Imagine EA decided to update and release a new version of Uni. What would you want to change? What would you leave the same?

If this thread turns out to be fun, I thought we could do one fore every EP, eventually


Here's a short summary of what the EP added, using the wiki as a guide

crippling students' debts and teachers working 3 jobs to afford a burger?
Maybe update for Unsavory Charlatan: The Presidential Edition, Jordan Petersen's and The Elon (each downloaded separately for 50$).

yep - sims juggling 3 jobs, definitely!

Mostly the option to attend University at any time, similar to the Sims 3. There's Christianlov's Adults Go To College but you manually need to adjust the ages afterwards.

Honestly my first reaction is nooooooo, don't let current EA anywhere near those early EPs which were so good. The Sims 3 / 4 expansion packs mostly seem totally buggy, random as hell, missing basic obvious features. (Some of them are cool but as a whole, nope).

But if you're saying WE get to redesign it? Okay

So the cellphone/mp3/etc would obviously have to be updated - and I think this in fact wouldn't even fit into a university EP any more. That is such a 2000s thing, that the people interested in those items were kids in their late teens. Nowadays everyone from your grandma to your 8yo nephew has a smartphone. And honestly? I kind of hate the smartphones in sims 3 and 4. I know it's realistic, but it's so BORING and creepy to see everyone just whip out their phone and instantly stare into it the moment you let them idle.

What gadgets do students use today? I'd say it would have to be IT related. Laptops - maybe with the option to access lectures/classes/write assignments online, which might be quicker than by hand. Own printer vs having to go in and use the library printers. (Maybe even this is outdated, do students now submit everything online?) The laptop being dual usable as a TV, and the option to either buy streaming services legally, or use an illegal download site, which has the chance of attracting a police officer coming to lecture you and a fine. Maybe you could get the details of the site from the secret society.

Zoom calling would be awesome to be added to computers too.

IIRC the inventory didn't exist properly until Nightlife, but it would have been cool to make it exist in Uni and then make both the laptop, and instruments, accessible from inventory, like they are in later sims games. I do really love the way that the instruments from Uni work together to simulate a band.

The careers they added were odd - I would have expected to see Law, Education, as being some careers which require a degree and then some specialist ones like Natural Science and Architecture, maybe Engineering (even though that's not even a career in the game!). I know that means that they wouldn't have been able to put zombies in, but they could have made a different way to do this, or swapped which supernatural came with which EP. Werewolf, vampire, bigfoot, servo, plantsim all fit within their specific EPs, but they could have put genies or witches into University - actually, witches would have been epic, maybe with a secret "school of magic" hidden lot or subhood, and witchy/gothy decor replacing the punk.

I don't mind that they didn't require a degree for the older careers, because they are all worded in a way that suggests you can either work your way up or get a shoe-in to higher levels with a degree, even though Medical is a bit alarming to imagine without years of training! They probably COULD have made older careers need a degree in the same way that the unicareershack does - Medical and Science, maybe Politics would be the ones I'd want to see. The in-world explanation could have been that sims already in those careers would have been grandfathered in, but new applicants need degrees.

It would have been cool to be able to follow sims to lectures, or get an item that allows sims to give/receive lectures and actually gain skills from it, which could be used on normal community lots to create a kind of evening class/community college, and allow CAS adults or pre-uni sims or sims who had dropped out to get a degree if they want to. Actually, I think community lot skilling should have been enabled (for everyone) in university too. University is so much more fun and feels vibrant when you have a bare dorm just for sleeping, maybe eating, and a small common room, and then you go out into the campus to visit the library, classrooms, lecture halls, labs etc to learn the skills that you need for grade gates.

I would redo the entire semester structure, because it's simultaneously much too long and tedious to keep redoing the same thing over and over again, yet not especially challenging to fulfil all the grade requirements unless you actively restrict them, AND 3 days isn't particularly long enough to have to actively balance studying and partying, and it keeps being interrupted all the time. I think I'd have about 2 final exams, rather than 8, and about 4 of the "term paper" type assignments, with these being tied to deadlines. If you hand it in before the deadline then no worries, but if you wait until close to the deadline, then the library printers will be completely jammed with a queue, and visiting any community lot (especially anything designated as a study spot ie with a desk or bookcase) near a deadline you'll see dormies running around exhibiting stress behaviours like fainting, screaming/crying, ripping out a page from their notebook and screwing it up, falling asleep in their assignment (why wasn't this added??? Now I want to add this using the "fell asleep in food" animation!) based on a combo of their neatness/activity scores, with lazy and sloppy sims being most likely to panic having left everything to the last minute.

Lastly while the graduation party is a nice idea, it's just a bit annoying to have to run it separately for every sim - it would be nice to be able to have sims remain in limbo once they have graduated, as they currently do, and then instead of a graduation party (which is a bit lame) have the option to schedule a graduation ceremony, which you could add as many students to as you like, as long as they are all either dormies or in the "limbo" stage. This could then play out as a cutscene, with each sim walking up a stage and accepting a scroll, and then playables appear as individual sims in the main hood bin, while dormies simply get upgraded to adult townies. Or at the very least, just allow several students to graduate at once in a singular party.

Oh and one last small niggle - I wish that Hang Out could support both sitting on chairs/sofas when they are available AND the floor. It's stupid when they all sit around on the floor next to the nice sofas etc I have provided.

I like the EP in general, I don't think it had a lot of unfinished aspects. Except what Bulbizarre mentions, more freedom in when a Sim can go. Adults can get degrees too. But then we can also achieve that through player-made methods, so I can't say it's high on my over all list of things I wish EA would fix.

I think the secret societies were a really fun concept that didn't live up to its potential. Joining should've had effects later in life. Relatives of members should be grandfathered in. It should help with promotions. Or backfire - offering the secret handshake to a headmaster who's still bitter about not getting into the society could cause him to reject your kids from private school. I'd also like to have at least two secret societies per campus that had a longstanding bitter rivalry. I wish members were granted some sort of mystical ability or item that wasn't available anywhere else. Like the resurrectonomitron, but something Sims could take with them after they left campus.

Fraternities and Sororities should've had a headmaster style scenario - something like entertaining the frat president when they come for a visit. It would've been nice if you could set membership requirements for each group that members would have to continue to fulfil or be expelled from the house.

I feel like sports (both on a university vs other university level and just intramural club sports) is something that's a big deal for a lot of schools, but was almost completely absent from this EP... I never got that excited about it at university IRL (my school was also not great at most sports so there wasn't much to be excited about), but not all my Sims would have the same attitude as I did!

Kind of in a similar vein, I think other extracurricular activities would have been good to include - sports is one aspect, but things like clubs or student government or the like could have been a good addition. Greek life covered a bit of this, but only for one aspect, and I DID get really involved in clubs at university IRL, so I'm always wishing there was more opportunity for that kind of thing!

For starters, keep the remake out of the grubby hands of EA. Who know what kinds of microtransactions they would hide in it, And if there were any bugs, EA would never fix them. They would also make it so that you need an online connection just to play it. Have another company that's trustworthy work on the reamake instead.

I like this idea for a thread! I wouldn’t mind seeing it for the other EPs too.

I’m in agreement with I think everyone else that uni should be able to be done at any time. I like the extra wants slots but I think I’d like to see another benefit to having a degree? Maybe a boost with chance cards or skill building.

The secret society too I always was a little disappointed with. I love the idea of children automatically getting in if their parents were members. Same with Greek houses!

I think if I had the ability to rerelease the EP I would make it more of a general education pack instead of just university. Maybe a new school type and boarding schools? And then for sure activities like sports teams.

I really wish zombies were fleshed out a bit more too. I always want to play them but they don’t really do anything besides walk slowly and groan. But I don’t know what else zombies could do? Eating brains is definitely a fun idea.

I would love some more careers and scholarships as well. I know there’s mods for scholarships, and I’ve changed which careers require degrees and which don’t in my game but some of the later games brought in good uni careers I thought. Astronomer and engineer off the top of my head, but I wonder what the career rewards would be?

I dunno I always thought Uni would’ve done better as a later pack as opposed to the first one. I think they would’ve made more careers require degrees at the very least. I feel the opposite with Freetime, like if they’d swapped the two the game would’ve been better for it

I like playing Uni just like it is.

Sport could be improved - but I have had dorms competing against each other (of course it is not formal, but easy enough to do when you have dorms full of playable students).

There is merit in the idea of adult sims going - but I think it is not essential, it is only the first generation of adults that is made in CAS who can't go. And - because I like Uni - I send all the teens there, so all of them have degrees (which is also unlikely in RL, but I honestly cannot care less).

Uni is not too long for me - at times, I find it too short Time flies when using the full potential of community lots, after all.

Edit: Oh, I do not like the Greek house thing. So - I just don't have any Greek houses in my Uni hoods.

I couldn't resist.

Graduating does give other perks - if you're not using HarderJobs or other mods which affect how job hunting works, then you'll see higher level jobs appear on the computer. So for example a sim without degree will see a job at Level 3, whereas the Uni graduate might see a job at Level 6. It means you get more money straight away and don't have as far to go to complete a career track. There is also a boost for private school, but university graduation is the biggest boost. Newspaper jobs are always level 1.

Plus of course a degree opens access to the four uni careers - Paranormal, Artist, Show Business and Natural Science. They are weird choices IMO which is why I would change them if I was re-releasing the game (and why I use unicareershack in my own game).

I don't really understand the greek house thing and rarely play them. I mean, I got what the concept was, but it's not part of British university culture. I never use the secret societies. British unis usually have societies that you can join for interests - so you'll get the movie society, the DnD society, the debating society and so on and it's encouraged to join these in order to make friends and meet people outside of your own course. I loved this idea IRL. I don't think it really works for the sims and it fits better in Freetime anyway, with the secret hobby lots.

Playing today I realized something I wish they had done. The semester timer decreases when the Sims is at a community lot, but then when they return home it works the same as in main hood, where the time of day is whatever it was when they left. I wish it worked like vacations in BV, where community lot time is deducted and the clock does not magically reset when you return home. The way it works in Uni is disruptive to seasonal rotational play, since households that spend a lot of time at community lots on campus will graduate sooner than others.

Also, the time at the university community lot is random, not at all related to dorm time. This can glitch up your game - I took a Playable student to the Student Union when I thought there were several hours until class time. But on the community lot it was well into class time, so she disappeared - and then didn't reappear when class time was over. (So I quit without saving and restarted.)

There's supposed to be a mod for this somewhere....

Yes - that is how it works, they will leave to go to class from the community lot, and then may go to class again when back at the dorm (but the clock does not stop, which means the semester is over sooner in the end and which is why I don't find Uni too long at all).

One thing that actually turns me off to The Sims 3 or The Sims 4 is that they all have cell phones by default. I've never really played around with either but I imagine it would be a real kill joy to be playing out certain scenarios (the past when cell phones didn't exist, apocalypse where cell towers would become dysfunctional, a luddite, etc) and not be able to have Sims with no cell phone.

^ One thing that often has annoyed me with TS4 (and in some cases TS2) is the constant need to play with their phones. Can't remember if this was an issue in TS3, but I'd prefer this to be an option rather than a default setting, and if they have cell phones I'd much rather the options associated with it not be an idle or autonomous. Same with games, music players, etc.. Honestly, I kinda prefer the house phones in TS2 over cell phones, even if they're old fashioned by now (they were still in use when I was a kid).

Sometimes you have scenarios where phones don't fit in, or where it really isn't a good time for a sim to pull out a phone or game from their pocket and start playing.

House phones are the modern phones in my game. My Sims are quite happy with the status quo.

I guess there must be mods to disable the cellphone for apocalypse challenges? I don't know honestly.

I hadn't noticed the community time being random. If they are going to go to class when they get home then I just cancel them going to class from the community lot, they don't need to go twice (it can be a useful boost if their grades are low, though!)

I don't like ordered rotations because I have to pick a household that matches my mood for playing. So I have two methods to keep track of which households I've played and which are free to be played.

In most hoods I use the lot sync timer, so I can get around the seasons issue by using the weather controller career reward, (or later I just got the vase from SimWardrobe) and just sync them back to the main hood, setting them as "permanent" in whatever season it's supposed to be, which I usually have linked to the day number (Day 1-5 is season 1, day 6-10 is season 2, etc) for easy calculation. A full year is 20 days so I just have to subtract the nearest multiple of 20. I like this method when I'm trying to keep ages exactly in sync, but it is a bit of a pain to load a household, check their lot sync timer, see what day everyone is on so that I can pick someone with the lowest day.

Or another way I sometimes sync households when I'm not so bothered about them being synced to the exact day, is sync by season. If the current season is Spring, then I can play any house that is in Spring, for as long as I like, but once it ticks over to Summer, I can't return to that household until all the Spring households have been played (I never let two seasons tick over in one play session, unless it's the very last household, and generally try to leave early in the season.) The benefit of this is that it's instantly viewable from neighbourhood view who needs to be played and who has already been played and is on hold until everyone else catches up. It also means that the entire hood is generally in one season at once and it gives me a sense of progression - mostly spring barely any summer is early spring, it's still cold, everyone is longing for sun. Once there are more summer households than spring ones, it's starting to feel warmer and the flowers are out. I swap people's clothing over during Spring and Autumn, so in these seasons I will see walkbys and community lots with a mixture of long and short sleeves etc. In winter most people are wearing outerwear and then sweaters etc inside. In summer everyone is in shorts and t-shirts and sundresses etc. I really like this! Whereas in some very big hoods with the lot sync timer method I can have a span as far apart as 8-10 days from the furthest behind to the furthest ahead household (I should probably just be more strict with this!)

ANYWAY how this relates to uni hoods is that I simply set uni hoods to have two doubled seasons, rather than 4, and then I rotate them. So if it's currently Spring moving into summer in my main hood, I'll set it to S1/2 Spring, S3/4 Summer. (Or whatever season they start in when they move into a new house, I forget). For me with 48 hour x4 semesters, and the amount I use community lots, and moving them from dorms where they spend their first 2 years into student housing for the last 2 years, this seems to work out about right in terms of syncing with the rest of the hood. Once everyone in the main hood has moved into summer, I'll change the uni seasons from Spring/Summer to Summer/Autumn.

There is a 'career' that allows adults who weren't able to go to college to do so, imitating the college semesters. They get a very tiny stipend and they have to really earn those skills if they want to graduate.

https://modthesims.info/d/415772/ad...ent-career.html

I wish it were possible for both "college in the hood" (Squinge's mod) and regular college via Uni to exist. You can have either one or the other, but not both. Mostly because the 'college in the hood" automatically ages up and transitions kids into college and you can't move to Uni if you're living at home.

Plus, I'd like it if the under those circumstances you could just skip the college altogether instead of having to 'age up' the kid to avoid going in the first place. I'm considering that option because some of the kids in Tinsel Town are not motivated to do college, and I think they'd be better off not going.

I already do that in my medieval game, as girls were not allowed to go to college and only elder sons were. That means for the kids who aren't eligible for college, I have to age them up before 6 pm on their age transition day for them to be just uneducated people.

(and yes, I do have the 'no uneducated memories' hack that allows them not to agonize over the omission.)

I still have and use a house phone. I don't like nonsense calls following me everywhere I go, so only people really important to me even get my cell phone number.

Ability to have adults go to college later in life, akin to having them re-doing a college degree from their past or even doing a new degree. Like they got disillusioned with what they had their previous degree in or want to get a degree they couldn't previously, akin to mature students and all.

Altering the university appeal itself. Not every Sim getting a want to go to University, not every Sim getting a bad memory for not going to college or dropping out.

Shorter semesters. I have a mod for shorter semesters because 4 semesters at several days is just much too long. Maybe that's a realistic aspect, akin to how going to school always feels so long when you're a child, but there's a difference between something realistic and said realism being bad when put into a game.

The ability to attend university in your main hood. Or being a purely online-only university/school attended via laptop/computer.

Fraternities and Sororities I'd remove entirely. They don't seem to really do anything, and it seems a rather superfluous part in the game itself.
But I will say I would very much like to completely change how the university itself works since I am not in America, so anything like university/college in my country is nothing like what the game is like. But it's an issue with the series, of course, made with a very American mindset. (Must have a car; teens want to learn to drive in Sims 3; etc)

The University pack would also be a great pack to implement some other school addons like High School for teens, regular/private school for kids, Kindergarten or day care for toddlers and babies/infants (here is to hoping more would be done with babies/infants in general if TS2 was redone), with at least the option to send them there but maybe also some options for visiting and interacting during a school day.

I mean - you don't need 3-4 packs to do it... It's enough with one EP when you can use much of the same stuff (at least for High School and University, and a lot of the school items would probably be fine for kids too)

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Fraternities and Sororities - not sure if that's more of an American thing, but I think so? If you're from another part of the world, there's a lot of stuff that really only makes sense in Sims if you've been consuming US based media.

Sororities and Fraternities are an American thing (they might exist in other countries as well). I think it's fine for an American game to be America-centric, though.