Comment on What is a game you can’t understand why its so popular ?
arcine@jlai.lu 23 hours ago
The Sims 4.
I mean, The Sims 3 and The Sims 2 are right there ! Both much, much better games, with the same premise but both with much better and clearer direction. Both quite different from each other and interesting in their own right…
Meanwhile The Sims 4 is a buggy mess with over 1000€ of DLC, I cannot fathom why anyone would choose it over its predecessors…
KoboldOfArtifice@ttrpg.network 22 hours ago
I can pitch in that for me at least, Sims 4 was a large improvement in terms of the UI and UX in regards to both CAS and Build Mode. It has a lot of small stuff that makes the experience much more accessible for me, personally.
It also comes with a visual style that I myself quite prefer, but this is controversial itself.
I still find myself getting bored of actual play in Sims 4 rather quickly, since things just don’t feel like they require much investment at all anymore. Being a perfect all-rounder of a Sim is utterly trivial in Sims 4 while Sims 3 and 2 back then made me feel like I had to work for it quite a bit. It may just be me being more capable, who knows.
I’ll say, I can’t say the business model of any of these games has appealed to me. I have purchased the base games for all the titles in the series, but have chosen to experience the DLC in a more budget friendly way. Yar har, et al.
It’s a pity we’ve lost a lot of things that were great that they just didn’t feel like building on. The neighbourhoods in Sims 4 feel terrible and I wish we’d have found some way to make Create a Style from Sims 3 work without bogging down the performance quite as much. At the time when Sims 4 rolled around, I was also happy to swap as my PC at the time just couldn’t handle the game running smoothly anymore, either.
Sims 4 is not really a development that will do the series good in the long run, but it can’t be denied that it has some really great changes that for me at least make building and decorating buildings feel much more fun.
MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 22 hours ago
Yeah as a fan of the series is annoying because there is no “best game”.
Sims 2 has loads of content, but sims only age if they’re in the current household so you end up with children that have moved out of their parents end up being the same age or older than their parents.
Sims 3 was arguably the best, even though it missed some of that “extra detail charm” that 2 had. But it had that awesome “open world” feel and all sims aged appropriately.
Then Sims 4 came around with the best Build Mode and Mood system out of the series that it now makes 2 and 3 feel not as good anymore. But then you lose all of the REALLY cool stuff 3 added to the series. 4 kind of feels like it pretended 3 never happened.
The best Sims would be a theoretical 3.5 combining the best out of 3 and 4. And then to go the extra mile they could add all of the extra detail flourish 2 has. (And personally also if they bring back the piano jazz of 1).
KoboldOfArtifice@ttrpg.network 21 hours ago
You hit on a point there I really missed out on in my comment. Sims 2 had that perfect unique character of being weird and endearing at every corner. I feel like Sims 3 frankly was losing it already and by the times of Sims 4 it had just felt entirely corporate already.
The games used to have a very delightful degree of strangeness that was only aided in by the eccentric but utterly iconic music it ran with. I was rather young when I played Sims 1, so Sims 2 is my nostalgia home turf, but I love both of their soundtracks. Mark Mothersbaugh’s music in particular just puts me into an entire space of it’s own when I hear it. Don’t think there is music that more embodies the lightness of existence than that.
I miss the times when somehow they juggled making me feel like my Sims achievements are somewhat hard won and meaningful with the silliness of having my Sim dream of nothing but grilled cheese and living next door to plant people and aliens. Incarnations of Strangerville after Sims 2 just never quite hit the note that that game managed to nail.
MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 11 hours ago
I love all of the soundtracks mind but everything since 2 has just been iterations of what we got in 2 (and i don’t mean that in a bad way), but they’ve revisited the style of 1 and I’d love to hear elements of that brought back into the soundtrack of a future installment.
Since writing my comment, I’ve watched a video on paralives which coincidentally comes out in a few days and that is looking to be shaping up to be a spiritual successor to my theoretical Sims 3.5. So I’m excited to play that now haha. Hope their soundtrack is on point.