• KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      Not even then, really. Everything in it is just so completely and utterly shallow even compared to comparable things in The Sims 3. It has a huge variety of things that do basically nothing with a core gameplay loop that’s even more of just a “passively win” idle game than the earlier games. I’ve pirated it a few times over the years to see what’s been added and it’s always just sort of disappointing and the new content is less interesting than it sounded like.

      It’s really disappointing that they just kind of stripped down 3 and then just treaded water ever since instead of building on any of the mechanics 3 introduced.

        • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          2 months ago

          It was weirdly complex and could basically be summed up as “imagine if all the little side mechanics Sims 4 got from DLCs were actually fleshed out into full fledged mechanics with at least some content to them, it actively simulated the entire neighborhood at once which was also bigger and had more stuff in it, and its difficulty was curved a little more towards actually having to try a little like in earlier games.”

          It also took forever to load and would actively break without a community patch to regularly fix and clean up invalid background simulation stuff because of compounding errors with said simulation, like background-simulated sims glitching into invalid positions and spamming pathfinding errors - the community patch ran a garbage collection script every in-game day to detect and fix those before they could get out of hand and it worked great. But apart from that it was really good and an iterative improvement over The Sims 2 which had been an iterative improvement over The Sims. It would have been amazing if The Sims 4 had just sort of cleaned it up and kept building on that complexity instead of rebuilding something simpler from the ground up and switching into a minimum-viable-product content churn forever because it’s sitting in a niche where it has no real competition at all.

      • imogen_underscore [it/its, she/her]@hexbear.net
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        2 months ago

        totally agree. even sims 2! like LGR touches on in the video there are still aspects of the sims 2 that have more depth, more care than sims 4. it’s not just animations, there are game mechanics too that have devolved since 2.

    • kleeon [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      I once pirated it with all the dlc’s and it was borderline unplayable due to all the dumb shit constantly happening.

      Your friend is texting you about their marriage for the 50th time

      Your character got eaten by a plant

      Your character got impregnated by aliens

      I just want to build a house goddamnit

    • imogen_underscore [it/its, she/her]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      it’s definitely still not “great” it is strong in some aspects like sim creation, the art is good, but like LGR touches on in many ways it is a more shallow game than sims 3, even sims 2. less heart and soul.

  • peppersky [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    I genuinely pity the poor folks who have to work on the Sims 4. EA seems to be completely determined to push out nothing but the minimum-viable product year after year, while you also have a fanbase that all care about wildly different things and the base you build your game on just isn’t very technically or mechanically sound.

    It’s genuinely crazy to think just how ambitious and big The Sims 3 was in comparison, if sometimes to its detriment. Like just the first expansion pack added three entirely new worlds with tons of unique assets and mechanics and people didn’t even like that one when it came out and it’s probably got more content in it than like five Sims 4 packs combined. The later DLCs also had wild features like being able to build houseboats and actually drive them around, which is completely inconceivable within what Sims 4 can do.

    Certainly doesn’t help that since they ported the game to console they seemingly have to really abide by strict memory limits, where they have strict limits on how many items they can place on prebuilt lots and some of them really really feel empty.

  • blobjim [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    so what? why make something new when what exists is good and can be built upon? can’t imagine being mad that an American company isn’t wasting money on making new treats.

    • booty [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      why make something new when what exists is good and can be built upon?

      Sims 4 sucks and last I paid any attention to it it was worse in every single way than sims 3

      People want a sims 5 so they can make something that is good and can be built on instead of building on something that isnt good

      • bigbrowncommie69 [any]@hexbear.net
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        2 months ago

        The assumption is that Sims 5 would be better and not worse in every way. They could do the exact same things again but five times worse.

        Hell all this time they could have been working to fix the main issues with it.

        • booty [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          2 months ago

          The assumption is that Sims 5 would be better

          I’d call it a hope more than an assumption. We know they can make good sims games because they made 2 and 3, so it sucks to see that they decided to stop making games and just forever-develop the one that was bad.

          • CarmineCatboy2 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            2 months ago

            We know they can make good sims games because they made 2 and 3

            You see, that’s kind of a problem right there. Game companies are like the ship of theseus. The people and, more importantly, the teams who made Sims 2 and 3 are not there any more.

        • bumpusoot [any]@hexbear.net
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          2 months ago

          Sims 4 is already just bad, it’s core mechanics suck and DLC will never fix that. Sims 5 may or may not be good, but it’s a chance at least.