Good point! I'm often amazed how quickly some mods are upgraded after a patch. Good work guys

Here's another example of dodgy goings on.... I downloaded the "Guerdon" free vending machine last night. You know? The one with pictures of all sorts of yummy soft drinks in cans, bottles and plastic, chippies and candy bars on it..... well unfortunately, they ran out of all those yummy snacks..... and all it dispenses is the following.

A plate of "melty" pink yoghurt snacks
Some chicken nuggets (admittedly with dipping sauce)
A slice of grey coloured "cake"
A ham & cheese sandwich which has had all the fillings swiped
A standard garden salad
A plate of green slime that looks like someone put their Endagame in a blender
ABSOLUTELY ZERO DRINKS OF ANY SHAPE OR FORM!


Thankyou loyal fans for spending vast amounts of money with us, here, have a free object that we knocked up during a lunch break...

Ewww! Not the green slime.

The sims in TS1 eat the same thing for every meal and even that looks better. I thought Maxis got over that with the pour-able lettuce, guess not.

EDIT: I'm not going to dig my claws into this too much. I've been dealing with the clowns from another multi-billion dollar company all week; face to face. I've come to the conclusion they all act the same way, but at least in that situation they're learning things even though they keep chest-thumping at me over job titles as if I give a shit. I digress.



The ball pit has returned in another form. Ignoring the color which looks like 'food' that has been sitting out for about a month, they're as flat as the plate itself.

Playing with the new Sims 4 battlepass content

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxP5siMK1yc

People really think Project Nay-Nay is going to be better?

I feel like someone on the team doesn’t actually know what a vending machine is because none of the American vending machines in the game make any damn sense.

There’s already a can of soda (base game?) in the game and chips. I do not understand why that was picked over… cake?

I don't know what those are supposed to be. The way Satch was talking about it lead me to think that perhaps they were yogurt covered raisins which are a thing that do exist.



Do people get yogurt covered raisins out of a vending machine? No. Yogurt covered raisins are typically found in the produce section of a grocery store and perhaps a convenience store depending on how fancy said convenience store is. We have a few fancy convenience stores not far from where I live. By fancy I mean the store has marble floors, shelves made from mahogany and so on. Said stores jack up the prices of everything by at least 200% and I don't go into them to buy stuff, but they are nice.

There are such things as vending machines that sell sandwiches and that kind of stuff. I worked for a company that had such a vending machine, there is at least one at our local hospital, ect... Do people buy food out of these machines? Yes. Would I recommend people buy food from these machines? Absolutely not. Nobody should pay over $5.00 for a basic tuna fish sandwich with mayo.

https://www.vendinglocator.com/blog...vending-machine

Then there is the problem of not knowing how long the food has been sitting in said machines. Sticking with the tuna fish sandwich on white bread example, if the power goes out for a extended period of time and the vendor of those machines doesn't stay on top of things, a person is at high risk of getting food poisoning or worse, botulism. These kinds of vending machines need to be refrigerated for obvious reasons.

Bringing this back to TS4...

To make this vending machine thing even more confusing, the pictures on the front of the machine show typical things a person would buy from a vending machine. Soda, chips, a candy bar, and so on. Why Maxis thought it would be creative to have a plate of mysterious 'balls' of who knows what come of a vending machine with those pictures will always be a mystery.

If this isn’t a reason to reconsider like maybe not buy packs or items seperate, when you spend time doing smth useful like learn to mod, then I don’t know what will help tell Maxis this is not ok.

Devs are taking the most lazy and cheapest route to design the effing objects we are asking. The whole vending machine looks boring without the glass window, so its excuse to not 3D draw the object and animate it (then again, maybe its fair - TS2/3 didnt had it either because how painstaking ir actually is to make it look it dispense every individual item), but the most insuting thing it drops food from a vendor/fridge where its served on a plate/dish. Are you effing kidding me right now? Everything seems a reskin in this game and its funny how much better content you get out from mod-creators than at times from official employees of The Sims. It’s a bit of a joke!

People that create cc and mods are not tied to EA. By that I mean they're not stuck to sticking to a budget, the amount of time they work on something because the only 'deadline' they have are ones they set for themselves, and they are not confined to EA's rules of what they can do or make.

To this day I still see plenty of people talking about how EA should hire this person or that person to create content. This is not a bad thing, people want more content from their favorite creators, but it isn't that simple. If that were to happen, the content wouldn't be the same because that person or group of people would be forced to follow EA's rules.

Maxis continues to show us what being forced to stick to EA's rules looks like. There are some things Maxis does well, but does anybody need plates of gross-looking plates of food in their game with a $40 price tag? There is a abundance of gross-looking food in TS4 already. Just like people don't need to spend $40.00 for yet another bar. How many recolored bars in TS4 at this point? I've lost count.

Yibs that participate in making stuff with Maxis have a much different relationship with EA / Maxis than the person that does it out of love for the game. Even Yibs like Kayla and James will / have talked about all the restrictions put on them when they've done builds for various packs. I'm sure there are a laundry list of rules Plumbella had to follow for the kit that she helped create.

I realize I'm beating a dead horse with this as it has been discussed a gazillion times over the past decade. Grant laid it out 10 years ago; their game, their way. If they want gross food being served out of vending machines, I'm sure somebody within EA's mothership dubs it as "quirky".

There are ways to be lazy while also getting a lot of bang for your buck. Just slapping whatever foods in a vending machine actually required an unusual amount of effort when they could just have it shit out a can of soda.

Funny enough, they already have a retail fridge from Get To Work selling sandwiches. That’s fine as is and looks the part for what it sells. However, the fridge does not work in all venues like a vending machine would.

What’s irritating me more is us getting our 3rd set of apartments in an expansion pack, and having already had a pack where we build our own apartments and there is 0 sign of a spiral staircase. I’ve given up hope on the elevator. A modded already showed up it was possible. I hope they don’t consider us using those helpful but massive and clunky modular stairs as spiral staircases.

No… lol

Well, that is going to depend on the quality of the patch they put out. All this recent malarkey about the EA App will be updated so that everybody has to patch their TS4 for the App to be able to run it, all this pulling the wool over the eyes with the log in everyday and get free stuff like the Vending Machine, even a promise from EA to work on improving TS4 and its graphics and frame rate.

It all came about because of the desperate state of affairs brought about since last December. The For Rent patch and pack were just an awful, awful mess. So bad it made a lot of folks, including myself, think twice about patching. Which I did not at the time. Then came the January and February patches which didn't really address anything at all. Leaving a bad taste in many mouths as For Rent and the game (lot loading getting stuck etc, etc.) were - and still are - a mess. Then came three months of patching that can only be described as incompetent insanity. Breaking the game even more. How is that even possible? Statistically, the lowest amount of players willing to patch their games in the history of TS4 came about. Trust and willingness at an all time low. EA cannot sell you stuff if you refuse to patch your game. So everything that's been going on in recent times is to force people to patch their games. That's it. That's all. No big mystery to it.

So then, how long before EA Maxis put out another string of terrible patches? And as such, how long do modders hold off from patching because it's not healthy for their games, their modding pursuits and their general happiness to rush into getting patched without waiting for feedback on the state of that patch?

But since EA App forced us to all patch if we want to play the game at all, it does reset everything to a square one position. And how long do you think that can be sustained? Well, if the cheap and lousy free Vending Machine is any indication to go by... Ouch!

Never look a gift horse in the mouth, eh? Though what pasty gunk comes out of that free vending machine gift horse is something you'll never want to put in your own mouth.

Maxis, make and test patches better. That is simply all you have to do.

I dunno, but they are adept at it and have been doing it since at least 2004. Sims 2 seemed to have something broken for each thing fixed (they kept breaking pianos, and sandcastles I remember ) and often issued several patches per expansion pack.

Sims 3 was epic, as they once released a patch that broke things so badly, you had to reinstall the game to fix it.
Game Help:Issues with 1.3x Superpatcher^wiki





When:

Maybe?

Trailer dropped. This looks nothing like an expansion pack. Closet Woo Hoo looks fun I guess.

I understand it’s a pack of systems and not things, but there’s absolutely nothing to really do except a new card game? They didn’t even throw in billiards?

Yikes.

People keep insisting that woo-hoo in a closet is a new thing which came with Get Together. They're recycling stuff because of course they are.

The rolling up in the blanket feels like a play on woo-hoo on a hammock in TS2. Otherwise it feels like a game pack disguised as EP because of the new world. It's pretty, but it's not like sims can use the whole map. Whatever...

This is what happens when you stretch the years for this game: you start making expansion packs that revolve around social interaction. Nightlife gave you cars to impress (figuratively more so, but they could made it AoE moodlet here) dates and bars as a new concept that made sense to throw in where dating and romance revolded around (thats the aesthetic we usually get our partners and strengten sentiments of having good time with them). Nor Generation, a $40/60 pack, was required to allow Sims to cuddle in bed (may happen here) or functional babies have moee stuff to do (looking at you Growing Together). But if people wanna spend that much money for a gimmicky world and a bunch of animations to be played over, let it be their guest. How many turns it will take for a player to get bored with this pack after killing their Sim from a breakup state (if its possible, as I heard runoes Sims don’t recognize cheating or feel strongly jealous).? I’d think not many.

Hell, even Generations added two new cars JUST to have something expensive to buy during a mid life crisis.

I feel like there isn’t anything to really grab the player. There isn’t a drama or fun new gameplay objects. For example, the focus is on clubs, lounges, and bars. No arcade cabinets?

The showed a dumbbell… is that a new workout?

I feel like there’s nothing to do, but it’s still early. That woo-goo rug isn’t very exciting, and the costume chest is cute, but situational.

Build Buy, which features Spanish Colonial items, doesn’t even look all that exciting. Shame.

Just popped up on the App... $NZ 70 for Lovestruck!!! Not the usual $50... but $70. Plus it will wreck all my romantic mods for free....

Huh. I haven't really kept up with The Sims 4 lately because doing that drains a lot from a person, but this doesn't feel like an expansion. Well, it doesn't feel like a Sims 4 expansion at least, and without the world, it sort of feels light for a game pack as well.

Actually, I don't think I've seen a game pack announced in a little while, let me just check... Werewolves?? Two years ago??? Looking at the recent expansion offerings I missed, it seems like EA has figured out that people would pay extra for a game pack if they label it as an expansion pack, so I guess that's where we are at this point in time. Fantastic.

A "dating" expansion is something that's been done before, but you run into a little problem doing one for The Sims 4.
TS1's Hot Date had dating as a feature but also introduced the ability to go outside of the home lot, and community lots, so it was real easy to add new features and objects, and you didn't even have to interact with the dating side to play around with the pack.

TS2 launched with community lots in the base game, but they were limited. Nightlife came out, and alongside dating there were bars, nightclubs, bowling alleys, restaurants, cafes, gambling halls, karaoke bars, etc.
New systems as well, like turn-ons and turn-offs, contacts, fury, groups. CARS, THE INVENTORY SYSTEM, AND 2 NEW ASPIRATIONS (the only time TS2 ever got new aspirations!) You can do a lot with a pack like this, and a lot of it is even usable without needing to date.
I'm skipping over TS3 as it had no packs focused on dating, though a few of them could supplement the act of dating.

But the thing is, what do you do with a pack focused on dating this far into TS4's lifespan? You can't add bars and clubs, they are already in the base game. How about we expand the things you can do there, add DJs, dance floors, and new drinks? Nope. Get Together has already done that, and while you are at it, you can scratch cafes off as well. Karaoke? Restaurants? Sorry, these things have already been done.
Alright, how about we focus on new systems like turn ons and turn offs, online dating and polyamory? You could do that, but mods already exist for those things, they aren't the most complicated things to implement, after all. And it's likely the mods do it better than what you could implement.

The result is this flaccid looking pack, where it looks like there isn't much of anything.

So, features. Dating app. I never used online dating in TS3 because it was more engaging to just find a date in the normal way, around town or at clubs or whatever, plus I think you could get catfished. Not interesting to me.

Dates. There are "custom dates", apparently. Dates suck in TS4 because of the stupid social event system where you have to scramble to meet the goals of "socialise 10 times with your date" or "flirt with your date 3 times." etc, and it's just not fun, and I hate it. TS3 did it better by not doing really anything at all and TS2 is the gold standard, gamey but you can still have time to do what you want. If they can make dates better, cool, but should this really be a expansion feature?

Turn-Ons and Turn-Offs. Already been done with Wick- I mean, Wonderful Whims. Boring. Next!
Relationship dynamics. Sounds interesting, but like, not really anything new.
Romance skill. Less focused on pick-up artistry which was something I feared, so it's basically more romance interactions the more skill. I think charisma skill should be more than enough for this sort of thing.
Romantic boundaries. Polyamory and open relationships. Cool. Long overdue. Probably the most useful part of this and it's part of the free patch.

New aspirations (boring) and two traits that sound just like the flirty and unflirty traits worded differently. New Mexican inspired world, looks neat, will probably be small, when I saw the penthouses in the trailer, I thought they were just showing San Myshuno for some reason at first.

New CAS and BB items to go with that Mexican theme, and some tacky outfits and BB items. I like the tacky stuff, BB for TS4 packs is usually so boring, so this is neat and reminds me of Livin' Large. The tacky outfits is probably the most spicy they can get while remaining in their target audience, never gonna get something like the threesomes that the TS2 devs were considering during development.

Having Don flirt with the Grim Reaper at the end of the trailer is interesting, probably just marketing for the trailer, but I wonder if it would be possible pull an Olive Specter? Have a baby with Grim and have it get some small special powers when they grow up like Father Winter babies already in the game. That would be neat. Probably isn't the case, but wouldn't that be fun to think about?

From all that's revealed right now, I think this is the lightest and most disappointing pack for TS4 to date.

For the lack of actual places to go, you double down on other aspects of dating.

1. Getting Ready To Go Out
Implement Salons, so Sims can pick a new hair style and make up, or get a specialized makeover from the styling, both reintroduced and updated from Get Famous. Sims request a certain look in a certain outfit category, and the game picks from premade looks. Salons will also feature a Tattoo station with similar functionality.

Sims can also work at these stations for money (Similar to Spa Day).

2. Prioritize Gifts & Shopping
There should be a variety of dating gifts, and different Sims should like different gifts. Foodie and Romantic Sims will love treats as gifts. Childish and playful Sims will love stuffed animals. Neat & Outdoorsy Sims will love flowers. Snobs & Material Sims will love jewelry and fragrances. These will also work across various other packs, like gifting a Geek Sims Voidcrotter Cards.

3. Add Activities To Existing Venues
There’s still a lot missing from existing venues, beyond the obvious addition of pool tables and gambling to bars.

Parks can features rentable toy boats and toy cars for Sims to play with together, and picnic blankets for Sims to share a meal together. Parks can host a variety of competitions like they used to - grill offs, chess tournaments, fishing competitions, etc. Parks can also be littered with small service cars, such as popcorn, hot dogs, frozen ice, kebabs, etc. so Sims can order food.

Museums can include various new exhibits Sims can watch and interact with, such are aquatic exhibits (large and small tanks or fish, with interactive aquariums), animal exhibits (for natural history exhibits), and interactive science exhibits (like a VR headset). Museums can also feature small gift shops to purchase gifts for your date or light refreshments.

Gyms can feature new workout equipment (which Sims can also use at home, like dumbbells and a workout bike) and classes to engage in, such as dance. Gyms can include food options like a salad/protein bar, and smoothie station. This will give Sims new interests and ways to meet single Sims.

Nightclubs/Bars/Lounges can be updated to feature customization options to make them unique, including dress codes and drink menus. VIP rooms also be rented for a fee and will be open to select Sims and staff/service NPCs.

Bars can benefit from the addition of having things to do in the “back rooms”, such as shuffleboard, billiards, and slots.

Nightclubs can benefit from including things to make different types of nightclubs, like foam machines, dance cages, the dance sphere, or a drink making machine.

Lounges can benefit from serving the elite with lavish experiences. The “Private Chef Table” will feature a chef NPC Sims can hired for a steep cost, and invite up to 7 Sims to dine there at a long tables. A service NPC will spawn and cook 4 pre fixe meals from across several cultures of choice upon hiring, then leave. Similarly, a Teppanyaki experience can also be rented out with a special NPC that visits the lot once paid for.

There’s a lot they could do. There’s no reason for there to be so little to do in a pack about dating.

A pack that focuses on fleshing out existing lot types sounds actually useful, but unfortunately would require effort, so probably not getting something like that from 4 any time soon.
Nice ideas, though! Dating isn't really my thing in The Sims so I hadn't really given it much thought.

While I like the theme itself, this looks anaemic for an expansion pack. I feel like there are some obvious omissions here, like speed dating, kissing booths, canal rides, etc. At least add a new hot tub, or something. Bars are pretty boring in this game, so they could have taken the opportunity to flesh them out a bit more. Add billiards, poker, or maybe even add in a new venue with burlesque(-ish, because this is The Sims) shows.

I can only echo what others have said here about it coming a bit too late in the day for TS4, so a lot of the things this could be paired with have already been done. Just another example of how EA keep breaking an old pack into many different pieces, I guess.

I do like the tacky BB stuff though. There's not enough of that in the game IMO. And I suppose it will be entertaining seeing how players mix polyamory and role-playing with Get Together's club system...that's about it.