this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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I was pretty into 2 and 3, and I'm definitely not burnt out of the genre or anything, but I just can't work up the interest to really check out another The Sims after 4.
Maxis have a habit of pushing some weird bullshit no one asked for while losing all the content built up from previous titles
Yeah I assume they were the inspiration for modern Paradox
I'm pretty hyped for some of the spiritual successors, like the one PDX is working on and Paralives. Hard to get excited about anything EA makes nowadays though
The Paradox one looks garbage though, and given their history with DLC I don't have much hope for it. Paralives looks interesting but the development is glacial to the point where by the time it's out I'll be in a retirement home if not seven feet under.
On the other hand, I also have no hope Sims 5 won't be insanely predatory and anti-consumer. Sigh.
It's a shame cities skylines 2 doesn't run on many PCs, or even that the first one became so DLC heavy because watching SimCity implode under EA's bullshit just for an amazing successor to take to the field was amazing.
I'm very excited for the successor to the Sims but I've been waiting for it a scarily long time without any major promising news.
Let them cook.
What, in general, did they do to 4?
EA made Maxis convert what was supposed to be a successor to The Sims Online into a mainline Sims game. The result is that there was a lot of content that previous games had which was missing at release. Iirc some of it was stuff like pools and cars. Some of it, like pools, has been restored since then, but stuff like cars is still missing.
Edit: one of my biggest personal complaints is the lack of world-editing tools. A modder has hacked in some janky world-editing tools since then, but it took something like 6-7 years for someone to do it.
Toddlers were missing too at launch (sims went directly from baby to kid). That and pools at least got corrected in time with updates.
It also got rid of 3's full town simulation to have only very small neighbourhoods load at one time. Admittedly, this was a performance hog in 3 and created quite a few problems. But that also felt a lot more "alive". It's not like 4 is that much less broken than 3.
And then there is a huge problem with 4 compared to previous entries IMO. The game is boring. The new mood mechanic at least is an interesting evolution, but beyond that it always feels like nothing is happening if you don't provoke it in some way.
Tbh I kinda see the differences between TS4 previous Sims games as being similar to the differences between Skyrim and previous elder scrolls games. If you're into modding games, TS4. If you want your game to be fun without mods, play a different game in the series.
Not convinced honestly, for both examples.
The most I've played TS3 was quite heavily modded. Sure a lot of the mods were to fix stuff that didn't work, because those games are a mess... But quite a bit added new stuff too. And of course custom content (which Sims modders tend to separate from "actual" mods with gameplay changes) has been thriving well before TS4.
As for Elder Scrolls, sure the mod offer got bigger with each new entry, but it was already quite big even for Morrowind. It was the first modding community I got involved with, at a time when "modding" wasn't even something I was familiar with. It was just that easy to encounter all that stuff already.
It's just generally really shallow. The emotional states was a good idea, but they didn't actually do anything interesting with it. A lot of the strides they made in asset customization in 3 were left behind in favor of... nothing, i guess? You have a hundred different interactions between sims, and they can all effect the tone of the conversation... but that doesn't actually matter at all (To be fair, they did introduce lingering sentiments from conversations later, which was a good idea that just needed expansion).
Build mode is alright, but the furniture is a linear progression system which is annoying. You might want a modern looking bed to go with your big city apartment, but the numbers say you actually should want a wooden Princess Cordellia bed. Maybe you want metal stools for your bar? Nope, Princess Cordelia. But what about your dining chairs? Say it with me. Princess Cordellia. You can just ignore the numbers if you want, but there's not much else to spend money on.
At the end of the day, it feels like you're just giving up a lot in exchange for half-baked, overpriced, and uninteresting additions.