Is The Sims 4 Still a Fail in 2022?
Because three huge previous articles weren’t enough to convince you.
Hey everyone, it’s me, the wayward Celt. The Englisher. I am here to bring you more pulpy goodness from the grapefruit of giving that is the Sims 4. You wanted it, I give it.
I’m a bit mellower in this article than I was last time. Do you know why? Two reasons why. I’ve been playing less of this game, been watching less videos on it, been less annoyed in general by it.
I have still played, I’d say I’ve put in about 200 hours of play since last time out. That’s not a lot in the scheme of things. Not compared to the hardcore sims player.
My form
I’ve played every Sims Game. TS1, TS2, TS3 and TS4. Sims is a happy place for me as a franchise. I have had a lot of enjoyment out of this franchise. I’d like to call it chapters, volumes, sequels but they are just iterations, production line iterations.
I tend to put this time played metric here, so you know I’m not full of shit, not a journalist in journalista mode. That number equates to 81.65 days.
After my last article, a very long article, I barely played the Sims 4. Barely played it. I did play some, I did. But the biggest decision I made was not to buy any more packs of any kind. I was playing other games mostly, occasionally I might drift back to TS4 and build some buildings, try out some scenarios but otherwise my play had dropped off significantly. I had some red mist in my last article, anger. Angry that The Sims 4 wasn’t only not getting it, but going out of their way not to get it.
Previous Articles for you to Peruse;
You don’t have to read any of these, but if you want further context, then by all means take a look. I poured a fair bit of time into each and they are all rather lengthy reads.
The game at this time was 3 years old. There wasn’t a super amount of content but it seemed okay at this point.
The Sims 4 is a Fail. And Why EA Should Be Concerned | by Jackson Noel Davies | Medium
There was a slight upswing but some annoying new trends circa 2019. It had definitely come on a bit since 2017.
Is The Sims 4 Still A Fail In 2019? | by Jackson Noel Davies | Medium
2020 saw the height of my anger and irritation with this game.
Is The Sims 4 Still a Fail in 2020? | by Jackson Noel Davies | Medium
Quick Reference — Acronyms and Terms
I apologise for using a fair few of these but in order to keep track I’ve added this Quick reference guide. I’ll be referring to this throughout.
- TS1, The Sims, The original released game from way back.
- TS2, The Sims 2, many player’s all time favourite.
- TS3, The Sims 3, the open world Sims and what I class as the zenith in many aspects.
- TS4, The Sims 4, our current version. I would say has undoubtedly the best create-a-sim tool to date, despite missing create-a-style.
- Studio — AKA The Sims Studio. The current programming and artwork developer that creates content for The Sims franchise. Was created as a function for EA from the remnants of Maxis and now produces the console and mobile app on top of The Sims 4 expansions. Came into effect in The Sims 3. Sims 3 being their first title in the new configuration. Consider them an entirely EA owned development company. They wear the business suit and are stained by the foul EA ichor.
- Sims Camp — A bit like Space Camp but a shadow of that movie. This is where the Proletariat go to sample and be fed Sims Crap. They normally get a look at some new content coming up, and get to film some exclusive vids as part of the Game Changer programme. During the beer bug, aye Corona, this didn’t happen. Instead it was performed remote.
- Game Changer/Creator Network— The Game Changer programme is something that runs out across the EA games domain, not specific to The Sims but to many EA franchises. You can consider it an affiliation programme where EA picks a subsection of hipster youth that are on the pulse, who have the weight of subscribers and target demographic viewers, and shills through them by granting exclusive access to otherwise embargoed content. Pre recorded footage is withheld and can be published after a set time window, with some accordance to placing the Game Changers sponsorship by EA in the video. You’ll know its an access video when you see a watermark floating around the screen. Whilst they try to look fair, the usual suspects always get the cream. I call those the “Sherbet Dealers”, they deal much by measure of sherbet. Sherbet is a powdered sugar that when ingested in sufficient quantity will make you feel very ill. In small amounts it is quite pleasant. You soon realise after a gorge session, wait a minute, this stuff is bad for me! Sherbet is often the choice treat of children. That’s the target demographic. Note that they have moved away from Game Changer to Creator Network in 2022. A shill is a shill. Put a funny hat on it, and give it a clown nose, it’s still a shill.
- Maxis — A now defunct marque of a once beloved developer. Used simply as a banner to trick people into thinking that this game was made with love. Ah, sweet memory. See Sims Studio above.
- EA — Electronic Arts, Distributor of the Sims Franchise and owner of The Sims Studio, Maxis, Origin and all related trademarks, reserved rights and copyrights.
- Origin — The platform on which EA games are provided that require online elements to play. Also the store where you buy the expansions from. This platform provides the updates to the game in the form of patches. Origin is used both on PC & MAC. For console players updates are distributed through by the console platform (Sony, Microsoft), same is also true on the mobile app and the operating system (e.g. Apple, Android/Google, Microsoft, etc.)
Sherbet Dealers
Before I get into this proper, you need a reminder if you haven’t read that last article. You need to know what a sherbet dealer is. A sherbet dealer is a person who deals sherbet (a very sugary sweet treat) to children. I’m not talking cocaine or anything illicit, I’m just talking sweets or as you Canadians and Americans like to call it; Candy. Sweets or Candy, are okay as part of a balanced diet, as long as they don’t become the norm, you can eat a non regular treat and enjoy it. When they become your daily staple, there is a problem, it’s not good for you, not good for your health. A child who indulges in sherbet loses all their teeth eventually. But sherbet dealers is a metaphor. The sherbet in this context is the buzz you get from a new expansion, new options, new gameplay. But what EA actually delivers beyond that peak through the window presented by the likes of a signed up sherbet dealer, is found wanting. It is found wanting increasingly more. Most Sims 4 players are like addicts, they come back for more expansions. But it seems that EA play on this, get rich on this, milk this. We had our first taste of this in The Sims 3 with the points store. You could buy tokens that could be exchanged for clothing, worlds and more. People liked and disliked it, it was too far for many. It received some major negativity and EA decided not to go with this form of cash grab in the Sims 4. Instead they just broke former expansions down into ever smaller constituent packs in order to leech ever more money out of us (if we let them). So these sherbet dealers are by virtue of association, partnership, network, complicit in this fleecing.
I wanted to talk slightly wider at EA for just a moment. Games as a service has been a thing with EA for a good long while now. They did it mostly in their sports games, but wanted that platform in every new game. They want it online, they want you to have to come to a server to log your time. They want you to purchase add ons and bolt ons. The Sims has managed to hold out on many icky practices. No loot boxes, very little by way of pay to win, its not that kind of game. The kind of gameplay expansion you get with the DLC of TS4 is mostly cosmetic. There is some gameplay but it is sparse to say the least.
I talked about these individuals before. Now some people can be impartial and be EA game changers but in the main many will be partisan. They are partisan because kissing the ring gets them the exclusive. Some do pick significant criticism but EA and the company formerly known as Maxis do what they always do which is ignore it until the fire potentially is about to burn the building down.
How do I feel about the Sherbet Dealers? Well, the thing is, sherbet dealers will always be there. They don’t magically disappear. If the current brand weren’t there, tons of new ones would spring up in their place. EA deals out the honey, the bears come sniffing. It is what it is. I think perhaps the one accolade I could lay on EA’s shoulders is that they come in for criticism whilst other big distributors and publishers have zero tolerance. The only bad thing is that they don’t take that criticism to heart, they don’t make any action on it that is of top quality and goes deep enough. I will talk about this a bit more later on.
Reader: Jackson, buddy, give me an example of a sherbet dealer.
Jackson: Okay. James Turner formerly The Sims Supply
Now, don’t get me wrong, I actually like James Turner. He is a chill Australian with bags of charm, a cheerful demeanour and a twisted sense of humour. I’ve enjoyed his playthroughs, his builds and the exploration into the gameplay side that I enjoy. He’s given me ideas in my games and that has enriched my time spent in the Sims 4, so I can’t dislike him on that front.
He is a Sherbet dealer. He deals that sherbet. He is interwoven into the soul of the sims 4. He has designed a part of it now (in the world of the werewolves pack). His partner Deligracy (who is a Sherbet dealer in her own right) completes his membership to the cadre of sherbet dealing. As much as he might protest it, he’s up in EA’s business as a sherbet dealer and he makes suitable bank on that.
Something you’ll always notice when you see the sherbet dealer in operation, is that they receive a preview build of an expansion, which is a cut down functioning version of the pack built for the specific purpose of demonstration. It actually downloads as a separate game to The Sims 4 and is a standalone. It incorporates all the necessary function from Base Game Sims 4 and all of the features of the expansion. You should never consider it a complete view of the expansion pack, as it does not take into account any cross expansion compatibility (if there is any to be had). If you enjoy your mods and CC (custom content) you may have a wildly different experience. The chance of some major element of the new pack being in someway broken is high.
Remember when your mother or father said…
If you tidy it up as you go along it won’t ever be a very big job?
Did your parent or guardian ever say that to you? Did a boss or supervisor, or simply a old hand tell you that at work?
Well it’s kind of true for The Sims 4.
All this nice mechanics that were introduced in various packs should have been topped up as they went along. It’s called integration. It doesn’t add much code but if you do it right, it makes the whole experience better. It widens and broadens the game.
Let’s talk about Whims. They’ve been replaced entirely in a patch during 2022. They’ve been replaced with a modified system that is trying to look back towards the past of the franchise. A member berry if you’d like. Wants and fears. Now Whims was developed up until about the Seasons expansion pack then for reasons the studio stopped developing the whims system. They stopped adding unique whims for each new expansion and buried away whims, you could toggle it on if you wanted, but it was hidden away in the settings. People realised that they could toggle the whims on and off and many toggled them back on, because they give you some free opportunities for reward points with relatively simple hoop jumping. As ever, this cobbled new Wants and Fears system was rather an abortion. It only included a smattering of whims from the base game, and would include those from high school and that would be it.
There are many mechanics that only pushed as far as their pack, their world but there were others that went further.
Seasons still effects packs beyond itself. With seasons even in biomes where you don’t get snow, you get chill weather. Even if you don’t get leaves shedding from trees you get stormy weather. Weather effects were brought forwards.
Pollution from Eco Living, was brought to the parks but could have done with being uniformly rolled out to some of the base game worlds at the very least. It would be good to see junk piling up, but it didn’t happen. Too big a scope perhaps, but they could have incrementally rolled it out going forwards.
Performance
It has become clear that there is some bloat, or at least some poor implementation of memory saving in the sims 4.
I recommend this article by the way. These are fab tortoises.
Game Lag
This is experienced most commonly when you transition to either the CAS (create-a-sim) or go to Build/Buy mode and start building. It something to do with an over-abundance of poorly categorised bits and pieces. When you transition back to live mode the screen is stuttering. You can press escape at times and this sometimes resets the game, but it gets annoying quickly if you are drifting in and out of these various modes during a short session.
The team need to look at this. They need to stop making new stuff, and fix this rather urgently. The Sims 3 had the exact same problem but it was 10x worse.
Sim Lag
The sims often take a bit of time to decide on what they are doing next. They are a bit like a toaster that can chain toast bread. Each sim has 6 tasks they can stack. Often you’ll find that the sim lag is so bad, the time it takes to get something done or decided to do it, that you’ve lost that sim in the interaction. There is just a whole bunch of stuff they won’t do, or they’ll get locked out or trapped in a thought pattern and need to be reset. It’s interesting to note that the Sims Studio has added the Shift click option to allow debugging without the console commands now, as if to say, they know it can break frequently and want you to have a get out. In the past you had to enable the cheat mode first to allow the shift click menus.
Unusual interrupts
I’ve noticed more that you might be interrupted in what you are doing on the way to it. I’ve noticed sending my sims jogging may be cancelled out by something along the way. It’s like sending the dog from Up out on an important mission and they get distracted by a “Squirrel” the moment they walk out of the front door. It’s annoying.
What I haven’t bought
This section was going to be a review of all of the content I had bought. But guess what. I hadn’t bought any since my last article. Not a thing. Not one expansion of any flavour. Not even when the summer sale was in full swing. Nothing. It was 2020 when I last wrote, I have not bought a thing since.
Expansion Packs:
- Cottage Living
- Snowy Escape
- High School Years (just released)
Game Packs:
- Dream Home Decorator
- My Wedding Stories
- Werewolves
- Nifty Knitting
- Paranormal
Stuff Packs:
Apparently they are not making these anymore. I currently have all of them. As explained in my last huge article, I went mad and purchased them all. Do I like them all, mostly. Some are better than others, some get far more mileage than others. You might be surprised to know that the somewhat maligned Moschino pack is one of my more used stuff packs.
Kits:
- Throwback Fit
- Moonlight Chic
- Modern Menswear
- Little Campers
- Industrial Loft
- Incheon Arrivals
- Fashion Street
- Décor to the max (If you want that sexy e with the accent press alt +130 on your number keypad to get é. if you struggled with that, go to the character map by typing in a search. You can then copy and paste. You learnt something today. I’m the kind of teacher you need, that dude without the Marxist pyjamas and bed spread.)
- Courtyard Oasis
- Country Kitchen
- Carnival Streetwear
- Bust the Dust (this kind of kit used to have its own category, no more)
- Blooming Roots
General Issues
Yeah, there are some general issues. Have you noticed how long the patch notes are becoming but it’s still too little. Those patch logs are long because stuff is broken in all of the packs. It’s no wonder they can’t press on to some big fixes. It’s what you get when you get contingent coders trying to hem their half hearted work into the ever increasing amount of “Spaghetti Code”.
Coin Rush
It’s the vicious cycle of making coin. It’s not a cool app game on a mobile, but if EA could sell it that way, they surely would.
The coin rush never ended. It continues. Just because the pandemic is over doesn’t mean that EA wouldn’t return to suit. They want your coin.
I think what they fail to realise is, that if this game had more polish, more attention to detail and more love lavished on it, it would sell even better. I don’t think EA realise how many noses they have pushed out of joint over time. How many loyal simmers have come to the end of the road with the game, parked it up.
It has been apparent from TS1 that every time an expansion pack comes out for the game, you play it for a while to get the juice out of that new expansion orange then your interest fades.
I noticed with the release schedule once again that Werewolves got almost completely overshadowed by High School Years because of that heavy drive for summer sales.
Is that smart? No. It’s predictable. It’s become EA’s norm. Maxis is a MINO. Maxis in name only. The Sims Studio is EA approved ring kisser Maxis. You know it. Does it make sense to spread out the release of packs throughout the year so as to get the most out of your player base? Yes. So why launch two packs almost side by side? Because of the summer. Because you prime with the first, and wow with the second. You get the wallet ready for purchase, you grease it with the first purchase so that the levers open for the second. It’s just boring capitalism. Werewolves got done dirty. It’s not the first pack where that has happened.
My Enjoyment
I think since I haven’t picked up so much of the new stuff and have embraced just enjoying the elements of the game that I like, I’ve had a happier time with the Sims 4 than those composed on getting angry about the stuff that is half-arsed, under-cooked, or missing. I have been playing other games a lot more, some quite different games. I’ve been playing Crusader Kings 3, Kenshi, Rimworld, Hardspace Shipbreaker and many more.
I think something that you’ll grasp as a sims player is buyer’s remorse at certain points. That you’ve sunk quite a bit of coin into your purchases and you feel honour bound to recoup your investment. There is something to that notion.
Some Changes are Nice
So, I’m not here really to beat up on Maxis (Sims Studio EA) because besides the raft of issues this game has, there is a game in here that is worth playing. There are some good elements that are placed into the system, it’s normally new mechanics which have more success. It’s when they go tinkering with things where it all turns rather pear shaped.
So, Maxis did something with the Goth family. They got rid of the old Bella and Cassandra and replaced them with the darker skinned variants that they should have been. I like that change, even though I liked the lighter skinned variant of Bella just as much. I think that Alexander, Cassandra and Bella are just right in the new variant. I didn’t think Mortimer changed all that much until I noticed he had received a bit of a touch up in the face.
They added options for pronouns. Now, you might be on the fence, you might hate pronouns. But for my purposes it was useful. As you may or may not know, you can create transgender or non-binary sims in the game now. There are options to do so. It’s nice to have the pronouns that go with the gender that you look like. I often find it unpleasant when a trans person who is clearly feminine is called Sir. It feels disrespectful. You might as well just call them penis for the bluntness of it. Whilst I am not a big fan of identity politics or general wokism, there could do with some harmonisation. A bit of chill. Just a little and I find this inclusion very subtle. You don’t have to opt in at all if you don’t want. It’s a discrete function that you can take advantage of if you want to. Choice.
I came up with the character below on the fly for this article, it’s that easy.
There’s now also an opt-in sexual preference system, so if you are demisexual or want to depict a sim as one, there is a chance you can do this. All sims, from the very beginning of The Sims 4 (in 2014) have been essentially bisexual. They will go either way. Now you can be a bit more selective in that process if you choose.
The sad thing is, and I’ve been calling for this forever. I still can’t believe it has not been implemented, but, your spouse doesn’t take your Surname. Why? Why? Why? It bugs me that they can make all this extra superfluous feature work, and yet they can’t make fairly important base features function. I gnarl my teeth at this every time I have to go into CAS after getting married with two sims, just to change their surname. It’s infuriating! It’s like putting a door on a house with no door handle. You can get in if you use a coat hanger to pull the handle from the other side but it is not functioning as a door should. It’s a bit shit.
The Question of Cost
I wanted to mention something, and you might hate the idea of it, but due to how EA are and how they will always be, I started buying codes to the expansions through another service to save myself some serious coin. I don’t always if the deals are keen enough during a sale, but it’s always best to shop around. Don’t worry, I haven’t been sponsored, this isn’t a sponsored article. You are within your rights to dislike this, and to in part dislike me for this but I’ve been doing it ever more frequently because I feel some things are just hideously over priced, and games and their expansions have headed that way.
For me £34.99 for a full expansion is insane.
For me £17.99 for a game pack is unpleasant.
For me £4.99 for a kit is a shooting offence.
But you may not live in the realm of Britbucks, Queenqoin, No. You’ll be paying your Dollar, Escudo, Shekel, Gold Pressed Latinum, Doubloon. So those numbers may mean nothing to you. Well, it is a lot. Let’s just put it that way. You are paying for a full priced game with each EP, but you are not getting a full priced game’s worth of content in your game, so you should be paying the right price, and this is one way to level that cost.
I have bought codes for Microsoft Office so that I don’t have to run a subscription on 365. I like the office suite a lot. I have used alternatives, but I much prefer Microsoft’s suite but I don’t want to pay full price for the key, and it seems increasingly clear that they want to nickel and dime the shit out of you and make sure that you don’t have a life long ownership of your software licence. I don’t support that and it’s dumb. You are going to get more pirate copies if you demand that. I should be able to buy a licence for my copy of Office and not have to pay again.
So for games, if a service offers a way to redeem a code for an unlock of the expansion, I’m going to do it. There’s nothing nicer after buying something you like than having bought it for a bargain. It’s a double hit of joy.
Who do I get the codes from?
G2A. You may growl, snarl or throw your half full dijon mustard jar at the screen (smearing it on your bits weren’t you, you deviant!).
G2A are a company that have some err of controversy. It’s not so much G2A as the people who sell the redeemable codes on their platform. G2A are just a marketplace, they allow the sale of game codes and other bits and bobs through their platform, and they are about the only one that doesn’t have trouble with my debit card. I did use CDKeys for a while but my bank would regularly block the transaction after a time. The same was true with Green Man Gaming, same problem. G2A, no problem.
So where does the nub of the issue come from? Well, it’s organised crime unfortunately. People stealing credit cards. Buying a mass stack of game codes then laundering the money through such sites as G2A, CDKeys and the like. There is loss in the process but they can turn over at least 80% of what they can pilfer. When your credit card gets stolen, it is possible that the thief may launder money from it this way, there are a cornucopia of ways, but this is a pretty quick one. The platforms cracked down on it a lot, got some shady players kicked, but you have to be careful. Whilst I’ve never had this issue, it is possible that if there has been a large issue of dodgy keys sold, you could lose access to your game. And that sucks, but even if you had to buy the key again, it would still be cheaper than buying it full price from EA. Your coins will feed the likes of Andrew Wilson and his big wig chums, the faceless shareholders. If you want to feel proud about adding to their Bollinger fund, by all means play by the rules. But if you want to save a bit of coin, go elsewhere for that code. Some of you may have purchased the sims through steam. You can get steam gift cards from G2A at a saving, so if you felt bad about not paying the full amount for some bizarre reason, you can at least save something and do the right thing. It’s up to you. No judgement here.
Don’t bother getting any of the brand new stuff there. But if it has a bit of age like say the Cottage Living you could get it at a steal. So, let’s look at an example; Cottage Living.
EA price = £34.99 not in a sale or bundle.
G2A price =
£16.93 is super reasonable.
You could pay a small subscription with G2A if you wanted to, and get that for £15.24. Even better still. Useful if you buy games a lot and are willing to be a little patient on when you buy them. That means having some impulse control which is difficult for some. But if you can wait just a little, you can bag yourself a bargain. That last part is another problem.
Early Adopters
Unfortunately as The Sims 4 becomes less and less quality controlled as it moves along in terms of age and depth (which is still super shallow) those who buy this on pre-order or buy it on the day, are almost becoming beta testers at this point.
Now, you could try and tear lumps out of the sherbet dealers who get their release/demonstrator copies early, but they don’t get a full cut of the game. You can’t blame some of the flaws on them not being observant enough to lodge a complaint. They aren’t getting the full experience, and you watching it are not getting the full experience of what it is and what it will do with all the packs, mods and CC stacked on top.
I would strongly recommend that you don’t buy this stuff too early now. That you give every expansion a few months to bed in and be debugged slightly first (because slightly is all you’ll get). The QA team and the bug bashers are glacial in their “through the pipe” repairs. They are about as bad as the water company that I have contacted twice for my leaking meter this summer.
I think in general you shouldn’t be an early adopter. In a different example, a non EA one for a change, I am very unhappy with the Early Access version of Baldur’s Gate 3. It has been a disappointment which was unfortunate because I really loved some of Larian’s previous games. I don’t like that I paid such a price in 2020 to essentially be a beta tester and I will not be doing that again. I don’t care about the Pandemic excuse, it simply wasn’t good enough. In the current version 8 that I had to download an insane patch for, the game likes to crash with ridiculous frequency. I was so annoyed after the last time (where I had beaten the harpies without a single party member being downed) I said fuck you, to the game and haven’t played it since. My gnome cleric is wondering why I didn’t return to lead her to finding a cure for the Illythid tadpole. Sorry hon, I can’t be doing with the stupid crashes. It is as welcome as the Githyanki tiny nostrils. They just look weird okay though I would still bang Lae’zel, her petulance gives me the horn. But that’s another story. I digress.
As a side note, I did return. I murdered everyone at the gate and killed all three of the ogres. There was a small patch that fixed all of the crashes I was experiencing, didn’t take Larian long to fix all that either, and they did it without any drama like Maxis.
I feel increasingly that developers and studios are throwing out undercooked games because it’s the norm, because we as consumers will allow it and stump up our chump change to do it over and over again. I’m from a different era of gaming, I’m 41 years old as of writing. I came from a time where it was pretty much done out of the gate, and it was only hardware and software incompatibilities that really caused the problem. The games were solid and had to be, as there wasn’t the ability to go and download updates so much especially before internet had any speed, patches didn’t become a thing until later. They weren’t built around expansions, and constant updates. They were launched in their final build and that would be it most of the time. Those newer gamers don’t know what it was to have to create a ramdisk or a special autoexec.bat with some configuration changes, in order to get a game to run. The very first SimCity made by Maxis needed some jiggery pokery at times to run on the old form of computers back in the day. I remember having to tweak the graphics settings so that it would run in SVGA. I remember playing SimCity on my Compaq Presario with a floppy disk drive. Those times were different. You have many things better now, and many things worse. Truly ground breaking and new games are less common, it’s more derivatives of games from the past. The fact that The Sims is on its 4th generation is something. Many of us are hoping for a better 5th generation but not holding our breath.
I would say, don’t be so eager to accept mediocre.
Fads and Trends
Apologies but I might slip into a little sidetrack in here, but just go with it. You can always skip it if you want. That said, you might notice some things in the sims franchise that don’t date well.
Bubble Tea, Pearl Milk Tea, Bubble Milk Tea, Tapioca Milk Tea, Boba Tea, Boba, it is all the same thing. I have never had this shit and probably won’t mostly because I have trouble with tea these days. I don’t know why, but some time back I started having an intolerance to tea and I avoid thus. I had a period where, and I realise I might sound like a girl, I had some major bladder issues. Tea is a form of diuretic which acts to lower the amount of liquid you have in the body, and it makes you unwell. Diuretics make you piss until your piss turns dark amber, and they make you unwell the more you piss out. I was very ill for about a fortnight. I discovered that not having tea solved these bladder issues.
For a British person that may sound like sacrilege, but true story, tea messes up my bladder function, coffee doesn’t so much. I drank tea religiously, I drank it like a fish, I drank it up to the point that my bladder said, Jackson, fucking stop! It often felt like I was pissing razor blades, or that someone with wolverine like claws had scratched me on the inside then pulled tight, everything in there was swollen. So no, I haven’t had bubble tea. It looks pretty nice, apparently the Taiwanese invented this in the early 1980s, which is funnily enough when I was born. It’s tea with balls at the bottom and the gauche drink it, because they are trés gauche. The plastics, the idiots of Hollywood, the trendy bastards, the in with the in crowds, the sheep. If you like tapioca balls at the bottom of your tea, you deserve to be parted from your coin, you juicy whale. Andrew Wilson is rubbing his Australian Satan hands together at the thought, he is the CEO of EA after all. I jest of course. Drinking a gauche tea every so often as a treat is entirely permitted but you remember I said about making things a staple, and where that gets you?
When the sims adopts trends they date so quickly. It’s eye rolling. Its always so clear who they are trying to tempt and cajole. The idiot young. The trendy, those who get noticed. Sounds funny coming from an Elder Millennial like me if we are going to attribute name calling to my generational origins. Maxis knows the game, they keep on shifting their customer base ever younger because they piss off their existing customer base with their bullshit, their EA corporate bullshit.
Do you remember Pulled Pork? At one point, one year, it was fucking everywhere.
Do you remember Salted Caramel? At one point, one year, it was fucking everywhere. Now to be fair, I love salted Caramel, I do. But it was so everywhere that it was obnoxious. If I was going to pick one chocolate bar above all others that is salted caramel I would have to pick a Galaxy Salted Caramel. In America I believe that Galaxy is branded as Dove which is confusing as fuck to us Britishstanis, because soap is branded as Dove and we don’t like eating bars of soap. You Americans might. You are weird as fuck over that side of the pond, I know, I’ve been many times.
Do you remember Tab Clear? No, you probably don’t, you are probably not old enough. I remember it well, I fucking loved it. I was around in the 90s for the short period it was on sale, yeah, I’m that old. It was gorgeous but they stopped selling it. It was a white elephant. It had been created to compete against Crystal Pepsi but Pepsi stopped making that. It was an odd sell but I reckon if it had hung on, it would have done okay and still be here. Apparently they stopped selling Tab in December 2020 in the US due to low sales. But there was clearly too many diet cola’s in Coca Cola’s line up. A shame for those who enjoyed it but a casualty of entropy.
Do you remember the Batuu game pack? They fly now?
What is my point? The Sims 4 is getting old. It’s showing its age. We need a Sims 5. You can try and redress it as much as you like, but it was never fit for purpose out of the gate. It was a rehashed-multiplayer-online-all-the-time “game as a service” game that was quickly retooled to appease long time fans of the franchise. It was a scrambled, rushed project that landed poorly and took a long time to get moving. It has never truly reached the levels of gameplay that I feel its predecessors reached in spades. It is a shallow, vapid, ditzy, cash grab sequel.
They (EA/Maxis/Sims Studio) are getting worried, I sense it, they are worried about Paralives. Do you know how I know they know it? Do you want to get into the parallax of that decision. The many faceted mirrors that cascade into the ether? What the fuck are you writing Jackson, have you lost your grip on reality? I’m fine thanks. I know what I mean. Two words;
CURVED WALLS
They don’t work right but they are there. You see, the sims makers have been watching the Paralives videos like the rest of us. And they are shitting pants in corporate like I might after some lactose rich dairy latte (which in my view is more milk than coffee). They’ve woken up to the terror of it already. They are worried it will be another situation of City Skylines all over again. Because if you weren’t aware, SimCity as a franchise was the defacto City simulation game for the longest time. I played the first four iterations of Sim City and loved them all. I think my favourite was Sim City 3 in some ways, but I loved the kind of cities you could build in Sim City 4. Sim City 5 or simply Sim City as it was called, was an always online disaster. We lost one of the Maxis old and steady hands thanks to that disaster; Lucy Bradshaw. They didn’t simply shoot themselves in the foot, they shot off their foot and tried to pretend they weren’t bleeding to death by putting on a brave face. Whether you like City Skylines or not, it is now the defacto, the market leader. And The Sims Studio may be worried that if Paralives does super well, The Sims could be another casualty. It’s not like EA handles their developers all that well. So many studios have been ended by EA under their stewardship, their corporate demands on sales and targets damage the soul of the studio. I think we could all see that despite the sims 3 being good, it had lost the fun that the first two sims games had. The madcap. The Sims 4 went even further in losing that soul.
Boba tea feels like, and stands for the vanity of the franchise and its direction. That’s where we are at. Boba tea was the feature we needed over such fun mechanics as Nectarology that we had in World Adventure in The Sims 3. Can you remember your sim falling over in the tub of grapes while treading them down? I can. But no, we get Boba tea. We get body hair. Women can have hairy tits. Lovely…
If Maxis started prioritising gameplay over vanity and repugnant inconsequential details. We might be somewhere.
I had a dream last night…
I had a day dream where I was a person employed by EA to shake things up. I went in there and for a whole year, I performed the Sean Murray (creator of No Man’s Sky) of adjustment. I made some changes. I went through the base game, I made some changes. I started going through each and every pack, oldest to newest, and tried to integrate ever more. I started with Outdoor retreat and gave it a load of new features that made it feel more worth while as a resort location. I added a scout jamboree mechanic into it and whole host of other things. I scanned through hundreds of mods, I actually subscribed to some pay for modders and I downloaded their code, and I marked all those modders who did a great job of repairing or giving extra function to the game. I made sure they got a tidy sum then went through and tried to adopt or adjust the game in every way possible from those modders and their mods. Where their code was inefficient or didn’t quite align, I would have my small hit squad adjust it to suit.
I’d have a decent art team at my beckon call who I could call in to provide some more artwork for the game and we would set to work improving. Everything was on the table, every aspect. We’d do a deep dive of all of the feedback and try to knock off as many elements on that wish list as we could whilst maintaining the efficiency of the game. We’d get that lag gone, we’d get that function running. For all those mechanics that really worked well in a particular expansion, we’d work our best to try and farm them out to other expansions and when new ones came out, we’d assess if there was anything that we could migrate over at the time. We would have a very specific test script that would stress test a new expansion when weighed down by all of the other expansions. We had a veto on expansions, we would be able to tell the expansion team that they were fucking it up ahead of time and we’d have carte blanche to get it delayed to put it right. It was glorious, it was a thing of beauty. My department got a bonus and Andrew Wilson sent me two very fine escorts one evening to celebrate stacking another 500 million dollars on the pile. Yeah, I’d earned it, and that 50 million bonus. I would shag the shit out of Darlene and Tiffany that evening. I dared to dream big instead of being a soy bastard who said yes to the design committee at every stage, even if it was the dumbest shit I’d ever seen. My team got it done. You know what that team was called? Quality assurance and development.
That might seem like a joke, an extreme fantasy, but what the fuck are they doing exactly?
Is their first response “it’s hard.”
If it is, I’d fire all of them on the spot.
Do you know, how much insane dollar the sims makes now and they still claim poverty? It’s obscene. It’s one of EA’s largest marques, one of its biggest franchises. It prints money. For them to be this lazy boggles my mind. They could afford two extra development teams easily but they run super lean because dollar. That’s the biggest problem. In order to get quality you need to pay for it. You need permanent coders who attribute good code practices from element to element on a regular basis.
I wanted to share this video from Simyin. She went into great detail with this and I thought it was a nice showcase here for those who are interested. She is not wrong in any area.
Simyin raises a point about her game not starting. That used to be far more common in the Sims 3. I remember it well. The patching in the Sims 3 was terrible. I’m sure that they will get to this High School Years issue quickly but every time something like this happens, it just damages trust all the more. It burns you a little that you can’t play a game you’ve spent so much money on. It’s like having a Rolls Royce in the drive way but it is missing the steering wheel. It looks great but has zero function.
What I played with that still feels rough
University is not a good pack
The process of getting degree is in many ways a time sink. If you want to get a perfect A+ GPA, you have to take each class 1 term at a time to insure that you don’t balls it up. The quickest approach to getting a degree done is to take the maximum 4 classes a term, but you will struggle to get a decent grade that way. I also hate the singular Studying for a Final Exam. It gives you no feedback as to how your studying is going. You can of course ask the tutor, but even that doesn’t feel like a good enough feedback loop. I had ideas for how I might re-design university slightly. With the final exams, you have to put together some kind of mind-map object, a study guide of sorts. You’d have to study the book on the subject for X time then update your study guide. It could be an A3 sized piece of paper with a mind map in the middle and like with the presentation board, you can refine it until you get to a point where you can’t refine it any further. At least then you’d have some tacit understanding that you are going to pass that exam and that you’ve done enough to get it done.
University sucks because it saps the fun out of the university experience. The little events that they generated aren’t fun. There was so many things that they could do. There are no Sororities or Fraternities, there’s not even any room for that on the campus. I realise that they made this version more like a European style university which I don’t mind but I kind of liked the Greek houses even though I’m a filthy Brit. I kind of miss them from the past 3 versions of the sims. That was the fun part for me. The residential halls are too restrictive. They brought bikes into the series but didn’t make suitable room for them in Foxbury. Riding a bike around is great in Britechester but crap in Foxbury as a result.
The fact that doing a degree from home is so much easier disrupts the purpose of Britechester.
It just was rather uninspiring.
Seasons needs some reworks, better integration and some TLC
There is an issue that pervades everything. In the cold months, your sims will be complaining about the cold (and the inverse during the summer). So every location needs a thermostat. And the only way currently to go about that is to manually add them everywhere. You have to do that whenever you generate a new game with a fresh world. There’s no feature where they are automatically added to the game. It’s annoying. There’s also an annoying interaction where the sim will react to a pleasant temperature and just stop dead when they walk through the front door. This animation is both annoying and unnecessary.
Get together and its many festivals interact poorly with seasons. I think where you have a blizzard, such festivals should be cancelled because seeing people trying to get around in San Myshuno in a blizzard for the Spice Festival and more festivals like it, is just ridiculous. I might be funny the first time but it just feels rather pathetic.
Some of the older packs don’t harmonise all that great with the new stuff.
Questionable and Paywall MODS and CC
Oh dear. The Mods Scene has taken a knock.
Not that kind of Mod. If you are too much of a Generation Z you won’t get it, If you are American, you most likely won’t get it. There was a scene in the UK a long while back. Particularly where congregations of youths headed to Brighton on the South Coast of England where you would get the Mods (pictured on the left who typically wore canvas shoes and drove scooters that were heavily modified with lights) and the Rockers who traditional drove much beefier motor bikes and wore leather jackets. They’d be in competition and would often butt heads for the lols. Now, they just enjoyed a bit of horse play (like kicking each other’s bikes over whilst driving them) and many from both sides ended up being life long friends. They had a bit of a laugh on their days out on the weekend and as you can see in this photo, they were having a fun old time of things.
But this photo is a good example of something I’ve included in this article for illustration purposes but which I have no claim to. Medium determines that as a writer, you have rights to everything you put up, therefore if you don’t its a slam dunk for them to dole out justice however they determine, whether it be taking the image down or someway restricting the content until you’ve removed it yourself. They have a right to this as it is their platform, and they can be challenged by the rights owner at any time. This particular image I have flipped horizontally and coloured in order to avoid a image match, but if some digs hard enough it could cause me trouble. I used to own a website where I had put up an image being critical of a certain dodgy SEO data miner that was crawling my website a little too frequently. This company weren’t too happy with this, and I had to remove the image because they had bullied me into it, it is about the only time I’ve ever been subject to anything strange and I hope it is the last. But you have to mindful about copyright and intellectual property rights. There’s this talk of fair use, but its not as easy to defend as you might think.
At any rate, I went to Brighton when I was younger and they had a Mods and Rocker event happening with a younger crowd of fresh converts. I was wearing a leather jacket at the time and got some rare street cred. That was a fun day out. The only shit thing was that I was on a date with a Vegetarian at the time, and my jacket was very much genuine leather. She took me into one of the common vegetarian burger bars and I felt very uncomfortable in there as people shot me daggers for the cowhide slipped over my shoulders. They were fine, but it was awkward and I don’t think that chick had thought it through.
But this topic, as a whole, isn’t a fun one for some people who have for a long time relied on a secondary grey market of content that goes outside the purview of the developers. Now, modding has been a thing for the Sims for the longest time, from the inception. If anything Modding made the Sims in my opinion.
CC has become somewhat of a cottage industry but I didn’t realise how far it went. I’m not a big one for CC myself. CC of course is Custom Content or pretty meshes and skins that The Sims team didn’t make and which go in your mod folder. I didn’t realise how big the grey market in paywall content had got, but clearly it was becoming an issue. Some mods had also been put behind similar paywalls, permanent ones at that. Some of these costs were becoming comparable to legitimate content. There was some CC weighing in at $40, which is expansion money in relative terms. But for a number of reasons, Maxis put their foot down and a new policy was initiated. And I’ll be going into detail of this with thanks to Pixelade’s coverage.
The recent lit firework in the firework factory
If followed that big orange sign. I’m glad I took a screenshot when I did as it is gone now.
There has been some development as far as mods go. Some might call this stygian, some might call this timely intervention. I leave it up to you to decide on that. At current time of writing, I only run 2 mods. One of these mods allows teen to adult relations, something that is very much frowned on, and potentially may be nixed by EA due to the controversy that such a mod illicits.
Q: What actually triggered all this?
A: A very visible media presence of the fact that incest was a thing for the briefest time.
This also got picked up by quite a few online sites with big circulation and some other places EA really didn’t want this bad press showing up.
This created this bizarre witch hunt. I’m not even convinced it was mods that caused this. This was EA/Sims Studio poor coding that caused this. Someone had a mild stroke on the keyboard and fucked up tons of code. They went to sleep on the keyboard and forgot to put the dumb shit guard on (because I reckon there is a lot of sleeping in the studio on the job).
They decided to have a think on acceptable mods practice. But I think there is more to it than that. We’ll try and peel back the covers on that as we head down the page.
I’d like to at this stage thank Pixelade for this information. He often gets good scoops so I appreciate his work on this front as always. I’ve taken a screenshot from his video stream on YouTube for information purposes, and will be talking about some of the elements in these videos. I’ll leave links here so you can check them out, but if for some reason they disappear in future hopefully I’ll have given you a paragraph or two to summarise. Thanks Matt!
A New Policy was dropped for Game Modifications.
All seems sensible to me. I have seen the many people who lock the downloads behind a paywall of some kind. I understand that coders have got to eat, but you are actually breaking the terms of service by making coins off your code.
This is what in many ways bugs me. Some of these mods fix all the ills and spills of the game. Add more content, improve mechanics, chart content that in the Sims Studio design brief are not charted. But by virtue of charging for them, you are essentially making cream off the parent company, and some are so blatant in this act that they deserve to receive the rod of pain.
EA aren’t being too hideous here. It’s not like they are stopping you asking for donations, just that mods can’t be hidden behind paywalls or require activation codes or other elaborate means to extract coin from your wallet. So they are actually doing simmers a favour. However, without those motivations are coders likely to continue making this content, putting in the time to code? Answer is probably no.
Paywalls do appear with Patreon a fair bit. I’ve noticed this increasingly.
Some of the big mods from the sims 3 weren’t paywalled. They were just passion projects by avid Sims fans who got tired of how shit the engine was running. Nraas was a big one that you might have heard of it, Twallan created it. It is somewhat essential if you are playing the Sims 3 these days as it improved efficiency inside the rather antiquated sims 3 architecture. Nraas provided a suite of mods, and you can still download them for free as of time of writing.
So the video continues on, as they always do to turn the knife a little if you are seeing it that way. It’s more to establish the red line if you as a modder weren’t aware;
So, if you have any dodgy mods running, watch out, you might have to say goodbye to them at some point if they are deemed questionable. I run one mod by Polarbearsims that could potentially fall into that bracket. There have always been examples of “close to the knuckle” mods because this game is designed for children and young teens essentially and adults play it. There is a degree of “realism” that adults yearn for that this game leaves lacking on. Some of the “adult” content is gross in my eyes, but someone might not like the mod that I use. This will definitely open a can of worms. I think everyone can remember the “Hot Coffee” issue that happened around Grand Theft Auto. A mod was made for that, which allowed the buried content to be accessible. That’s what modders do best.
Now in Matt’s second video on the 31st July, he went into detail about wanting a confirmation of Early Access Paywalls. So essentially putting a gate on the content for X weeks or months in order to recoup for the programming time expanded on the mod content. Matt made an impassioned inquiry in his video for the coders and their family, but its still a problem that goes against the red line and he made the outline that basically the permanent paywall crowd has made it bad for everyone (tarred every modder with the same brush).
So moving swiftly on, there was a confirmation on the 1st August to clarify. Pixelade went into some further detail on the mods reporting;
You know you are going too far, when you have to go this end to get things done;
This coming from a CC designer;
But the hammer was really dropped in Matt’s final video;
Apologies on the low quality of the image here but someone asked the question.
I think that is fairly definitive as it goes. CC designers and modders who put their mods behind a paywall in early access are not permitted to use this kind of method any longer.
There is nothing to stop you making a charity goal, that you need to obtain x amount to make the content but it will be free on release. That’s an easier way around it. So you are commissioning an artist instead, and everybody benefits. I think that might be a better way to perform this in future.
I was going to lay this comment down, but its too wordy and I’d get some eyebrows raised so to be nice to Pixelade I recanted on this, but I thought I’d show you my 2 cents;
Allegedly, if you say Andrew Wilson three times as a chant, you’ll be able to hear the feint noise of a Didgeridoo before you get hit in the back of the head with an empty wallet, with the expectation that you throw it back full. That’s all his practicing from his days throwing boomerangs. Don’t try this at home kids. 😁
I left this one instead. You might not think any better, but Matt, you get my premium comments for free. What you complaining about exactly? Hmmm.
I think the biggest problem here, is that you’ve upset modders. Upsetting modders isn’t a good thing. You could say there were a lot of freeloaders here who were making fat stacks off willing whales but its still not right. It’s an odd one for me, because I actually stand on the side of the company for once and like the stand they made. I don’t think mods should be hidden behind paywalls of any kind. I don’t think there should be an early access grace, that the sims game should be relying on so much unlicensed third party content to keep this shit game going. Perhaps if Maxis weren’t artificially held up by these mod makers, there might be a secondary upshot of quality content in the product (though pigs do not fly, sadly).
But then the pot stirs further as you look at it and Pixelade later followed up with this;
So from the horse’s mouth, its okay to run a limited early access period. Why they didn’t clarify this properly earlier, I don’t know. But they should have.
That said, I kind of stand by my observations. You create a business resting on the laurels of a grey area, and expect that their could be bumps in the road. I still stand by the thought that you should try to mitigate risks and diversify your income stream if you are in a “risk” area. I wish I had done more on this area myself, as my industry came in for a lot of risk and had some major issues following the quarantine period that put me in some serious financial woes. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. You’ve got to continuously look at the risks in your market and be prepared to make some dramatic changes. It’s always easier to get something started and making some profit and then scale it up if and when you can later on. Every little helps. My biggest concern with this market would be if The Sims as a franchise was blown out of the water by a competitor. The market for the CC and mods would dry up if this happened. With Sim City, this happened. Sim City was replaced by City Skylines. Nothing lasts forever.
What do they define as reasonable? There is always vague lines in these rules.
It’s not a problem that effects me so much. I don’t go in for CC. I don’t like the manual upkeep of a huge library of custom stuff. Though I understand it being useful for customising and making unique sims beyond what the studio provides.
I’ve made some mods of my own in Crusader Kings 3 and Kenshi, time does go into making them, undoubtedly. Crusader Kings 3 has a slightly higher difficulty level than Kenshi in terms of application, though the code has been written to make it easy (easier, it still has some syntax and rules that take a bit of getting used to) in CK3. Kenshi lends itself to easy adjustment and has a special visual tool to help out. I understand why people would charge, I really do. The amount of time you can spend making a comprehensive mod is not insignificant. I can also say that mods are tested far more than what the Sims team perform on their game. But I don’t think you can rely on it as a permanent income stream. The risk is too high. The only reason the content creators have been doing so well is that it seems that the Sims 4 is set in for a really long period and there has been a history of both modders and sales, whereas in other games, mods are essentially free-vend and passion projects.
Conclusions
This round up is missing a vital element that I normally go into. I didn’t buy anything from the last article to this one. And as such I can’t talk on any of the new packs since 2020. I simply haven’t played them so don’t feel honour bound to discuss them. The only one I was tempted to get now was Werewolves, but I just don’t feel motivated enough to do it just yet. The world in Cottage Living looks fab and having a pet Llama would be fun, not gonna lie. I’m also oddly tempted by the Paranormal and Nifty Knitting packs but not enough to press the button. That’s the problem. The spark is not there to put down my Queenqoin, my hard earned Britbuck. I’m just not there. The trust is not there.
Q and A
Q: Have we moved on enough from the two years that I last wrote an article?
A: No. There is no optimism. There were no heroes.
Q: Has enough changed to shower the team in praise.
A: No. Not even remotely. They still make the same bonehead mistakes in many areas. They shall receive jeers.
Q: Is the quality of the game improving?
A: No. there have been attempts to improve the core, but they are woefully inadequate. Other than cosmetics, the efficiency hasn’t returned. There is no buttery smooth. There is still heavy lag both in terms of Sim Lag and Game Lag as detailed further up the page. Expansions are still being released in broken condition, some more than others. Updates are being released with too few bug fixes. I’ve noticed far more small bugs as of late. Small things that creep in and upset the flow of playing. At some point I will be uninstalling this game, but not just yet. Soon though I think.
Suggestion:
Do what I did folks. Do what I did. I assume that most of you have The Sims 4 reading this, had it, or never purchased it. If you are in that latter group, well done for your willpower.
Don’t buy anymore for this game. Not a bean. Not a pack, not a tiny morsel. Do not drop another cent on this game.
Your anger will subside remarkedly.
Play it less. Play other games. Let it stew.
If you do play. Build. Don’t bother with the gameplay. Just build. Even if you are crap at it. Just build.
I spent most of that 200 hours between my last article simply building houses and community lots. I got better at building. I’ve currently made two restaurants. The second one didn’t come out so good so I’m going to rethink it.
I can’t recommend buying anything right now. The Quality control is not there. It is super low trust at the moment. EA/Maxis are only interested in dollar right now.
So enjoy what you have and build.
You can create some sims to go in those houses, just don’t play with them.
Delete all those idiot townies, delete all the lots, delete all the terrain paint residue left behind, and build. Like the Egyptians, build. And if you get bored of that, play a different game.
My other suggestion is to wait for Paralives. And yes, its going to have pets in the base game. Yeah, I know. That got you excited didn’t it.
