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[10ebbor10]

Anything you need a loading screen to access, is not loaded (Duh) and thus in complete statis.

Be Happy though, Because the world revolves around you.

[Knight of Fools]

With all of the negativity coming up around the game, it feels like they took the parts that people wanted for Sims 3 (Talking in groups in rooms, multitasking, some customization options, better social and emotional interaction) and finally put those into the game, but took out everything that made the Sims 3 what it was (Open world, a neighborhood that felt alive, more life cycles, pools, creative capabilities) as if they weren't important. Or, for a number of them, things that they can sell later as overpriced expansion packs.

Sure, the Sims 3 ran like a pulsating pile of garbage when you installed every expansion pack, but that was just because it was a patchwork of badly optimized code. Instead of actually sitting down and figuring out how to make the game run faster and more smoothly they said, "Screw it! We'll just make it so simple it can run on a tablet if you dumbed down the graphics enough" and called it a day. And they can get away with it because 90% of their target audience don't have the computers to run anything more complicated than solitaire, much less a modern 3D game with lots of stuff going on under the hood. An open world is hard to optimize for a game that'll inevitably be so full of memory leaks and performance issues by the end of its life cycle five years from now that they decided their great big piles of cash weren't large enough to work on fixing those issues, so they avoided them completely instead.

They know their audience, and I'm pretty sure most of the people here on the forums are not part of their target demographic, as much as we'd like them to cater to us. They're going for casual stay at home moms, kids, older folks who google their email address to check their mail, and people looking to escape from their stressful work life for a few minutes before going back to doing double shifts. The kind of people who wouldn't know the difference between a GPU and a CPU if it was tattooed to their retina.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing for most people - The result is that the target audience get a product that's certainly not good, but it's enough to satisfy them. The hardcore gaming community won't be nearly as easy to please, but EA won't listen to them over the sound of EA selling their bi-monthly content packs and expansions to those who see the game for what it is, not what it could have been.

[Neonivek]

Well if you had an issue with it being too hard to advance in The Sims 3... well fear no more...

The Sims 4 basically makes you an achievement hunter as every job has several requirements for the next level of advancement.

Here is an aspect of stupid... If you marry someone they do not move in, you have to do it manually... Kids do not recognize step brothers or step mothers (the game has no step mother status...)

They know their audience, and I'm pretty sure most of the people here on the forums are not part of their target demographic, as much as we'd like them to cater to us.

Not us... Or people on their forums...

[Knight of Fools]

Exactly. Their target audience has never used a website more complicated than facebook. Most probably don't even know they could talk about the Sims on its own website, if they even wanted to.

[Neonivek]

Exactly. Their target audience has never used a website more complicated than facebook. Most probably don't even know they could talk about the Sims on its own website, if they even wanted to.

True the game does feel like a social game...

What with its arbitrary advancement requirements at times.

Yeah it REALLY feels like they strip mines The Sims 3 except took none of its great content, choosing to throw out what The Sims 3 actually brought to the table.

There are so many skills now it is actually frustrating... It sounds silly but I actually preferred The Sims 1 and 2s method of having skills be rather interchangeable.

[Zona]

Surprisingly positive responses (on other forums) and having it pointed out to me that I could buy it off the Mexican store for around $37 mean I just bit the bullet. I'll report what I think  of it later as right now it's downloading and I have to head to work.

[Neonivek]

Surprisingly positive responses (on other forums) and having it pointed out to me that I could buy it off the Mexican store for around $37 mean I just bit the bullet. I'll report what I think  of it later as right now it's downloading and I have to head to work.

It isn't AS bad as the negativity. I wasn't able to bust through the game like I could with The Sims 3.

[Mono124]

I don't necessarily hate the sims 4, but it isn't the greatest. My parents bought me the sims 3 about a month ago and I have played around 40 hours of it, so not a ton, but enough to get a feel for the game. I put in hundreds of hours into the sims 2. It feels like the progression should have gone sims 1 > sims 2 > sims 4 > sims 3 in my opinion. Sims 3 had a world that was too open, and had too much, which meant anyone without an amazing computer at some point chugged and when you did have a loading screen it was ridiculously long. The way the sims 4 deals with the world is like an in between of the sims 3 and the sims 2... but not in a good way. Rather than actually making a decent world that was open(ish) and didn't make a computer flip out, they made it appear open at first glance, and hid everything behind loading screens. Sure, it's much better than the sims 2, but going from almost no loading screens in the sims 3 to a loading screen just to go talk to my neighbors across the street is a bit ridiculous. I feel like a better system would have been to keep the groupings of 5 lots, but expand the world and include a ton of those 5 lot groupings, while at the same time making the entire grouping of 5 lots load in at one time. This would mean that if I wanted to go to my neighbor across the street, or do anything with people in my group of lots I wouldn't be bombarded with a loading screen, but if I wanted to go farther I'd have a modest loading screen. I mean, I kinda feel like they could have just taken the sims 3 open world idea and worked on it further, and by this point probably ironed out all of the crappy issues people were having with slowdowns due to bugs being stuck in an area they can't path out of, or even set it so the user could determine how large of an area they want loaded at one time so people with toaster computers could still play, but people with $2000 rigs could flit around their world like the flash.

[Neonivek]

I am still astonished they didn't make better displays for all their collectables still... Or once again something to DO with the collectables.
-Honestly the Collectables are MOSTLY worse then they were in The Sims 3...

I am glad they added the multi-leveled shelfs.

Yet they only added a proper display for the elements and the letters (but I don't know what those are).

They also need to add more variability to the Date and Party Prizes IMO... they are already a bit... too gamey >_> so to speak. As well some are impossible to win.

[varnish]

I think I can boil it down to this. Sims 3 became a toybox. It had very few game elements, and gave you power to just do whatever was fun for the most part.
Sims 4 feels like they're trying to make it a game again. Balancing the emotions for buffs, things like that. I would say Sims 2 > Sims 4 feels like a more natural transition than Sims 2 > Sims 3. Whether or not this is good depends on the person I think.

I think I just liked the openness of the sims 3 more. I know it was often a mess, but the feeling of having things going on everywhere worked for me. Every other sims game I played, I never liked the flat and lifeless feel of the neighborhoods. I also enjoyed making new houses and buildings, as well as customizing things, as much or more than the actual game. So it really sounds like this one is not for me.

[BigD145]

Multilevel shelving is at least a year or two old.

The openness of 3 let you manage household time better. You could get more done. Not everyone was always busy with all their own thing. They could do stuff for each other, like ... a family.... perhaps?

[Neonivek]

Multilevel shelving is at least a year or two old.

The openness of 3 let you manage household time better. You could get more done. Not everyone was always busy with all their own thing. They could do stuff for each other, like ... a family.... perhaps?

Yeah whenever you go out... you are doing it at the expense of another family member.

I kind of wish if they did this the game would just sort of remember how long that person was out for... and just push back time to the other sim.

[Rolan7]

Interesting... Posting to watch.
I really enjoyed the Sims 2, and the Sims 3 gave me more to do and an open world.  If I had more time, I'd play TS3 again right now.  I'm not seeing any reason to want TS4 yet.  Particularly if it requires Origin.

I actually might have been interested if it had social...  Like the old Sims Online mmorpg.  I feel like there's still potential there (for a SIMS game, not Sim City!)

[BigD145]

Multilevel shelving is at least a year or two old.

The openness of 3 let you manage household time better. You could get more done. Not everyone was always busy with all their own thing. They could do stuff for each other, like ... a family.... perhaps?

Yeah whenever you go out... you are doing it at the expense of another family member.

I kind of wish if they did this the game would just sort of remember how long that person was out for... and just push back time to the other sim.

Wow. Great family relations you've got going on... I'm sorry?

[Rakonas]

It sounds like the only immersive way to play the game now is to turn off aging. It was fun in Sims 3 how if you were immortal everyone else would slowly die of old age and their children would take their place. Now it's that your family slowly dies of old age and everyone else is immortal.