A month later, how is The Sims 4?

So now that it's October, and most of us have had about a month to play The Sims 4, how does it hold up?  Many others have said that this version feels more like an update to The Sims 2 than it does as an update to The Sims 3 (I wonder if that was part of the reasoning for making The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection a free download last month).  For me, it's mostly good.  There are a few things I miss from earlier versions, a few new features that I like, and there are a few things that I absolutely detest.

My top picks on features that I miss from earlier games, are these:

• Open world - The Sims 3 had the open world done right.  Once a world was loaded, my sim could travel to any location and go into most buildings.  There was a lot to explore, and I didn't have to wait for the game to reset everything when my sim visited a neighbor or went to the beach.
• Vehicles - This goes right along with the open world.  Sims needed ways to get to the other end of the world, and they were able to use the most appropriate vehicles to get there.  The Sims 2 handled cars a little better in that sims actually opened the car door, got in, backed out onto the street and drove away, and The Sims 3 let us follow the cars (or bicycles or even witches' brooms) all the way to their destinations.  But in The Sims 4, all of the vehicles are just background scenery.
• Playable careers - The Ambitions expansion pack for The Sims 3 added some careers that included some extra gameplay during a sim's work day.  The ghost hunter career was my favorite and the traits that enhanced this career path are the ones that I would more often choose for my sims.  While The Sims 4 does include some "homework" in the gameplay in order to get promotions, and they are more appropriate than just building up your friend list like it was all the way back in The Sims 1, a sim at work in The Sims 4 is simply non-playable.
• Basements - I grew up in Los Angeles where basements were exceptionally rare, but I moved to the Midwest about 20 years ago, and around here, it's rare for a house to lack a basement.  The basement is often used as an extra living space, but can be converted into almost anything that the homeowner wants.  In The Sims 3, the basement tool was an invaluable tool that I used to expand the living space on every sim house I made or had my sims purchase.  I made wine cellars, theaters, gyms, art studios, servants' quarters, trophy rooms and garages, among many other room types.  The basement was an easy place for me to stash the extra skill-building items that didn't fit into the usual house decor.

Okay, so what do I like?  Well...

• It works! - More than anything else, I love that I can play The Sims 4 on my current computer.  I'm using a refurbished laptop that is a couple years old now.  The game installed and worked wonderfully out of the box for me, and got a little better when I turned on the "laptop mode" option (with this option turned off, I actually had my computer automatically shut down due to overheating, but have not had that happen yet with this option on).
• Visual style - I wasn't too keen on the more cartoonish features when the early screenshots were released in Spring and early Summer, but I've gotten used to them.  Touching on the fact that the game runs on my computer, the reduced detail on game items that is most noticeable in the characters' hair, reduces the computing complexity.  Every object in the game seems to fit its environment, and there are lots of little details to find (like the fact that the curtains will subtly wave back and forth as if blown by the house's air conditioning).
• Conversations continue - I love that I don't have to queue up 80 different interactions when my sims are in conversations.  They will usually keep going with smalltalk between the interactions that I ask them to do.
• Reusing birthday cakes - In earlier versions, getting multiple sims to age up at once was nearly impossible.  It was a little easier in The Sims 3, but I was still stuck with waiting for each birthday interaction to completely finish before aging up the next sim, then I had to buy a completely different cake for the next sim and go through the whole process again.  In The Sims 4, I can have a sim make one cake, add candles to it, and then add candles again and age up the next sim, and the birthday interactions are much faster than they were in previous versions (and there is finally a birthday song in the game too!)
• Multitasking - I am continually surprised with the tasks that sims choose to combine.  My sim will change clothes on the way to getting breakfast out of the fridge, chat with other sims while repairing or upgrading objects, move to the ambient music while sitting and performing other actions (like writing a book on the computer or eating a meal and chatting with other sims in the room), and I finally saw one of my sims make a phone call from the toilet.

• Build mode roof tool - Finally!  Now I can really put the roof pieces the way I want them without all the hassle that were roofs in the previous versions.
• Sim path selection - I love that a sim in a small bathroom will not be blocked in by another sim at the door any more.  The two sims will be able to get past each other even in very small spaces.

I mentioned that there a few things that I absolutely hate in The Sims 4, and I would be remiss if I didn't list at least a couple of them here.

• Loading screens - Every time I send a sim to a different building, no matter where it is, I have to sit through a loading screen.  Even going immediately next door forces me to wait for another loading screen.  Sure, having exactly one active building at a time can reduce the computing complexity, but this is overkill.
• Unreadable text - My vision isn't quite what it used to be, and as a professional photographer, my computer screen is correctly color balanced to help me ensure that I am getting the exact colors I need on my photos and that they will print with my correctly color balanced printer profiles that let me print out exactly the same color (or as absolutely close as possible) that I see on my screen.  That means that my monitor's brightness and contrast are adjusted away from the defaults (which are way too bright).  The Sims 4 user interface is usually a very light blue or light green text, sometimes even yellow-green, against a white background.  This is almost impossible to read.  The notification wall does it right by using high-contrast colors, but the aspirations and job homework text, where I need to read the text more closely to decide on my sims' next actions, does not.

For my style of play, where I try to follow one sim from birth through adulthood and then continue the line by following one of the sim's children, The Sims 4 lets me play.  I remember the big uproar from The Sims 2 to The Sims 3 when players found they couldn't play multiple families concurrently any more, but this was less of a change for me because I've always played in a one-sim-at-a-time manner.  I was never the player who built death trap houses, and although toddlers in earlier versions provided an almost consequence-free time span for skill building, for the most part, The Sims 4 is fun enough that I'll keep playing.

This week's update that added ghosts is a welcome addition, and I look forward to the pools that are coming in next month's update and the new careers in December's update.  It is likely that this game evolution will lead me to stop playing The Sims 3 just like that step led me to stop playing The Sims 2 before it, but I am confident that the game will continue to improve and that I'll find a way to either tolerate or mitigate the shortcomings.

The best night of their lives so far…

As teen sims age closer to their young adult birthday, they have the opportunity to attend one of the most anticipated rituals for their age group, senior prom.  They will get to go assuming that the Sims 3 Generations expansion pack is installed, of course.

A couple sim days before their last teen day, teen sims will often look forward to attending prom.  You may see a wish pop up that they want to attend.



This is a fairly easy wish to grant, it just takes a little time.  Usually about the same time as this wish appears, there will be a message telling you when prom will occur.  In this case, my teen sim got the wish to attend prom on Monday and the game notice told me that prom was scheduled for Thursday.  Now is the time that you want to get your teen sims’ formalwear outfits planned and find a date for your sims.

A date for prom isn’t mandatory, but when a sim attends with a date, especially one she is good friends with, she is much more likely to have a good time while at the prom.  Sometimes your sim will get a secret admirer note from another teen sim, so use that as an indication of which other teen sim to pursue for a date.  The next time your sim meets him, check the romantic interactions for the interaction to ask the sim to prom.



As with all the other romantic interactions in the game, either gender can initiate this interaction, and there is also no restriction requiring that prom dates be of the opposite gender.  Sims don’t judge, they go with it.  Once your teen sim has asked another teen sim to the prom, she will usually get the wish to attend prom with that sim.  The disadvantage here is that if you promise this wish along with the previous wish to attend prom, you now have two wish slots occupied; depending on how much else you direct your sim to do, this could restrict how many more lifetime reward points she is able to earn.

When prom day arrives, the game will display a notice about three hours before your sims’ ride arrives.  This is your last chance to make final adjustments to your sims’ formalwear.  Sims go to prom in style, renting a limousine for the ride to school, and if your sim has a date to the prom, they will usually ride together.
 


In my case, prom day coincided with Snowflake Day, which is why my sim and her date are dressed in their cold weather clothing, but it also looks like someone left the sunroof open in the limo.  Usually this will be the first time that your teen sims have ridden in a limo so they will have that memory pop up as well.  The limo behaves exactly like the daily school bus and takes your sim and her date to the school to attend prom.



When your sim arrives at the school and enters it to attend the prom, you will see a new memory and if you want, you can share the memory online right away.  I’m a little split on whether or not to share too many memories.  On one hand, there is a badge that you can earn for your SimPage on TheSims3.com for sharing memories, but how many memories can you share before your player wall makes it look like you’re not getting anything done except playing the Sims?  This is a question that each individual simmer should ask himself; I will usually only share the most significant memories such as when lifetime wishes are achieved.

Anyway, back to the prom.  Depending on your sim’s relationship with her date and her mood when she leaves for prom, there are a number of different possible messages and outcomes from attendance.  In my recent game, Stacy’s date decided now was the time to try to advance their relationship beyond just being friends…








Things were going so well for Stacy and Peanut that she was even selected as prom queen!



Naturally, being chosen as prom queen added a hefty reward moodlet as well…



Like all things, prom comes to an end at 10:00pm sim time.  Well behaved teen sims are advised to head straight home after the dance.



The message notes that there is a photo or two in my sims’ inventory, but I didn’t see any this time.  Usually, there will be a photo of your sim and her date both in their formalwear, in poses similar to the greeting card photos that they can get at the seasonal fairs or at City Hall (if you have the Seasons expansion pack installed).  My sim didn’t have a photo from prom, but she did have another souvenir.  She got to keep the crown she received as prom queen.



So is it worthwhile to send your teen sims to the prom?  It can be.  The experience I showed here isn’t always going to grant your sims the same rewards.  But no matter what happens, your sims will have some new memories and could come away from it with more lifetime happiness points.

Got a lonely sim? Have her call someone

The social need is probably the one that I pay the least attention to in The Sims 3.  It’s not that I don’t want my sims to find mates and build families, it’s just that I keep my sims busy with other activities.  So it’s only natural that my sims will eventually feel lonely and sometimes they won’t want to do anything until they interact with other sims to bring up their social need.

I will often run into a social crash with my sims when I am starting a new game or when I’ve got sims going on extended adventures without any social interactions.  Thankfully, this tip helps in all situations.  By the time my sim has depleted all of her social currency, she has almost always met at least one other sim in her universe.  I will normally, at this point, open up my sim’s relationships panel and look for one of two types of sims for her to call: either a sim from another town or a vampire.

For the foreign sims, I look for those whose portraits are greyed out, which means that they aren’t in the same town as my sim at that moment.  In the example shown here, the sim I’ll have my sim call is from China (note the little sim-China icon on his shoulder), and my sim will “chat long distance” with him.  This interaction completely ignores the game clock and allows my sim to chat with this acquaintance at any time of day to bring her social score up.  You don’t need World Adventures to be able to make long distance calls because there was a base game update that enabled travel to any other town that you have installed, so you could have a sim in Sunset Valley call another sim in Riverview.  Since your sims can travel to other towns, sims from other towns can and do travel to your sim’s town, so it is quite possible to have traveling sims in your relationship panel.  There also does not appear to be any standardized time zones in the game, so any sims in other towns will always answer the phone and be willing to talk.

I also look for vampires (which will be shown with a red outline in the relationship panel), because my sims usually crash their social needs long after bedtime, and vampires (added with the Supernatural expansion pack) tend to stay up at night so they are also good candidates for night calls.

Are streetcars coming in The Sims 4?

So yesterday I put up a nice long post about this week’s live broadcast.  There was a digression in there about rapid transit systems in the game and how I would love to see a streetcar system added to the game.  Today at lunch I was looking at the new The Sims Official Magazine and reading a little more about The Sims 4, when one of the screenshots (admittedly, I had seen it before with the Gamescom coverage) caught my eye.  Here’s a smaller version of it (copied from The Sims official site, where it is labeled as “The Sims 4 Image #3”)…

That sure looks like a streetcar in front of the house, and if you look to the right of the street’s center island, you can see street trackage that continues off the screen to the right.  I absolutely love the look of this streetcar and desperately hope that I will be able to send my sims off to school, work or play via this new (to the game) transportation system.  But if it’s another free-to-ride system like the taxis in the current game, it will detract a bit from my perspective.

The only things missing from this screenshot for the streetcar system are the overhead wire and the trolley pole on the streetcar.  There have been streetcars built using battery or diesel engine powered cars, so a scene like this isn’t completely out of line, but streetcars powered from overhead wires are by far the most common type of systems used worldwide for the last 120 or more years.  I wonder…  Is there a railfan working on The Sims design team?

My wish list for The Sims

I’ve been playing various incarnations of The Sims starting with the original The Sims game.  In that time, there are a number of features that I’ve found I liked in them as well as features that I wish they all included.  Here are my thoughts on what I would like to see introduced in future sim games or updates to the current game:

• The ability to set a sim’s height in Create-A-Sim.  This is one of the most often requested feature enhancements, and I was very disappointed to hear that it will not be included in the base version of The Sims 4 (as mentioned in the live broadcast from Gamescom).  However, remember that adjusting a female sim’s bosom wasn’t available in Create-A-Sim until one of the patch updates to The Sims 3, so I remain hopeful that this feature will be added in the future.
• Layered clothing in Create-A-Sim.  I would like to be able to specify my sims’ shirts and coats separately such that in warmer areas, they will wear their shirts and then grab and put on their coats over those shirts when they go to colder areas.  It would be terrific if this could be paired with an animation of the sim actually putting on the coat, which would also lead to the ability to use coat racks or just coat hooks near doorways.  But extend this idea out to allow sims to layer every type of clothing; in real life, we usually wear undergarments beneath our other clothes, so do this in The Sims.  There was a hint of this ability in The Sims 4 where hats and hairstyles will be independent of each other (also in the video linked above), so it looks like we’re on the right track
• Better vehicle animations and interactions.  The Sims 2 introduced cars as a mode of transport for sims.  The animations and additional interactions were wonderful.  Sims would walk to their cars in their parking spaces at home, open the door and get in before backing out of the driveway and onto the street.  When a carpool car arrived, sims would walk to the car at the sidewalk and again open the door and get in before the car left.  Sims were able to just go out and sit in their cars if they wanted to, and if two sims were sitting in a car, it became an additional woohoo location.  So I was very disappointed to see many of the animations and almost all of the new interactions not present when The Sims 3 was released.  It seemed that the Fast Lane Stuff pack would have been the perfect update in which to include these features, but alas, the pack only increased the number and types of automobiles available.
• Improve Edit Town mode to allow better placement of lots and rabbitholes.  There are a lot of custom-created worlds out there on the interwebs that can be downloaded and added to the game for free.  But, as I add them to my game, I find that, especially since I don’t have the Pets expansion pack yet, the most recent versions of them won’t install and older versions that will install with my current expansion pack collection don’t always include all of the rabbitholes that I need from newer packs.  If I try to use Edit Town to move or change lots, I will usually run into a situation where I can’t put a lot down where I want it.  Even if I delete abutting empty lots, I can’t place a lot of the combined total size in its place for any of a number of reasons, and then when I try to put the original lot sizes back, I get the same errors when trying to place the smaller lots.  If I can change the lot to what I need, the necessary rabbithole sometimes is not included in the built lots that can be placed in the world.
• An UNDO tool in Edit Town mode.  This is necessary because of the changes that I’m trying to make as noted above, when I remove a lot and can’t put it back into the same place.  I need an UNDO tool to put it back, but there is no such tool in Edit Town mode right now.
• Better wall control in Build mode.  Remember way back in the first The Sims game when we couldn’t put windows and doors on diagonal walls?  Control of wall pieces hasn’t improved very much beyond that ability.  I would love to be able to place curved walls or walls that are built to an angle other than an even multiple of 45 degrees.
• Better stairway control in Build mode.  We’ve got straight staircases, the Generations expansion pack added spiral staircases and a recent free game update added ladders.  But I want to build straight staircases that go around corners.  I don’t want to use cheats and extra floors just to add staircases that have a landing halfway up.  Also, the ability to build a grand staircase with curved sides for my sim mansions would be fantastic!  I would also love the ability to stack straight staircases on top of each other (they would be oriented in the same direction, but would make it easy to place a basement staircase below a staircase that leads to the second floor, which is quite common in contemporary house construction).  Finally, I want to add attic spaces onto my sim houses but I want to use one of those retractable staircases to get there; you know the kind that telescope and then retract up into the ceiling when they’re not in use.
• Customizable blueprints in blueprint mode.  Blueprint mode is great, but it is exceptionally limited in what I can place for use on my lots.  I want to be able to create rooms and then save them as blueprints.  I want to be able to share my blueprints in the Exchange and also be able to download other simmers’ blueprints and add them to my game.
• More hobbies that can lead to skills or constructables.  It would be cool if I could have my sims take up sewing or knitting.  The items they make could become new clothing pieces.  In old cartoons from the mid-20th century, there’s the stereotype of a woman knitting some baby clothes as a signal to those around her that she will soon become a mother or grandmother; I want my sims to do that.  Also, a number of my real life friends are handy woodworkers and often make furniture for use around the house.  I would like to teach my sims woodworking so they could build some of the furniture instead of outright purchase it; the cost of materials could be lower than the cost of the furniture item, so it could be an economical way to get sims’ furniture.  The Free Time expansion pack for The Sims 2 had some of this, such as sewing, so we should be able to add it in a future pack.
• Improved interface for achievements.  The idea of achievements and/or badges for specific accomplishments was added in the Showtime expansion pack for The Sims 3.  I like the challenges that some of them involve, but I don’t see an easy way, aside from the social connection panel, I don’t see an easy way to track the achievements in-game.  I want them to appear on my sims’ skill panels in much the same way as the challenges and counters for existing skills appear there now.  With that interface, it would be easier to see what I still need to make my sims do in order to complete the achievements.
• Working closets and dressers.  Yes, I know that dressers in The Sims can be used to set clothing styles and have sims change clothes between saved outfits.  There are two aspects to this wish.  First, I want to be able to build closets to store my sims’ clothing and to serve as a place for them to change between saved outfits.  Second, I want my sims’ closets and dressers to behave more like the dressers did in The Sims 2, where my sims have to go out and actually purchase the clothing before it becomes available to them in their closets or dressers.
• Brooms and vacuums.  Floors get dirty, and the only time the floors are dirty in the game is when a sim leaves a pile of trash or laundry on the floor or when a plumbing fixture breaks and leaves puddles.  I want to have my sims’ floors get dirty as they are used more frequently and require them to periodically clean the floors with brooms or vacuums.  Maids, butlers, cleaning bots and Bonehilda could perform the floor cleaning as well (hey, add a Roomba as a purchasable object!).  This could also be expanded with the Seasons expansions such that rainy days can lead to muddy areas outside and careless sims could track mud on their shoes into the house.
• Dust and cobwebs.  A natural extension of the brooms and vacuums idea above is to have an entropy engine in the game that very slowly adds dust and cobwebs to areas of the house that get less use by sims.  Again, maids, butlers, cleaning bots and Bonehilda could easily perform the dusting, but feather dusters could be purchasable objects too.
• Consistency in sims’ circadian rhythms.  So far, in all of The Sims games that I’ve played, it really doesn’t matter what day cycle a sim starts on, as long as the sim has had enough sleep recently.  If my sims are in careers with open work hours, such as the Inventor, Sculptor, Painter or the Scuba Diver, it really doesn’t matter when my sim sleeps or works, as the construction, collection and product sales activities can occur at any time of day or night.  It should take much longer than one day for sims to adapt between working first shift and working third shift, for example, and I shouldn’t be able to just put my sim to bed one night at 10:00pm, have him get up at 8:00am, play a little bit then go back to bed at noon, sleep until 9:00pm and then get up and work or play until 7:00am.  It’s gotten to the point in my games that I completely ignore the clock anymore except to keep track of when my sim has to go to work.

That’s about all I can think of right now.  I’m sure I’ll add to this list as I play more, but I’ve got to end this post somewhere, and this is as good a time as any to get back to my game…