard, where the current game is the “easy” mode, and all the added challenges I mentioned (and more that I’m sure I haven’t thought about) could be added.
I’m sorry for the lengthy post. I hope this feedback is helpful!
Community Manager
