The Sims 4 -

[Null]

Okay, so EA shit out their most recent game. It requires Origin.

Skidrow has released a fully cracked version of the game today, if you don't mind piracy.

However, if you want to be legal and you don't mind Origin, you can follow these instructions to get the game for $45 or $35 (deluxe/standard respectively) by purchasing it through the Mexican version of the store. The video instructions that I followed can be found here. Just be sure to change your password. I've done it and it works.

I may do a livestream this weekend if people want to start up a call. The last one I did that ended up in Pixyteri's ogre lover being smashed by a meteorite was fun.


Partial review of the game. I didn't play it that long.

 

[BT 075]

The last Skype was a pretty legendary event I am proud to have been a part of. If the next one if half as fun I'll be telling my grandchildren about it.

 

[Coffee Overdose]

Just got the game. Its "OK" at best and not worth any price tag at the moment. Wait a year or two for a price drop to $20 and then pick it up.

Making friends in this game is easy. (With benefits GOOD)
There are a lot of jobs (Good?) and a lot of jobs missing (Bad.)
Your sims can get depressed about random bullshit (their weight for example.) (HA!)
You get charged by appliance usage rather than furniture or size of your household. (GOOD)
There is no open world. Loading times are fast and so are saving times. (Huh?)
Making a sim is fun. Playing with him less so because lack of shit to do besides jobs. (BAD)
A lot of careers and a lot of skills (you can level each instrument individually.) (GOOD)
There are two different neighborhoods one tropical and one on a beach / suburban. They are both the game shit honestly. (BAD)
Can't edit your household's landscape as much. No pools or ground editing. (BAD))
Limit to Family sizes (Bad)
Limit to house sizes (bad)
Neighborhood is empty as fuck. (Really bad)
Parties still suck but at least there are objectives (Good?)

Thats my meh and heh list of the game. Just the things that bothered me and things I liked. Game feels incomplete as shit.

 

[Guardian G.I.]

Just got the game. Its "OK" at best and not worth any price tag at the moment. Wait a year or two for a price drop to $20 and then pick it up.

Making friends in this game is easy. (With benefits GOOD)
There are a lot of jobs (Good?) and a lot of jobs missing (Bad.)
Your sims can get depressed about random bullshit (their weight for example.) (HA!)
You get charged by appliance usage rather than furniture or size of your household. (GOOD)
There is no open world. Loading times are fast and so are saving times. (Huh?)
Making a sim is fun. Playing with him less so because lack of shit to do besides jobs. (BAD)
A lot of careers and a lot of skills (you can level each instrument individually.) (GOOD)
There are two different neighborhoods one tropical and one on a beach / suburban. They are both the game shit honestly. (BAD)
Can't edit your household's landscape as much. No pools or ground editing. (BAD))
Limit to Family sizes (Bad)
Limit to house sizes (bad)
Neighborhood is empty as fuck. (Really bad)
Parties still suck but at least there are objectives (Good?)

Thats my meh and heh list of the game. Just the things that bothered me and things I liked. Game feels incomplete as shit.

Apparently Sims 4 will get most of the features from previous titles only after a truckload of expansion packs. EA executives don't even try to hide their greed.

I'll pirate the game in 2017 or 2018.

 

[Null]

Okay, if nothing else, the editor in this game is really fun.

Behold my abominations.

 

[Rio]

Someone needs to make a deagle nation household and stream it for great justice.

 

[Queen of Tarts]

I miss the good ol' days of the Sims where I could make 4 male characters, trap them in a doorless house, and watch them flirt, slap, and cheat on each other while they neglect basic needs because they're too stupidly horny to live.

All without having to unseal the gay option.

 

[Ariel]

Someone needs to make a deagle nation household and stream it for great justice.

It would be good if somebody just made the house and the DN members & then left it streaming for a few days to see what happened.

 

[RV 229]

I wouldn't mind joining if you're doing it this afternoon. I like watching you play games.

 

[Shuu Iwamine]

I'd watch the stream. Sounds like fun.

 

[Cute Anime Girl]

But the question remains: Can you shoot your dad?

 

[Overcast]

I miss the good ol' days of the Sims where I could make 4 male characters, trap them in a doorless house, and watch them flirt, slap, and cheat on each other while they neglect basic needs because they're too stupidly horny to live.

All without having to unseal the gay option.

Okay, that sounds hilarious. I might have to buy one of the older Sims games. Just to see what shenanigans I can make.

Which one would you guys recommend?

 

[EI 903]

Okay, that sounds hilarious. I might have to buy one of the older Sims games. Just to see what shenanigans I can make.

Which one would you guys recommend?

Sims 2 is the most popular of the old ones.

 

[Shuu Iwamine]

Sims 2 is the most popular of the old ones.

It's certainly my favorite one. There were things about 3 that I did like over 2, but 2 had more pros than cons in the manner of comparison.

 

[A-Stump]

Someone doesn't know how to take screenshots but this made me lol so fucking hard

 

[Queen of Tarts]

Okay, that sounds hilarious. I might have to buy one of the older Sims games. Just to see what shenanigans I can make.

Which one would you guys recommend?

I played Sims 2. All the guys usually looked the same, too, which made it even more confusing.

 

[Null]

Okay, so time to complain.

Create-a-Sim
The CaS editor is very cool and it uses a sculpting system that's easy to pick up and adds a lot that the older games were missing, especially in facial detail. Though, in what they've improved they've also fucked up. The number of styles supplied is almost nothing and you can almost smell the DLC. There's about 10-15 options for each category (hair, facial hair, tops, full body dresses, pants, accessories) and if you're luck an article will have anywhere between 3 and 10 styles. This is in lieu of the Create-a-Style thing for Sims 3 which was really fucking balling and let you easily get all your furniture matching.

Also, if you saw my screenshots, there's this monkey lip syndrome that I can't figure out how to deal with. It's worth mentioning because the rest of the editor is so spot on but the lips completely fucking ruin it. They remind me of the dA guy who only drew anus mouths.

User Interface
Abhorrent. I have nothing positive to say. They go for a clean, minimalist style and fail completely. Every element fades and it takes a good second for you to be able to move on to the next thing you're doing. The Tutorial is from fucking hell. There are literally hundreds of prompts that it litters all over the place and the only way to get rid of them is to do the thing they're asking. The actual, official way to disable the tutorial is to exit the game, open its properties, and add a fucking executable argument that the developers use for the next time you launch the program.

The menu does not scale in size relative to the resolution of your monitor. On my 1920x1080, the text is microscopic, buttons are hard to click because they're so small, and I feel physically ill after 15 minutes of playing because I am 3 inches from the screen trying to read shit.

Camera
Also fucking awful. The biggest change that drives me insane is that edge panning is painfully slow to begin with, then quickly accelerates. There's no option for panning speed or edge sensitivity, there's just a checkbox to enable it. It takes 5+ seconds to move an inch in any direction, so you're constantly moving your hand off the mouse to use arrow keys.

Graphics
I'm a huge fan of the art style. I like games that can be cartoony and I feel it matches the old games well. It also carries the big advantage of being easy to render.

At least it should. I have a fucking $4000 laptop that can run any game I've ever purchased on max. Except The Sims 4. I have to run it on bare minimum to play the game at above 20 FPS. I don't know why. I have nothing more to add. It's disgusting.

Gameplay
Dunno where to start.

There are 2 town with like 6 lots each. This is all you get. There's a few ghetto places, two nice places, and two palaces each.

There is no overworld anymore. To travel between lots you need to use your cell phone to dial "Travel", and then after calling something you enter the overworld and can send your sim to another lot. This is Sims 2 type shit.

Conversations take place in what should be a natural way. You can do it while jogging, sitting on a bench, with multiple people in a big standing group, etc. This actually works quite well until I made a diva that only existed to piss off people. Negative conversations are carried in the exact same way as positive ones. My diva went over to a man, introduced herself rudely, and then they took a seat on the bench so that she could yell at him. See the attachment.

There also seems to be less shit to do. The game is engineered towards letting people live vicariously. It's aimed at lonely 30+ year old women with no children, and 16 year old girls with no impulse controls. Managing moodlets, getting to the top of your career path, achieving level 10 in a skill and not getting murdered in the process. I mean there was a lot to do to strike balance and while I didn't play the game for that long I didn't really get a sense of wanting to do anything. To achieve your sim's lifetime wish, you are given a list of tasks. For my diva, this was making 3 enemies and doing 25 negative social interactions. To complete my task, I cellphone'd myself to the park and started screaming at people on a bench, until I could punch them to make them my enemy. I did this in under a few in-game hours, and my reward was 50 points and another list, which were the same things, but three times as many. I don't know what the points are for. I assume they're some kind of lifetime rewards program a la Sims 3, but I couldn't find the menu.


Don't buy. Pirate if you're curious.

 

[Mourning Dove]

Hmm I'm sticking with the Sims 3, which I've already spent monies to buy it and its expansion packs. It amuses me enough.

 

[MysticMisty]

They nuked Create a Style? That blows. Create a Style was probably my favorite addition to Sims 3. I loved customizing furniture styles and clothes, and even walls and floors. And they seriously got rid of it? What the fuck! I had hoped for a game I could play on my laptop (because Sims 3 absolutely refuses to run properly on Windows 8 apparently), but this just sounds like the original Sims upgraded to prettier graphics. I'm going to wait and see for the first expansions to be released and then see if it's worth buying. Otherwise I'll stick with Sims 3 and wait for Sims 5.

 

[sea panther]

I've played this game for a few hours now so here are some first impressions.

Cons:
-This game is not worth $60. I knew this going in after reading reviews/sims subreddit but I did it anyway because I'm a sims apologist. There just isn't enough content for this to ever warrant being $60. $30-40, maybe.
-The closed world sucks. That wasn't even my favorite feature in Sims 3 but now that it's gone I feel so isolated. The game has an absolutely outrageous amount of people walking past your house, perhaps in an attempt to make you feel like things are still going on in the world, but it just comes off as ridiculous and weird. Why are there 10-20 people going by my tiny house in the suburbs of a *desert* at any given time?
-Why isn't there a dishwasher. I have a really hard time believing that putting dishwashers into the game was really going to be so difficult that they had to leave it out.
-Missing content overall. Babies just feel like toys that never stop crying obnoxiously and you can't even check on their needs like the last 2 games. The option to age them up immediately is a blessing considering how much they suck anyway, but also "breaks" immersion. I don't care about the toddlers being gone though.
-Not being able to control length of individual life stages. For instance, I hate kids, I want them to be kids like 3 days max, and I like making the elder stage short too. You're stuck with presets of "short, normal, and long".
-Emotions aren't *that* great. They're interesting, but they honestly don't make my Sim feel any more alive than usual. It's really no different from moodlets. Yeah they walk differently and their portrait looks different, but that's really it. All it adds is extra interactions here and there as far as I can see. I don't feel like I'm dealing with a living, breathing Sim. They still stand around blankly like dipshits for an inordinate amount of time before doing something (this is with full free will) and their priorities seem even worse than usual. They're complaining that they have to pee but will literally do anything BUT pee on their own.

Pros:
-Emotions are neat, regardless of their use.
-The multitasking is cool [but clunky] and feels a little more "realistic". I like that everyone can be in the living room doing different activities but still interacting with each other.
-Overall much less clunky than previous Sims games.
-short load times. My biggest complaint with Sims 3 was that it took 5-10 minutes to even get in the game, and this fact alone was enough to put me off playing. I could make myself a quick lunch in the span of time it took to save. CAS took eons to load if you had tons of CC. Sims 4 is lightning quick in comparison.
-More emotive Sims are a great addition. Their mouths actually sync up to their gibberish.
-The emotion stuff does add more of a challenge sometimes, as are the promotion requirements for work/school.
-CAS is a lot less clunky and I like more options for molding bodies (though I don't think the push/pull feature is any more or less intuitive than sliders).
-I like the way the sims look MUCH better than Sims 3. They always felt like weirdly blank dolls before.
-I actually like having less traits to pick from. There were way too many with all the expansions in Sims 3, a lot of them overlapping or redundant.
-The game is still pretty fun, even with my long list of complaints.

Overall I'm sort of on the fence. It's fun, but not $60 worth of fun. I'll probably play it for a few weeks until I figure out all the features and then cast it aside til a new expansion is released. A player new to the franchise may derive more enjoyment from it though.

In the meantime, I'm playing Benito Connors, schizo manchild author extraordinaire, with his sidekick Grandpa Stryker. Will Benito ever find love amidst his prolific writing of children's books? Will Stryker die before he fucks a furry tranny wolf? Stay tuned! (We know the answer to the latter. Chalk that under the cons list. EA shitlords excluding queer otherkin for the 4th sims game in a row. )

Eta: finished pro list.