It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that my (slight) discomfort when playing the Sims comes from the fact that I constantly boot it up expecting a different experience than the developers are willing to provide. The Sims contains a truly insane range of activities, hobbies, etc. that you probably wish you had the time/money to master IRL - as things are in the Sims 4 right now, you could go to your day job (President of whatever country this is), come home, learn how to bring a ghost back to life, go skiing, build a relationship with your pet llama, and write a hit song before you have to go to work again the next day. Honestly, it's kinda rad! I like that there's a huge variety of things for your Sims to dabble in and improve at. It's nice hopping between activities and watching your Sim grow, watching them rack up a truly silly number of life achievements. Despite this, playing the Sims feels like I'm constantly speedrunning activities and careers without really getting to enjoy any of them, and it took playing Project Zomboid and a couple major Sims mods to understand why.
The Sims games are very good at simulating social interactions, to the point where just clicking someone and selecting "Friendly" gives you a downright overwhelming number of conversation choices, from telling knock-knock jokes, to trying to console them, to just unloading on the poor fucker about every hobby you have (I think the "sentiment" system is one of the best things the Sims has ever added and I really want to praise them for that, but that's a topic for another day). Improving skills, on the other hand, seems to be less about playing out the fantasy of building expertise and more about providing opportunities to socialize, acquire money, or smooth out other inconveniences (e.g. becoming so good at repairing something that you can make items unbreakable). Bringing your Do Things Level from 1 to 5 mostly looks like clicking the "Do Things" or "Research Doing Things" buttons over and over until you unlock the ability to "Do Things Quickly".
To be clear, I don't think this is a problem, I just think it's a mismatch between developer focus and what I want in a life sim. But it's clear that the Sims is capable of more, because some of the most fun I've had with the game comes from the skills that change how you interact with the game, or ones that link with other skills. Cooking is already one of the more interesting skills because it's split into 3 different types of cooking - cooking, baking, and gourmet cooking, where you have to choose portion sizes and account for the dietary preferences of the sims eating the food. Acquiring the DLC that lets you grow a garden means you can try to live entirely off your own home-grown food, and when you have virtually no money and no recipes to cook at the start, the challenge it provides was enough to single-handedly renew my interest in the game.
This is what I want more of! I think the Sims would truly ensnare players to a dangerous degree if there were more of these skills that allow you to really dedicate your attention to improving them and working with their systems. There are mods that allow you to use the systems present in the game to grow and sell drugs, interfacing with the cooking system (making edibles), the social system (can discuss/share drugs), and the aging/family system (parents can search their teens' furniture for hidden drugs). I mentioned Project Zomboid earlier, and I think the Sims could learn a lot from Zomboid's approach - the way that many skills are still primarily performed through menus, but there are additional layers of investment required to interact with them. Cooking requires that you have the correct utensils (and is done by selecting a recipe template and filling it with compatible ingredients); repairing a car requires that you have the replacement parts, the tools to remove/install said parts, and also the tools to remove/reinstall any parts that are in the way of whatever you're working on. This is a bit technical, and I think it works for Zomboid, but it would definitely require some tuning to work in the context of the Sims, which is a far more casual game with a more casual audience.
I'm asking for a lot here, because I think the Sims is at its best when it offers players the option to really get lost in a fantasy, instead of skimming the surface of twenty different fantasies. Other games will always do this better if you want to go play a dedicated Lumberjack Simulator or MouthSimulater [sic], but by adding like 20% more depth to the skills and/or changing the ways they interact with each other, the Sims may just start consuming the souls of unsuspecting players.
The Sims games are very good at simulating social interactions, to the point where just clicking someone and selecting "Friendly" gives you a downright overwhelming number of conversation choices, from telling knock-knock jokes, to trying to console them, to just unloading on the poor fucker about every hobby you have (I think the "sentiment" system is one of the best things the Sims has ever added and I really want to praise them for that, but that's a topic for another day). Improving skills, on the other hand, seems to be less about playing out the fantasy of building expertise and more about providing opportunities to socialize, acquire money, or smooth out other inconveniences (e.g. becoming so good at repairing something that you can make items unbreakable). Bringing your Do Things Level from 1 to 5 mostly looks like clicking the "Do Things" or "Research Doing Things" buttons over and over until you unlock the ability to "Do Things Quickly".
To be clear, I don't think this is a problem, I just think it's a mismatch between developer focus and what I want in a life sim. But it's clear that the Sims is capable of more, because some of the most fun I've had with the game comes from the skills that change how you interact with the game, or ones that link with other skills. Cooking is already one of the more interesting skills because it's split into 3 different types of cooking - cooking, baking, and gourmet cooking, where you have to choose portion sizes and account for the dietary preferences of the sims eating the food. Acquiring the DLC that lets you grow a garden means you can try to live entirely off your own home-grown food, and when you have virtually no money and no recipes to cook at the start, the challenge it provides was enough to single-handedly renew my interest in the game.
This is what I want more of! I think the Sims would truly ensnare players to a dangerous degree if there were more of these skills that allow you to really dedicate your attention to improving them and working with their systems. There are mods that allow you to use the systems present in the game to grow and sell drugs, interfacing with the cooking system (making edibles), the social system (can discuss/share drugs), and the aging/family system (parents can search their teens' furniture for hidden drugs). I mentioned Project Zomboid earlier, and I think the Sims could learn a lot from Zomboid's approach - the way that many skills are still primarily performed through menus, but there are additional layers of investment required to interact with them. Cooking requires that you have the correct utensils (and is done by selecting a recipe template and filling it with compatible ingredients); repairing a car requires that you have the replacement parts, the tools to remove/install said parts, and also the tools to remove/reinstall any parts that are in the way of whatever you're working on. This is a bit technical, and I think it works for Zomboid, but it would definitely require some tuning to work in the context of the Sims, which is a far more casual game with a more casual audience.
I'm asking for a lot here, because I think the Sims is at its best when it offers players the option to really get lost in a fantasy, instead of skimming the surface of twenty different fantasies. Other games will always do this better if you want to go play a dedicated Lumberjack Simulator or MouthSimulater [sic], but by adding like 20% more depth to the skills and/or changing the ways they interact with each other, the Sims may just start consuming the souls of unsuspecting players.
2 Comments
nah its prob needed these games are due for more attention. i was looking into that drug selling mod a few weeks back and its fr crazy in how considered it is, whole sims 4 mod scene moves way different lmao
This comment was deleted
jobosno
1 year ago