SIMS4 Sims4 rants and raves

Quote:Honeywell - "Two things for food. We’ve split the cooking skill apart now. You have kind of homestyle cooking and then you also have gourmet cooking. So if you’re a chef you totally want to do the gourmet cooking. You have a big family at home, they’re going to love that homestyle cooking. And as you build your way up in those skills you’re going to unlock a lot of different recipes. That are unique to those types.

Another thing about food that’s fantastic, though, is now we have fresh ingredients that you can use to prepare better food. So when you’re creating your garden now or going out and catching fish down by the river that’s going to make even better recipes, by taking those ingredients back into your cooking.”

All I ever wanted... all I ever needed is here.... in this game. Words are very... unecessary... la la la TS4.

It is SO sims 2.5 ... if they fix the bloom it will be great.

Yes, the bloom, the slight pudding and those walks.

I was snuffling about at MTS and this post really did make me laugh out loud:

tedw Wrote:I wonder if part of the reason marketing seems sparse is because it's kind of hard to make a big announcement out of "hey, look at these features we removed."

after mopping up the coffee I had splurted all over my desk, I read further:

tedw Wrote:I mean, whether you look at TS3 as a good game or a success, the concepts of Create-a-Style and the open world were big, innovative features for the franchise at the time. Complete customization! Go anywhere you want in the neighborhood! It's great!

Both of those elements have been removed, and that will come across as a step backwards. When you trumpet to everyone how great Feature A is, and then five years later tell them Feature A is gone, they will ask why. When I used to do film journalism work, PR people were always silencing questions that directed emphasis away from where they wanted it to be; perhaps part of EA's silence is to avoid possible awkard questions that would take the focus away from positive (added elements - clay CAS system, emotions) and shift it to negative ('missing' features).

Or maybe they wanted to market this way all along.

So what do other leefishers think about the way EA are marketing this game?
Should we see Ts3 as a bold experiment that failed as a game, while delivering an awesomely pretty backdrop for pictures?
Are loading screens really that bad?
What is the Secret of the Rabbitholes????

tedw Wrote:I mean, whether you look at TS3 as a good game or a success

Neither lol, I think it had some good ideas but the implementation was a flop. Maybe in 10 years time that open world concept might work better, but on many computer in 2009+ it just didn't work well, it was too much to ask computers to cope with a large open world as well as being able to have great play. EA solution was rabbit holes, which means sitting and watching a green bar load as your sims eat. Not my idea of fun. The Sims AI was another failure. If the sims had looked good with a better AI and EA had given a proper OFB EP I think more people would have put up with rabbit holes and grey blobs as things loaded.

I think the open blocks is EA recognizing the large open world sucks when it's dotted with rabbit holes and sims getting stuck and two sims turning up at a venue and standing around doing nothing.

I don't mind short loading screens at all. And green bars going across is just a loading screen when you are not having a loading screen, at least a loading screen into a community lot achieves something, a lively venue you can actually play. I'm mildly optimistic these block will achieve that.

I dunno, I think CAST was a decent tool with poor implementation, but after a while I kinda like losing CAST. Going back to the TS2 way of recoloring, I believe, will bring a sort of standard back to the community. With the access of tools easy and available (TSRW is easy as pie to learn for basic stuff like clothing recolors or object recolors), everyone can be a creator with just a simple stencil change. I think with TS4, it'll bring back the requirement of effort for CC creators to be any good ala shading properly and logically, which will separate the good creators from the bad. No more flood-filling a dark grey color and "oh the game will hide it with shadows and patterns".

As far as the loading screens, I don't mind them. To me, if it means that my town will be more active and alive, I would loading screen everything I can. The one thing I hated about TS3 was that the town consistently felt deader than disco. I would build up the pretty city and then send my sim to the local bar and it was dead, it felt dead, and to be honest it made me hate how much I put into building the town only to not reap anything out of it gameplay wise because there was barely any sims filling up the place or the sims I didn't control were just sitting around doing nothing.

As far as the question of "Should we see Ts3 as a bold experiment that failed as a game, while delivering an awesomely pretty backdrop for pictures? " I believe no. There wasn't much pretty backdrop. The sims had the most blankfaced expressions and to be honest it didn't feel like EA cared too much after a while. Literally you needed more mods than ever on top of store fixes in order to even be able to play the game. On one hand though, I really did like the supernatural features they had in, I do hope in TS4 we get a better version of this.

TS4 isn't going to have CASt? Really, that is like the only feature I really wish could have been made backwards compatible to TS2! I really liked being able to color everything however I liked without having to download every single object/hair/clothing in an entire creator's palette. (Or in my case, often 2-5 different creators palettes, with additional one-offs. >.<)

However, if they're doing away with CASt, does that mean TS4 will have something more similar to proper genetics again? Having babies born with gray streaks because their father was an elder or in crayola colors because their mother was a punk was a bit off-putting in TS3. At least in TS2 I could create the sim with blonde hair to set their genetic hair color, then go to a mirror in play to dye it blue, and have them still have normal blonde kids.

Hmm, so the latest news is EA invited fans to events in Germany and Italy where they'd get to actually play the game. The events where scheculed for July. Aaaand then they delayed/cancelled both of them.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaand that we cant edit the public spaces. What the hell? Being able to customise the world has been in the game from TS1. That sucks, and there had better be a world editor.

Yes and have we mentioned only 5 lots per neighbourhood? And that includes community lots, right? So if you want to build a dance club, for instance, then you can only have 4 houses in that 'hood.

With all these limitations I expect stellar graphics, performance, and gameplay. But the in-game graphics we've seen so far have not exactly been stellar.