The Sims 4

I took advantage this week of Origin’s Game Time event for a 48-hour trial of The Sims 4.

I should say that I did not expect to enjoy it very much given the “word on the web” circulating about the level of execution and general game play.  Nevertheless, I did enjoy the game for the 48 hours that I had access to it.  (48 hours was basically enough for me to play it an actual 4 to 5 hours, after dinner, two evenings in a row.)

Game play was very smooth, and the game ran unexpectedly well on my desktop.  It’s a good, stock, Sims base game with an updated look and feel to the interface and the graphics.

Some have complained that the graphics are worse than in the Sims 3 but they aren't worse so much as different.  For me, the oddities that things were so very stark, and that the ceilings were so damned high that your Sims end up with a lot of wall space.  (I’ve never personally seen ceilings this high in any house anywhere ever, though they could exist, I suppose.)  I kind of felt as though my poor, lonesome Sim was knocking around a large, echoing space all the time.

Deja Vou mixes up some mac and
cheese in her enormous beige kitchen.

Outdoors, the scenery all appears larger-than-life too, though this may be that it’s finally something like normal sized and fleshed out a little.  The landscapes were far more natural and appealing than those I’m used to from Sims 3.

Deja Vou tries her best to annoy a neighbor.

Still, the game wasn’t completely bug free.  Old glitches evident in Sims 2 and Sims 3 still reared their heads here in Sims 4.

Deja Vou and a neighbor get a little too close in her kitchen.

Pools were in.  I say that because I’ve seen a lot of hand wringing about pools being excluded from the base game and how this is a crime against the very nature of The Sims franchise, but there they were.

Small lots mean really small pools.

What adding the pool did emphasize to me was just how small most of the lots were.  I looked around but could not find a way to add more lots to any neighborhood so, at least for now, it seems a Simmer is stuck with whatever the designers of the default neighborhoods think is appropriate for them to have.

The game also announced to me after a little bit of play that Sims can multitask now.  This seemed to mostly mean that they could carry on conversations while cooking, and while doing other things.

I hate to think about how much this happens in the real world.

Gardening seemed to be improved in that the plants looked better and there were new options (such as “take cutting” and “splice”)  and the ingredients were better integrated into the cooking skill.

The weeding work is never done.

While playing Sims 4, I very much missed the CAS (Create-a-Style) tool from Sims 3.  As in The Sims and Sims 2, with Sims 4 you’re back to being stuck with only a few color options  on any item — anywhere from no options to about eight — and the options are, in large part, bland and unsatisfying: Zero Punctuation summed it up as “chintz and pastels or fuck off back to Call of Duty”, and that does seem to sum it up pretty well.

There are other genuine complaints.  Open neighborhoods are gone.

Get used to this.  You’ll be seeing it a lot.

This meant that when I wanted my Sim to go visit a neighbor, and I clicked on their door, I faced a loading screen while she went to that house.  That house was empty so of course she had to just traipse right back home through yet another loading screen.  There are loading screens between the Sims in the neighborhood and any non-home activity (museum, library, park, &c.) they might want to try, and that loading screen gets old, quickly.

This also means that your Sim just disappears when it’s time for them to go to work, or when they “go for a jog“ or any other activity that takes them away from their home lot.  (So, I guess, no more job rabbit holes, either.)

The neighborhoods themselves are pretty small.  The base game comes with two, and they each have  a few housing zones, a big park, and an area of other community lots (library, museum, gym, and so on).

My Sim’s current neighborhood is highlighted
above, showing its general size.

Of course, leaving the bounds of one of those regions means facing loading screen, which was something I couldn't stomach as often as my Sim wanted to roam about.

Build mode took a little while to figure out and, once again, there were some things missing that fans of the franchise have become accustomed to.  For me, the main one was the lack of any terrain tools: no more raising or lowering lots (all the lots are just level), which for me takes away the fun of L-shaped stairways and the like.  It’s not an absolutely huge thing, but given how tiny some of the lots are, being able to bend a staircase around a corner would help quite a bit.

Overall: The Sims 4 still has much the same charm as The Sims has always had, and it’s enjoyable enough to play for a while.  I can’t say how long my enjoyment would last, though, once I was facing the full limitations of all the loading screens and the lack of being able to customize clothes and furniture as I’m wont to do in Sims 3.  The game runs pretty beautifully now, but so did The Sims 3 before all the Expansion and Stuff Packs were added, so I will just have to wait and see on that matter.

I am not planning to buy it in the immediate future: it’s just too pricey for the content offered and with the other negatives I’ve listed above.  I’m also not considering it right now because of it not being offered on Steam, but that’s a problem I don’t think EA’s management will ever grow up enough to resolve.