I got the base game of TS4 free when they were offering some promotion. Played it and just got annoyed.

Is it just my imagination, or does each successive version of the game cater for a shorter attention span than the previous one?

TS2 allowed for aging and dying, which I think most of us (pace AndrewGloria) prefer because we got tired of playing the same thing over and over again.

TS3 did away with much of the baby and toddler care, and the open world feature means players only have to keep track of one household while the game does the rest. It's a valid alternative playing style, I think, even though it doesn't appeal to me personally.

I've never tried TS4, but all the advertising seemed to be geared to making your Sims look just so and having them party all the time. Anything remotely resembling 'work' has been taken out - no toddlers at all, and toddlers are my favourites! (I know they added a 'toddler' category eventually, but they weren't proper toddlers, just pre-schoolers).

Now, from the sounds of it, TS5 is downgrading yet again, to cater for people who want the 'excitement' of competitive play because they lack the focus to play a game that involves nurturing and building their Sim families. EA did the same thing with SimCity BuildIt, by turning what was originally a building game into a war game 'to make it more exciting'.

If I were in charge of a TS5 release, it would return largely to TS2 graphics and style, but with moodlets, and would include Seasons and University with the base game. The teen stage would be only 7 days, followed by 8 days of young adulthood, with lower wages and limited career advancement compared to adults in the same job. University would last 8 days and Sims would age normally on campus; hence a Sim could go to university at any point after leaving school, but if they went as adults, or went late in the YA stage, they'd miss out on some adult wage-earning time (although I suppose you could have this age-group arrangement from the beginning and add University later, if there was proper planning for what careers needed a degree and at what level). If the hood didn't have a university attached, Sims wouldn't know about it, so wouldn't roll wants to attend. In addition to the repetitive EPs, later EP/SPs would include farming, historical stuff, and an alien hood.

Unreal Engine? If they're planning to use this for the final version that'll be quite a drastic change from the custom engines the series has been using. Maybe they realized the TS4 engine is garbage or maybe they're trying to cut costs even more as one of the main reasons developers use UE4 is its affordable cost.

You can do this, to some extent. JellyMeduza and Mortia have released mods with animations from the newer Sims games. Nobody's done it with Sims 1, but those animations are so stiff and jerky that I'm not sure anyone would feel like they need to bother.

I would love a Sims 2 remaster, too. I have full respect for modders, but we just don't have the capability to produce some of the things EA can, because we don't have the tools. We can't get into the .exe and make changes to the hardcoded items. We still don't know how to make and edit effects. We don't have body sliders, proper animation tools, dynamic skies, decent lot imposters, castaway type beaches etc. All these things could take the game to the next level.

TS4 is mainly a hand-holding game, so it fits right in with the theory of catering for a shorter attention span. You can learn to play it in a few sittings, and there aren't a lot of surprises. The "aspirations" are not really aspirations, they are there to lead you through functions of the game. While CAS has some nice options, and the building tools have some very useful functions, you clearly see that's where the remaining budget went (I guess the furniture too - but they forgot to make a swatch for the wood and colors, so color matching can be a struggle). The rest of the game (the play functions) are not that much to brag about, with very repetitive functions and very few actual sim-to-sim animations ("play" without items is practically gone, as an example). They made a game out of what they had to work with, and they have patched it up to be a somewhat functional game, but it's not (by any means) the best out of the four.

I don't know about the partying, though. I've tried taking the sims out on dates, but they drink a bit (have to be prompted), try to dance a bit (have to be prompted), and then lose interest. Most of all they love to sit by the pool if there is one on the community lots (or jump into it). Honestly I prefer playing with toddlers (kids are boring again - can't skill properly, have to reach 10 in whatever kid skill they have and then they start over from scratch in some skills (but can't skill up in others). I hate the skilling in TS4 (and TS3, by the way). Working hard just so they get 2 adult skill points seems so harsh (they spend so much time with that chess board). At least in TS2 they get to keep their hard-earned skill points.

I think I'm addressing the silent boomer elephant in the room when I quote simply your first sentence. I find it very unfortunate that so many video games continuously have to cater towards the shorter attention span of younger generations to keep them interested (and I'm in my mid-20s acknowledging this). Catering to the cellphone generation has become the dominating factor in today's market.

That sort of game development is obvious in newer instalments in some popular video game series (for example: newer Pokémon games). That being said, its also clear that some series are still creating effective games that capture the attention span of this market (i.e. Legend of Zelda, Animal Crossing New Horizons, etc.). Other popular Sim/Sandbox games like PlanetCoaster, PlanetZoo, and Cities Skylines (what SimCity should have been), should definitely be referenced by EA developers.

I have seen snowflakes playing TS2. They were more whining than playing. All computer games in 90-ies and early 2000-ies were made for learning purposes, not like now just for spending time.

You must have a very broad view of what it means to be a learning game.

I can list more recreational games made in that time than educational games... there were a lot of artistically innovative games made in that time made for fun. Games have always been made for fun, even as far back as Pong's release.

I had several educational kids games in the mid-90s (I was a kid), but more "for fun" games later on. There were a lot of fun games from back then, and even some of the educational ones weren't too bad. The educational ones were clearly educational, though - and marketed toward kids (or parents wanting their kids to learn something, I guess).

My brother had a game where he put together a football (soccer) team, and then he basically sat staring at the screen and it sprouted out results in writing (or something like that). So a bare-bones FIFA without any player graphics and the exteme bare minimum of gameplay. I don't think the game was by EA, but I wouldn't have been surprised if it was, because if that game managed to sell anything at all, then there could be hope for anything. I don't know what it was called (the game was at least 15-20 years old, which could explain the questionable lack of graphics - but games like Sims 1 existed, so it's not like some level of computer graphics wasn't possible - I guess it was an "artistic choice" ) - as games go I'd rather play one of the educational ones...

I honestly think this is all just marketing spiel. They don't care about making the game the players want anywhere near as much as they care about making a game which will make them the most money. That is their primary motivation. They pretend it's the former, but it's not - you can see this with all of their products. I don't doubt there are individual people on the Sims teams who care about making the game awesome, but the company as a whole cares mostly about whether it's profitable, and that's a problem with anything when it gets too big.

Therefore any content is created not for maximum play value but for maximum effect - whether that is their online store/these new mini-EP "kits" I saw people making videos about/cutting content from the base game to release it later, or whether it's the way they promote the content and choose content to release. They know that certain topics are going to generate more sales, whether they provide long-term gameplay is irrelevant because it's all about the point of sale. Effectively what sells now is "something that causes youtubers and influencers to post about it". They can do little micro-content-releases several times a year. Back in TS2 days, they made a Celebrations EP and that had all of the seasonal holiday stuff in it - today they can release a mini Hallowe'en update in October and a Christmas one in November. And again the next year with more new stuff.

With TS2 the gaming industry as a whole wasn't there yet and in the earlier years of the game it was a smallish team at Maxis, until they got bought out anyway. And you can see an incredible difference if you compare/contrast the small details added in earlier EPs - Uni, OFB for example - with later EPs like FT and AL. Most of the outfits added for those EPs don't even have a separate mesh for elders for example, whereas the earlier ones did. The features in the earlier EPs are obviously thought through and playtested - OK, uni lasts 100 years compared to ordinary lifespans, but I remember when I first got it that didn't matter because the novelty of sending sims to uni was still fresh and there was so much of this brand new hood (the first ever subhood) to explore. Contrast this with FT's hobby mavens that creepily stamp all through your house to wake you up because you had a dream about food, or AL's hordes of weird clone social group townies, which make sense in Belladonna Cove and absolutely nowhere else. Nobody playtested it, at least not in an unstructured way.

^ Still less annoying than having 10+ alien sims spamming your garden every other evening, especially since any and all methods of shooing them away have no effect whatsoever... I'd rather take the hobby sims popping up and leaving, because they know they're not welcome. I doubt anyone does any proper playtesting of TS4, because there tend to be a lot of bugs both before and after each update. Unwelcome visitors are almost impossible to get rid of, and will usually loiter around the house for a while even after being shooed off in ten different ways, while visitors you want to stay will leave ten minutes after arriving if you don't keep them occupied . In TS2 visitors stay until you tell them good-bye (or it gets late) and they leave. Simple.

Or else you zap them right out of your house. Really simple.

That's what moveobjects is for. Though Unsavory Charlatan kept spawning back.

We aren't the market for Sims 5. Not any of us.

Look at what's being promised, you can see exactly which demographic is the market.

Maybe that demographic is more willing to spend money endlessly on little bits of upgrades, maybe there are more of them so capturing their market share is more profitable, maybe EA is just plain wrong about who they should be marketing to.

But we here on the Sims 2 forum are not the market for Sims 5, we weren't the market for 4, and they lost us/gave up on us at 3, when we decided we didn't like that style. We're basically an underserved market, but I suspect that a lot of us are Old School Gamers where we went to Gamestop and we bought the game and expansions and we went home and played it and we maybe didn't even have home internet, and we certainly didn't give the company a credit card and keep on buying fashion packs for ever and ever, and we think that kind of game sales is shady and disreputable, and then we influenced a bunch of youngsters who liked Sims 2 to join our worldview (Hi Kids These Days!). We aren't their market.

All of that is true-but if EA were looking for customers who have more discretionary money to spend on games, they'd be wise to look at us because the vast majority of us have far more money to waste on games than younger people. Especially during this pandemic. A lot of us are retired, or looking at it, and that sometimes brings more financial stability to our lives. We also have more time to spend on 'silly games' than younger people-and we're not all old duffers who can't figure out the functions of a phone or even a remote.

Some of us actually grew up with computers from their early infancy and know what quality is when it comes to gaming.

That's possibly also why they avoid marketing to us-because we also know garbage when we see it, and the younger ones don't, and they're far more susceptible to peer pressure to buy a game. That's why they gave up on us-we demand a little bit more effort into making a game that runs on something that isn't a potato or a phone, because they don't want to spend the money to do so.

I read today in the announcements that Will Wright (yes, the father of the game) has asked us to give him feedback on a new concept for a game he is interested in developing.

While I am very impressed by his appeal, it also ticks me off that he is going the same way EA is-by making it mobile. If all the games any company ever makes are going to be on mobile and not for computers, they're going to be going bankrupt shortly-because mobile might be hot, but developers milking money from them are short term fools.

Because I can guarantee you that Will Wright, just like any other producer, is going to make it a revenue stream. While I detest the whole concept, I also realize that they're only doing what makes money.

The problem arises when the customer also discovers they're being taken for a ride when it comes to quality, and they cease being loyal customers.

There will be a time when people get tired of being milked like the proverbial cow. It takes time, but I can think of one company that went down to flames because they over-extended themselves, and they were the most famous, profitable mobile company ever.

Zynga was the name. After FB decided to part ways, they survived but they're in a crowded field.

You will note that EA is among the titles cited in this article which lists out the premier mobile gaming companies.

https://builtin.com/media-gaming/mobile-game-companies