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I've played the Sims 4 a lot and I had a lot of fun with it, but now when the only thing I enjoy is building in it. Playing the game feels so repetitive, like I know the outcome to every action. It's not like a story will unfold before me, I have to make my sim go out and purposely do weird things or nothing new will happen. Imo a big problem is that barely any of the traits change how you play the game, most just give slight mood boosts for certain skills.
I actually felt this way about sims 2, I thought its sim mechanics were actually better and more of an improvement on the first game than unnecessarily retooling them. the only thing that ultimately makes sims 3 the one to choose is the open world vs just the house.
1 is fantastic if you like really hard games that portray life as working class under the boot of capitalism. The game is so hard to micromanage your family and get shit done while being constantly exhausted from work. Makes it so that when you finally have money coming in and can throw that giant house party (that ends up being a disaster) all the more sweeter.
it also portrays a meritocracy, which is not something that truly exists
You know you're playing a work of fiction when your hard work and dedication on the job pan out and you get a raise.
You can be a fuckin magician or superstar in the Sims 1. Yeah the needs in that game was a huge pita but it was still the goat. The soundtrack and art style of that game unparalleled by any other Sims. The whole game just had this vibe... And then the occasional weirdness and creepiness punctuated it all perfectly.
You could make a best to worst Sims list in order of release.
Big agree on sims 1 having that vibe. I love the old school look of the pre-rendered assets and the early 3D polygon characters too. I feel like even though 1 had gimmicky supernatural elements like magic, it at least played it well enough to be believable. The sequels kind of went overboard with aping off Harry Potter. I still love the creepy music that would play when the raccoon would show up to raid your garbage can or the burglar.
ACTUALLY The Sims is sinister propaganda which tells you that Capitalism is Good and that the American Dream is alive and achievable.
(I've played The Sims a lot it's really fun)
How to be successful according to The Sims: step 1) own an acre of land with a shack on it occupied by several people who despite having no existing relation to you are completely under your control. step 2) everyone stands around painting all day and instantly sells even the worst painting for several hours worth of wages. step 3) within a week those paintings are going for more than even the most highly paid worker makes in a full day of work (which is only about 10 times the lowest wages, because apparently the world of the Sims has a comparable wage distribution to the USSR somehow). step 4) build yourself a mansion via telepathy and retire inside a couple of months while your painters keep passively providing you with endless free income.
Yeah. The only real problem the Sims 3 has is load times and a performance issue where the neighborhood simulation stuff would IIRC gradually create situations that NPCs couldn't path through and seize up regularly, though one of the most common general purpose mods included a daily cleanup check to fix that. The Sims 4 has a lot of basically good ideas to it (like non-rabbit-hole jobs, although those are all mediocre and buggy), but then everything is so stripped down and goes nowhere.
Not only that, but it also lacks any way to manage memory in a significant way meaning that every save comes with an unspecified death sentence that can only be mitigated by moving to another neighborhood every 3 generations or so. No amount of NRaas mods were able to work around that. The closest thing to a solution for that issue was a 64-bit shell, which only released for Mac just a couple of years ago and will never come to PC.
the sims 3 is the one i keep going back to, idk why though
it's the only one i actually enjoy the gameplay of - not sure what it is, but it just feels well-paced and not completely overwhelming to control multiple sims
This is how I feel about Civ4 and Oblivion, not to mention modding. Sim 3 isn't too bad, those challenges people used to post on the forum back before Sims4 are actually pretty fun and obviously difficult to follow through, like the have some ridiculous number of kids and raise them well so they're your friends one without using longevity extenders. Was also fun to recreate people's personalities within the limits of the game and watch how they interact with each other. I liked building civic lots too, not so much houses, but using the editor to make parks or worlds etc was fun.
I found out my memories of long ass Sims 3 load times were due to corrupt CC, there's lots of it on the main site if you download from there, even top mods. Feels bad man, all that time where I'd go read a book or watch a movie watching for the game to load on my old ass rig.
As a heads up, 4gb patch helps pretty much any old 32bit game with memory issues.
Same, been playing since early 2010s, still playing to this day.
I think the best change they did compared to the Sims 2 is making the motives much easier to fill. So you have more time to focus on your own objectives instead of staying alive. With the open world, the Sims 3 plays more like a RPG than a day-to-day simulator. Planting steak, writing erotic novels and woohooing the neighbors is always more fun than eating 3 meals in a roll so you don't starve.
To me the Sims 4 plays alot like a TS2 remake. Slower filling motives, loading screen between travels and mood management all points to more micromanagement and less RPG. I know a lot of people like micromanagement, but I'm sticking to woohooing the whole town.
To me the Sims 4 plays alot like a TS2 remake. Slower filling motives, loading screen between travels and mood management all points to more micromanagement and less RPG. I know a lot of people like micromanagement, but I’m sticking to woohooing the whole town.
I remember hearing that a lot of the cooler elements from The Sims 3 were pared down or removed because they made the game more demanding to run, which was not ideal since large swaths of the Sims' target audience have older or less powerful hardware
