I doubt if it has anything to do with "Social Justice Warriors" or "Social Injustice Warriors" or even "Antisocial Injustice Warriors" (take your pick) of whatever. Like any corporation they happily appropriate and monetize (and eventually dismiss, decay and break) any actual narrative seen as "consumer attractive" for whatever reason, as long as it won't lead them directly into criminal charges; those are the same people who tells us that "single player games are dead" (for like 10yrs now, go figure). Primitive use of sociometry ("focus groups" - that kind of activity for which you'd get an 'F' in my class for failed methodology) , wishful thinking, marketing superstitions and typical for that company "too late but with big hammer" attitude (lootboxes, anynone?), nothing more.

I think most of us felt like TS4 should have been a combination taking the best things from TS2 and the best from TS3 and putting them all into a new game. There are things in TS3 that are so much better than TS2, where one is the gardening and fishing. Then there's the CASt tool (oh how I miss that!) and the open neighborhood where my Sims were always running willy-nilly all over the place either collecting things, or sometimes a Sim would jog to work. And where interactions were involved in many ways TS2 does better and in others I think TS3 excelled. Oh, and something I had forgotten until the other day about TS2--the babies aren't even selectable? I could select my TS3 babies. Sure, I couldn't bathe them and their burrito shells are downright silly but at least I could click on them and see how long before they'd need fed or diaper changed.

So yeah, in the end TS4 ended up being a big disappointment.


Of course it loads faster. it's just a base game. Start adding packs and CC to it and see how the load time increases. This has been a thing with every new Sims game. "Oh, look! My TS2 loads SO MUCH faster than TS did!" then "Oh hey, TS3 loads WAY faster than TS2!"

I disagree, I really don't like the Sims 3 system where fruit trees evaporate after being harvested and where you can graft steaks on a shrub. Or the fishing system where sharks end up in tiny cartoon aquariums.



And here I disagree even more. The open world where you are chained to one family and all the others live and change without my influence is the biggest reason I never got into Sims 3. And I really don't like all the collection of diamonds and plutonium that goes on in Sims 3.

I looked at it like this. I didn't have to grow steak in the garden, nor did I have to put a huge shark in the aquarium. However, the garden improvements are how in TS2 a Sim will tend their garden then several times a day weeds will pop up, so unless they have a greenhouse they're basically on call to take care of their plants, and I love the variety of fish in TS3 and the spawners with the different ones. And I don't recall my TS3 fruit trees evaporating. I think the money trees would die eventually but I can't remember the regular fruit trees doing that. Of course I don't have the best memory. As for the other Sims, I looked at them like Townies, the Sims I never played anyway and I was happy they would move on with their lives and age and die. Then just like I have mods now to make sure that happens in TS2 I had mods that could help me keep control over the TS3 families I didn't want losing track of. However, like I said both games had their high points and the perfect TS4 would have found that but then again I've known for a long, long time I don't fall within EA's target market.

Anyway, I've digressed plenty enough so I'll just stay quiet on this subject now.

I think TS2 babies can be made selectable vi testingcheats, definitely by mod.

TS3 babies were just boring. Half as much to do With them as TS2 babies, and they didn't even look like mini versions of the sims.

TS4 babies are boring, but they're the easiest to take care of. Feed, socialize, change diaper, and wait for the thumbnail to og blue (when they're "sad" or need a diaper change, which you always know because it says "change full diaper" with the green smoke). And that's it. They don't even look remotely like their older selves, and don't always get the skins from their parents. I prefer TS4 toddlers to babies any day (and hadn't toddlers been added to the game, I'd never gotten it, because I find the older ages a little less interesting).

Gardening in TS2 is fine, but a bit more fun in TS3 because there are more plants and a bit more to do, even though the collecting thing did get out of hand. In TS4... I've tried, but the plants never seem to evolve to the next stage, or do so in a completely random fashion no matter what you do With them.

Skilling in general is also very annoying, because a lot of the aspirations require very high skills to do certain tasks, but don't actually say which level they require, so it's a lot of guesswork. And it's the same aspirations over and over and over again, with the same boring tasks. They're not very sim-spesific, since you can just change them up as much as you want, having all sims do all the tasks if you want. When there's little else to do than working on aspirations/wishes or careers, it gets old, fast. And pets are borked. If I can't make a pet that gets a pink and blue coat from its parents, but instead get a brown pup, then something's seriously wrong with the genetics (which are borked for regular sims, too - my green and pink haired alien sims with green and purple skin ended up somehow with a turqoise baby with a random hair color. Is it so much to ask for to have multiple hair color options for all the ages ,or having a proper green skin for the babies?).

Eh. Not as pervasive as a flies eating a sim alive. All games had a single absurd-absurd-fictional stuff in, like the psychiatrist and father time for instance) :D

I downloaded it and installed it. Haven't fired it up yet because I don't have time to do any Simming, at the moment. So, I can't speak to what it's like. I don't even know if I will play it at all. But it was there, it was free, and I already have an Origin-infested Simming machine because that's how I bought all the TS3 EPs. So why not?

As for the games themselves, TS2 will always be my fave because it's the most sandbox-y of them, which is what I like. The flexibility to do what I want, easily starting and playing all different kinds of neighborhoods and scenarios. I kinda hated TS3 for a long time, mostly because of its inflexibility and less sandbox-ness... but now I kinda like it. That is, so long as all the NRAAS mods, and some others, are installed that, for instance, allow me to control Story Progression (and do some really neat things with its castes) and that help with the game's massive lagging issues, yadda yadda. That game, to me, is truly unplayable without mods just in the lagging aspect. Then I finally sat down and figured out how to play households in rotation -- as well as that can be done in the game, at least -- and it's made it a lot more interesting to me. (I get bored with playing only one family. It's why I've never been fond of the original kind of "legacy" playing.) Overall, I've got my gripes about it (and I have gripes with TS2, too. A lot of them.), and I'll never be a huge fan of its art style or of the open world, but with mods and default replacements and stuff, I'm quite liking the game now. As a bonus, since I don't have much CC for it (mostly just script mods + default replacements), just all the EPs, one SP, and all of the Store content that interests me, it loads really, really fast. Which is good for times like now when I don't have a lot of time to play and I don't want to leave anything loaded for long periods of time when it's not being played. (Which is the way I get around my TS2 game's long loading time; I just rarely turn the game off, if I'm playing often.) I would even like to try my hand at Create-A-World, so I can build my own world...but I can't seem to get it to run. Probably because I used an alternate install location for the game, I'm thinking.

ANYWAY! Yes, this is an EA marketing ploy to get more people to try TS4 and then hopefully they get hooked and buy all the EPs or whatever-the-hell they call them. "Evil" companies do this all the time. The TS2 UC was a GIANT marketing ploy to get more people to put Origin on their machines. (And it worked really well, too.) This is another one. Doesn't mean you can't/shouldn't take advantage of it. You don't HAVE to fall for the marketing and buy anything from EA. Take the freebie and run, as it were.

So who downloaded it and tried it out now? Your impressions?

I got the game. Once I get a gaming computer, I'll be able to play it. Thanks EAxis :D

eee... i's a basegame so you should be able to play it even on "a potato" (it even has a "laptop" (or such) mode IIRC), the visual quality might be rather terrible in such case but as long as it will be just bg, it should work just fine.

The "laptop mode" didn't much work on my old laptop - or rather, the game ran, but lagged quite a bit, even with just one EP. That laptop was from a couple years before TS4 came out, and it ran TS2 (full game) perfectly fine, so... I don't know. Maybe my settings were a little high or something. TS3 was also a bit laggy, though with all EPs.

If you turn everything down to low, I guess TS4 can run on "anything".

Well obviously it loads fast because it's the base game. I'm just saying it's a factor in her choosing to play as she had basically given up playing Sims 3 because of the very long load time. She has Sims 2 on her old laptop and that is faster. No need for the mocking attitude.

I haven't honestly noticed a major decrease in load times when adding packs. There has been a minor reduction, but only by about 60 seconds and I have all the packs installed. TS3 on the other hand, with the same amount of packs installed, takes long enough for me to take a quick shower and make a sandwich.

Load time is kind of a matter of CC amount in whatever game you're playing, isn't it? I mean, my TS3 game is all EPs, one SP, a good chunk of the store content (which is bundled, but there's probably enough of it to be comparable to a few more SPs), plus a bunch of script mods and a small amount of non-bundled, non-mod, non-EA-made CC, mostly clothing and defaults for CAS stuff. TS2 in my creating user account is all EPs/SPs, the CC I'm working on at the moment, a few mods that I take in and out for testing-stuff purposes, plus less than 100MB of other CC that I use for taking preview pics. So, a pretty comparable load, I think, and they take about the same amount of time to load to the neighborhood/save selection screen, about 2-3 minutes. (My fully-loaded TS2 game with ~8GB of CC takes a lot longer to load to neighborhood selection, of course, but I'd expect that. ) Now, it does take TS3 longer to load a world than it does to load one of my TS2 testing/creating hoods but that's because those TS2 neighborhoods have very little in them -- sometimes an empty terrain (with terrain/road defaults), maybe a half-assed, mostly-empty lot or two -- whereas the TS3 world is...Well, a world, although I do play smaller ones with strict population controls to reduce lag while playing. Even so, if I take a leisurely trip to pee and make a sandwich or something, the TS3 world is loaded when I get back and of course there's then no specific lot to load like you have with 2. So it's not THAT long. Of course, if you're playing a large, heavily-populated world, it'll take longer...but not, I think, much longer all told than it'll take an all-EPs TS2 to load the game plus a large neighborhood plus the lot you're going to play. So it would seem to me that CC is what makes the difference, not the amount of EPs you cram in, whatever game it is. I could be wrong about that, though. It's just what I experience on my machine, which hardware-wise is optimized more for TS2 than it is for 3.

Of course a base-game-only-no-CC version of any of the games will load like lightning. If you compare that to an all-EPs/no-CC install of a different game, you're comparing apples and oranges.

So yesterday I tried it about. Not much pet peeve I could apart of how weak urgencies are (had Sleepy sim pass out at home lot despite there being an available bed), how I could send my Sim get selfies taken with the person who really despised (with the relationship being almost full red), and other minor things aside that I don't recall. Whimps were kinda mediocore and oddly disabled by default. Oh, I dunno If it's intential but my sims only when to work when on the hour it started. Apart from those issues, of course there are things I enjoyed (transition between interactions, caters/musicians/mixologist for hiring, many provided slots for meals on a counter, set drinks) etc. I sort of ran ideas of what do next, so I didn't play it for far long. Will for sure continue with it where I left off yesterday (should be expecting their first child).

One of the things I like best with TS4 is how toddlers are handled (I didn't buy the game until they were added, because I wasn't the least interested in playing with only child and up). I like how they can, if you give them the right trait, take care of most of their own needs - they can go to sleep in the toddler beds, can feed themselves as long as there's food available on a counter (and a couch or livingroom chair to sit on, because regular kitchen chairs are scary for some reason), can potty train themselves (though a bit less ineffective) with the independent trait or after 2 points, and can learn to use stairs (I always make sure they start out with the Movement skill, getting at least 2-3 points before moving on). It makes toddler care so much easier. Plus, if you give them something to do (they can sit with the bunnypad for hours, and can skill up for all skills with this one, plus they don't get tired of playing with it), they won't follow other sims around as much, and they usually stay away from the toilet. Communication skills are also a bit easier, because all talking helps, and they can talk while doing certain other tasks, even while in the same room as other toddlers who are playing - so essentially they can sometimes work on two skills at a time (only place where the multitasking is never annoying). And they have 8 days to skill up, which they tend to need most of. Basically they're much easier to take care of than in TS2 and TS3 combined. There are things I miss from TS2 toddlers, though.

The skilling system for toddlers and children is a bit flawed, though. Toddlers can only do toddler skills, which don't matter much when they grow to child, and children need to skill up to 10 in the four child skills before they can gain extra points for instruments, logic, etc. (they do start out with 2 points in some skills when they grow up, but that's little compared to how much work they've put into it).

I was encouraged to download the game anyway and did so today. The tutorial is extremely long and boring and didn't cover build mode, at least before I gave up. The GUI is very different to Sims 2 and was a bit of a learning curve for me. Nothing seemed intuitive. For example, for my freelance botanist I had no idea how to plant anything. So far, it's a bit meh, but it's early days.

There are Lessions you can under game menu.

I didn't bother with the tutorial at all. If I ever wonder about something I'll either mess around and try different things until I understand it, or google what it does or how to do something.

Carl's TS4 guide is quite neat, as is the Sims Wiki.

yavannatw, I had the same issue with plants, but eventually managed to figure it out. Sims can order seeds either from a computer or from one of the planters. Once you have them in the inventory, click a pack and open it so you get the seeds (you get different ones for each pack). You place a seed/plant where you want to plant it (planter or directly on ground), click it, and choose "plant". Plants will get the level the seed/fruit had when planted. Trees are 1 in each planter, the others you can plant 4 in each square planter. The sims lack several useful tools until they've skilled up a bit, so I'd recommend getting them to level 3-4 with a book first. Sims can also find plants around the neighborhood and take home fruit or pods (seedlings?) and pod them together so you get two plants in one (this can make new plants, but so far I haven't managed that, and it can also raise the level of one or both plants. There's several stages of the plant, and when it reaches a new one you get a DNA marker in the hovertext, and the plant gets 'stars' around it. Click the plant and choose "evolve". I do recommend getting the dragonfruit (available in either the rare or uncommon seed pack), because it can help on the earning money bit (also for the money ambitions). They're around 600$ each in the Perfect state, and with 2-4 plants, you get a lot of them. My current gardener has supplied his family with these, so all of the teens/adults in the house managed to reach the 200k for the money ambition pretty fast . The "super green thumbs" ambition price thingy may also help on gardening.

Yes, but I love playing all (or most) of my families. And I don't want the game changing them or having them run about doing whatever without any possibility of me preventing it. And none of the mods ever helped in any substancial ways to prevent that. The Open Neighbourhood (in both Sims 3 and the way Sims 4 handles it) destroyed my whole playstyle.
You don't have to grow Steaks on shrubs? Well maybe not (also sorry on the fruit trees I mixed them up with the Sims 4 ones it appears)... But you have to live with the whole neighborhood being active the whole time, which is a no go for me. And being able to have my Sims corss the roads isn't really a payoff to being forced to have a "main" Household to me.

In TS4, you can almost approximate how families are handled in TS2. You can set it so that Auto Age only affects the Active Household. It's not quite the same but close.

In TS2, when you didn't play a household, the family stayed frozen with what they were last doing and no changes took place in aspiration or motives. In TS4, with Auto Age only for the Active Household, unplayed families don't age, but the same amount of time passes and when you go back to play them, the family is doing different things than when you left them. Their relationships have dropped (dramatically) during the time you didn't play them, and their needs/motives are different. But there's been no affect on their job performance, fitness, food expiration or age. They've sort of been treated like a TS2 townie would have been during the time you didn't play them watching time go by but not actually doing anything. So with it set that way, it isn't quite as bad as the full story progression in TS3 or quite as good as the totally stagnant families in TS2.

You don't have to let it do that, though, if you're willing to use mods. Namely, the NRAAS Story Progression, which replaces the EA one. It's a huge thing with a learning curve that I'm only starting to figure out, but it has a thing called "castes" which are basically categories of sims. For each caste, you can separately assign what each can and can't do, and there's a giant laundry list of things you can turn on or off. There are a bunch of pre-defined castes -- one for each sex, one for each life stage, and a whole bunch of other ones -- and you can make your own custom castes, too. One of the pre-made castes is "Non-Active Family." You can simply set that caste not to age (or not to have/adopt kids, not to advance in careers, not to skill, not to do a whole bunch of other things), and it makes it pretty much just like TS2, with your active family and everyone else as static non-playables. You can also use that mod to play in rotations if you don't want to stick with one family. The SP mod also controls immigration and emigration, to avoid the annoyance of a Sim you're building a relationship with suddenly moving out of town.

Yeah, I know: "Why mod TS3 to be like TS2 when I can just play TS2?" That's pretty much my attitude, too. BUT! There are some fun (to me, anyway) things to do in TS3 that I can't really do in TS2, and messing around with the SP mod allows me to enjoy those things without the annoyance of the things that really piss me off about TS3.

Yes! See, it's been so long I keep forgetting which mods I use (my video card on that computer went all haywire and I don't know if it's the card or the mobo and need to figure that out before I know my next step with it) but for me NRAAS mods are an essential for TS3. I never use the castes because I don't like that but do use a lot of other things. Once you get the hang of what you're doing with it, it's all so easy and you set it up right within your game. The other day I was looking for some no-autonomy mods for TS2 and thinking, Sheesh, I miss NRAAS! Part of that mod system lets you click on any object and dig around until you find a setting to disallow autonomous use. There's a learning curve, definitely, but beyond that it's a wonderful mod with so many settings it's mind boggling. Or there's Awesomemod and that has some wonderful features as well and lets the player choose households to be protected and everyone else in the town progresses. Then with the really long age spans (age lengths can be completely customized) people who play rotationally generally set a really long lifespan and switch families every few Sim days. Or they turn aging off completely then just use the birthday cake to age up the Sims when they choose. That's another of TS3's great features--aging up Sims at your whim with the birthday cake, not s set-in-stone time (I did find Inge's special birthday cake to allow that in TS2).

I think I was misremembering about the fruit trees the other day. I think they do indeed die after a while (which is very realistic because any orchard owner will go through every so many years and completely cut down and replant) but as a general rule mine never lasted that long anyway because every time my Sim got better fruit I was always ripping them out and replanting to up the level. One of my Sims is a vintner and she makes a ton of money by selling her nectars at the local consignment store. I've never thought the Ambitions stuff in TS3 could stack up to OFB for TS2 but I really like the consignment stores. There's a little storage box a person can download here on MTS that my Sims use and any Sim that gardens has at least three of them in different colors: green for seeds or produce to use for seeds, purple for special fruits needed for various things, and if they fish a blue one for fish for fertilizer. And the whole storage/inventory thing in TS3 is something I really miss in TS2. Sure, my TS2 Sims have inventory but there are no boxes I can store stuff in, and even in the fridge once I put something in I can't take it back out. I like how Sims in TS3 can access their inventory no matter where they are, and even keep snacks in there. My fishing Sims usually have a few apples or something else in there for snacks while they're on the go.

Ah fiddle sticks. I said I wasn't going to digress again but here I went.

Well still haven't played or managed to download it yet.
Not that I'm concerned I just like the freebee from EA.

Played it a bit more. I got to say, it's an alright game. Things that could be consider annoying:
- Lack of urgency reaction. Playing it I notice my Sims hardly fulfill their needs (or certain of them) when they're yellow and even at times red. Got many times my Sim pass out cause she hesitated go to sleep for some reason.
- Sim stops talking mid-conversation to reach for their phones. Hopefully it's not deliberately, but looks like an oversight or a missing code of developers' part.
- I would have wished they split the "load up the dishwasher" interaction into two, the other being "turn on". Since even when your Sim or you drag a plate to it, the dishwashers is force to start up and you can't fill it in with more until the appliance finishes its thing. Kinda pointless features, since it's not a laundry machine. I do however get the appeal, so I would much prefer a flexible option to turn on the dishwasher whenever player pleases, since it's not like plates can run out or anything.

Things to praise:
- I like how you can instantly jump between lots your current Sims are present it, and that you can have them various pre-defined actions at home or on the lot. Another thing pertaining to visiting lots (asides of course you can visit neighbors unlike in TS2), is that time continuity is a thing. Now not everybody may like (depending on how TS2players with such absent aspect), but time progresses forward when returning home from another lot rather than resetting when they left it. I like it since it provides a realistic and fair 'challenge' so to speak to adapt that you can't stay in a time vortex.
- Toddlers are, well, cute. Was impatient having to have the baby grow up already. About tots: seems like they can already walk (which makes sense, as they're signifiantly mature than TS2's/TS3's), they get sad If one of their parents are away, which in turn immediately seek to be consoled by all adult she got her hands to (pretty cute).
- Basically, any welcoming additions that been carried from TS3 (hand tool in live mode, task choices for work, improved bars, etc.) that made the process much more intuitive or fun.