The Sims: 2014

[Dewar]

The original Sims was one of my guilty pleasures when I'd come back from college and hang with my friend who's younger sister got it for Christmas. During one of the recent sales, I bought The Sims 3 and it just didn't live up to my misguided nostalgia of the original. And now, The Sims 4, all the rage on Youtube for a week, then quietly gone from the public eye. Now that the shine has worn off, is anyone still playing? Is it worth the money?

Edit: Dang, I forgot what subforum I was in. Can a mod move this to the video games section when they get the chance. Sorry.

[tegan]

Animal Crossing is where all the cool kids hang out.

[Murdoc]

I got it for free and I didn't think it was really worth the price.

 

The short of it:

It looks fantastic, graphically, it's really tight.

 

Disappointing:

Load Times: I barely remember Sims 3, but I recall an "open world" to travel to, even with some load times, I don't remember anything like this. You can move a sim outside your house, but walk across the street? load time. Go anywhere in town? load time.

Gamey: Sims 3 was pretty game-fied but struct the right balance

Work: Work seemed more involved in Sims 3, the system now feels more like Sims 1, but it's a step back. Plus the career choices seem kind of dumb

Money: Money seems nearly meaningless, maybe that is a modern sims thing at this point, but I loved original Sims and how you'd start out basically with nothing and had to work your way up. Right now you start with so many luxuries and a nice house, I find that there isn't much that feel like accomplishing at that point.

AI: I think the AI is worse. They won't do anything on their own, even with their personalities and such. As an example I got so bored of the game I downloaded the Giant Bomb crew and stuck them in a house, I was going to twitch stream it on auto pilot, but with out you telling them what to do, they just sit around and sleep, they don't fix anything they don't have any inclination on their own. It's more a doll house/second life thing than ever.

 

Neat things:
More interactions seem cool, ghosts seem kind of neat and involved now, graphics/art, as I mentioned look really good. There's a lot of people in town so you don't feel like you need to make up a ton of households just to for people to interact.

 

Overall kind of boring, incremental changes, and sadly not as good as the last one I played and still a pale shadow of where the series started. I get that the intention of a family Sim is no longer it's goal, but that is what made Sims 1 such an oddity and intriguing. 

[Thrik]

The Sims 3 was excellent, I can't really think of anything to criticise it for apart from perhaps that it was a bit sluggish on my at-the-time powerful PC. I'm really surprised by some of those issues described above, especially the load times considering that The Sims 3 totally nailed the whole idea of being able to just pan out across an entire neighbourhood and dive into some random house at will. That was one of the coolest things about the game, that the whole village felt like a big, open place where you worked, hung out with neighbours, etc. If The Sims 4 has become more silo-like then that's bizarre.

[tegan]

Overall kind of boring, incremental changes, and sadly not as good as the last one I played and still a pale shadow of where the series started. I get that the intention of a family Sim is no longer it's goal, but that is what made Sims 1 such an oddity and intriguing. 

 

but just think of how good it will be when all that DLC comes out

[Murdoc]

The Sims 3 was excellent, I can't really think of anything to criticise it for apart from perhaps that it was a bit sluggish on my at-the-time powerful PC. I'm really surprised by some of those issues described above, especially the load times considering that The Sims 3 totally nailed the whole idea of being able to just pan out across an entire neighbourhood and dive into some random house at will. That was one of the coolest things about the game, that the whole village felt like a big, open place where you worked, hung out with neighbours, etc. If The Sims 4 has become more silo-like then that's bizarre.

Yeah, I'm pretty surprised, it's like they took a step back, maybe for graphical purposes or something? I dunno, it's weird.