Previews: The Sims 4 Gameplay Preview - Mad Scientists and Fancy Houses

andrearene

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Mar 18, 2013
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The Sims 4 Gameplay Preview - Mad Scientists and Fancy Houses

Andrea Rene takes a look at the character creation suite in Sims 4 and gets a peek at the crazy detailed community options.

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Scars Unseen

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May 7, 2009
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It looks alright, but so did Sims 3. The real question is have they learned from past mistakes and made a game that doesn't grind to a halt when you start adding custom content to it?
 

Barbas

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Oct 28, 2013
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From what I hear, a lot of long-term Sims and Train Simulator fans actually do buy a lot of the DLC for those games, despite the relatively high cost. Something tells me that the further slicing up and partitioning of features won't put most of them off getting the next installment. *Shrugs* Each to their own, I guess. I hope this one's more stable, because the last one had a lotta nasty troubles with corrupted saves, IIRC.
 

Someone Depressing

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Jan 16, 2011
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Seems alright; custom content was a big issue in 3.

...So, we didn't get toddlers and pools. Instead, we got caricatures of celebrities and fanfiction.
 

Amaror

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Scars Unseen said:
It looks alright, but so did Sims 3. The real question is have they learned from past mistakes and made a game that doesn't grind to a halt when you start adding custom content to it?
I heard that the reason Sims 3 had such a huge performance issue was that you could create custom textures for your furniture and walls and stuff and since the game constantly had to check those texture files it slowed down to a crawl once there were really really many files to check. Also, the open world was apparently a huge issue.
 

Coreless

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Aug 19, 2011
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Yea I am just not feeling Sims 4 at all, sitting on Sims 3 with 5 expansions I just don't see a reason at all to move to buy Sims 4. The whole emotion thing is just not that big a leap like they try to make it out to be, and with all the features they have removed it feels more like 2 but with way less features. With EA giving away Sims 2 Ultimate recently it gives me even less incentive to get 4 because its quite clear after playing Sims 2 just how far Sims 4 has fallen.

Amaror said:
Scars Unseen said:
It looks alright, but so did Sims 3. The real question is have they learned from past mistakes and made a game that doesn't grind to a halt when you start adding custom content to it?
I heard that the reason Sims 3 had such a huge performance issue was that you could create custom textures for your furniture and walls and stuff and since the game constantly had to check those texture files it slowed down to a crawl once there were really really many files to check. Also, the open world was apparently a huge issue.
Thats pretty much it, the create a style tool is incredibly powerful for creating unique homes and clothes but at the expense that your PC is going to feel it when you have to constantly render hundreds of different textures even when just idling. looking at Sims 4 at most you will only see 2 or more other homes outside your lot to render and that will dramatically increase the performance, Sims 3 was constantly reloading everything from cars, pets, weather to sims on the other side of town (if you have the expansions). Even with the performance issues I absolutely loved watching the town going about its business in Sims 3, it really made it feel like a world and not just a game, I just don't know if I can go back to Sims 2 style lot system again, it just felt so cut off to only show one lot at a time.
 

Scars Unseen

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May 7, 2009
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Coreless said:
Yea I am just not feeling Sims 4 at all, sitting on Sims 3 with 5 expansions I just don't see a reason at all to move to buy Sims 4. The whole emotion thing is just not that big a leap like they try to make it out to be, and with all the features they have removed it feels more like 2 but with way less features. With EA giving away Sims 2 Ultimate recently it gives me even less incentive to get 4 because its quite clear after playing Sims 2 just how far Sims 4 has fallen.

Amaror said:
Scars Unseen said:
It looks alright, but so did Sims 3. The real question is have they learned from past mistakes and made a game that doesn't grind to a halt when you start adding custom content to it?
I heard that the reason Sims 3 had such a huge performance issue was that you could create custom textures for your furniture and walls and stuff and since the game constantly had to check those texture files it slowed down to a crawl once there were really really many files to check. Also, the open world was apparently a huge issue.
Thats pretty much it, the create a style tool is incredibly powerful for creating unique homes and clothes but at the expense that your PC is going to feel it when you have to constantly render hundreds of different textures even when just idling. looking at Sims 4 at most you will only see 2 or more other homes outside your lot to render and that will dramatically increase the performance, Sims 3 was constantly reloading everything from cars, pets, weather to sims on the other side of town (if you have the expansions). Even with the performance issues I absolutely loved watching the town going about its business in Sims 3, it really made it feel like a world and not just a game, I just don't know if I can go back to Sims 2 style lot system again, it just felt so cut off to only show one lot at a time.
Frankly, that is an acceptable cost to me. What isn't an acceptable cost is having to run the game at low resolution on low detail settings just to achieve a marginally decent frame rate. And while my system isn't cutting edge anymore, it is ridiculous that I would have to go that far with an i5-2500k processor, dual 560ti video cards and 16GB of RAM. I liked the features in The Sims 3, but it was a technological trainwreck.
 

Coreless

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Scars Unseen said:
Frankly, that is an acceptable cost to me. What isn't an acceptable cost is having to run the game at low resolution on low detail settings just to achieve a marginally decent frame rate. And while my system isn't cutting edge anymore, it is ridiculous that I would have to go that far with an i5-2500k processor, dual 560ti video cards and 16GB of RAM. I liked the features in The Sims 3, but it was a technological trainwreck.
I can see that being a problem for lower end computers and that is more then likely the main reason they went back to the lot system. I have an I7 with a 660TI and 8 gigs of ram and really the only time I have trouble running Sims 3 was when I first start the game and have to load the game up. I can definitely see people with lower end computers wanting to sacrifice the open world for better performance but its like putting the genie back in the bottle for me. If they had just given us a more updated open world without CASt that was better optimized and had better error checking scripts I would have been more then ok with it but going backwards imo just seems like they gave up and just didn't want to actually have to work out a solution.
 

sid

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Jan 22, 2013
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Barbas said:
From what I hear, a lot of long-term Sims and Train Simulator fans actually do buy a lot of the DLC for those games, despite the relatively high cost.
So I keep hearing (mostly from people who won't buy all the dlc in the first place), but when was the last time that you actually saw someone defend EA's DLC onslaught for the series? I think that this time around The Sims should actually see a major decline in DLC purchases, though the initial sales will probably be more or less the same.

And on that note, I feel like the market is pretty much primed for someone to jump in with a new sims-esque series right now, everybody knows how popular The Sims is, and everybody knows its glaring and fairly straight forward to correct flaws.
 

Miral

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Jun 6, 2008
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I'm noticing a recurring trend in these Sims 4 "Gameplay" videos -- they don't actually have any gameplay in them. Maybe the game just doesn't have any.
 

tangoprime

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May 5, 2011
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So... it looks exactly like the Sims 3, but they've made microtransactions even easier, and we'll once again be starting from scratch content-wise, with all the expansions lined up and ready to go out in the same order they did for the last 2 iterations: We'll have our University one, our Party/Romance one, our Pets one, our Work/Business one, our Weather one, our Vacation one, and we'll be getting a tiny bit of supernatural with each, then 4-5 stuff packs in between each, right?

*sigh* no thanks, I'll just stick with Sims 3 with my steam sale acquired expansions and 3rd party stability mods.
 

ash12181987

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Nov 9, 2010
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This looks like Sims 3... The Sims core gameplay hasn't changed in 10 years, so what reason do I have to buy a graphics upgrade, when Sims 3 will do everything that this game will do, and not cost me 60$?

That is the question the devs need to answer for me, not whether the clothing system they've had for 4 games now, will be the same as it was before.

I mean, I'm a Fan of the Sims games, they are wonderful time sink if you have nothing else to do. They can be Fun! But, this has just gotten ridiculous.