The Sims 4: Create-a-Sim Demo Review and General Preview

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IamLEAM1983
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The Sims 4: Create-a-Sim Demo Review and General Preview

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It's old news now, but reviewers won't have access to copies of The Sims 4 until after release. That's usually a bad sign. A very, very bad one.

Review embargoes are usually placed when a company knows they've financed an underwhelming title, or something that's likely to earn them a lot of flak. Extremely confident publishers, on the other hand, tend to ride the hype train until the very last minute – and well afterwards, as well. For a complete opposite to the current situation with the Maxis guys, you only have to look to Volition. The creators of the Saints Row series are working on the Re-Elected version of Saints Row IV, destined to launch on next-gen consoles. There's also a standalone expansion to the core release in the works, a little ditty tentatively called Gat out of Hell. The short of it involves Johnny Gat and Kinzie Kenzington going to Hell, quite literally, to save the Boss' eternal soul. This'll be the first Saints game in which we won't control the Boss – but that's a story for another time. Preferably one narrated by Jane Austen.

That said, my point stands. Volition is positively strutting across the proverbial runway with nothing except a teaser and a bit of a PR stunt, whereas EA and Maxis are cowering behind their release of the Create-a-Sim tool. With good reason, some might say.

It started, as EA controversies are wont to do, with the announcement that previously core aspects of the franchise would be removed. Reasons cited tended to involve the inability to reproduce things as tried and true to the franchise as toddlers and swimming pools. As mind-boggling as it seems, swimming pools and freaking toddlers are too hard to code or otherwise animate. Yes.

Is there any other kind of load you'd like us to swallow, gentlemen, while you work on providing us with less customization features at the expense of a minuscule amount of extra flexibility?

Oh – Oh yes, of course. You forgot the David Cage defense, didn't you? Yes, the Sims are supposedly emotional, now. With a grand total of twelve behavior-shaping and overarching moods, we're supposed to be able to channel someone's fury into gym routines or coax a more cheerful Sim into giving the grumpier of the lot the pep talk they might need. The problem is, this approach restricts what we can do to the assumption that progress is one of the defining factors behind the Sims' lives.

I'm sorry, but I very rarely set out to play one of my Sims 3 households with the intent of creating a success story. Being that I like to orchestrate situations and otherwise subject my little people to a wide variety of demeaning, if entertaining things, I'm being fairly limited in the devs' assumption that a bad mood needs to be channelled somewhere or that being cheerful enables certain things. With less personality traits on offer and less wardrobe customization, I'm presented with a game world in which Sims are likely to quickly start resembling one another on a structural level. Yes, I can certainly design freakish blue-skinned humanoids if I so choose and turn their proportions into an utter nightmare; but the minds of the Sims are so limited in their scope that redundancies quickly surface.

Those limitations are most clearly expressed in the Create-a-Sim demo. With a paltry choice of clothes and the exclusion of a color picker in favor of prefab color coordinations, there's globally less on offer than what The Sims 3 presented us with. Granted, the Create-a-Style tool might have been a bit daunting to casual players, or to people who preferred to jump into TS3's narrative possibilities and leave the fashion aside, but its inclusion was an important and widely appreciated touch. The only way to design some truly unique individuals, further down the line, was to consider the use of these customization tools.

Now? Let's see, I've got two suit-and-tie combos, both of them offering me, hm... Black suit and blue tie, black suit and red tie and the ground-breaking pairing of black suit and striped tie.

That's it.

Some sleuthing reveals that this is, indeed, it. It isn't the case of the demo lacking some of the haberdashery options for your little people, it's a case of Maxis rounding out the proverbial corners by trimming the game's customization tools down to their very bones.

But hey, no biggie, right? Our Sims will be emotional, now! Who needs pools and toddlers, we've got emotions! Oh, and if you're not in for emotions because you're some sort of heartless monster – or so EA thinks – you've got prefab rooms to mix-and-match around, and purpose-specific furniture to design a romance-boosting foyer or a confidence-increasing gym!

I'm getting the impression that Maxis desperately chased the Innovation Monster around its Emeryville campus, at the exclusion of mechanics that had proven their worth across three games and dozens of expansions. Moodlets weren't draconian and behavior-dictating paradigm shifts that locked you into the process of resolving their conflict of origin. Bob Newbie being glum or angry didn't prevent you from socializing or from addressing things that were more pressing or more needed for your story structure than a fictional character's emotional well-being, and I honestly don't know many people who have enough presence of mind to channel their foul mood into constructive projects. It's a game design philosophy that's focused on behavioral optimization, and not behavioral experimentation – as had previously been the case with the other games in the series.

That aside, the game's framework is also cause for some concern. Lots and immediate neighborhoods are now far more detailed, meaning that it's now possible for Sims to visit four or five immediate houses without loading screens, and with a minimal amount of persistence being involved; as was the case in the previous game. However, trying to go further triggers a fairly lengthy loading screen. Sims can live in one neighbourhood and work in another, apparently, but the process also involves loading. If you're the type of player who actually does send his Sims out of their lot fairly often, you'll be disappointed by the lack of seamlessness; something that made pseudo-long-distance relationships a relative breeze in TS3.

The construction tools exist in the same half-gutted and half-enriched state as the CAS screen. Any house can now instantly receive foundations, but no basements can be built. Rooms can be shuffled around liberally as long as doors are carefully aligned – the placed furniture items following in their wake – and the above-mentioned prefabricated room designs make it easy to plan things out for whomever happens to be less of an interior designer and more of a frustrated soap opera writer. The pitch and orientation of roof pieces can be altered as desired; but as is the case with the CAS screen, most customization options are verging towards the “bare-bones” area of the spectrum.

As explained above, pools are missing. Most landscaping options are fairly limited, judging on convention or press release builds.

Oh, but nevermind that, the CES keynotes are quick to add; you can physically mold your Sims in a tactile fashion! This warrants retuning to CAS for just a moment...

The game's character creation system shuns sliders and replaces them with bones and vertexes that dynamically follow your mouse's movement. To alter someone's nasal ridge, for instance, click on it and then drag left or right to widen it or narrow it down. Several parts of the body can be similarly tweaked, dragged or pulled with the mouse, but the problem is that this approach makes it impossible to adequately control the degree of imposed deformation on each prefab bone structure. Your mouse essentially acting as the slider, it's difficult to see exactly where your chosen alteration is located in the grand scheme of things – something that was made easy to read by the previous game's slider system. In practice, your Sims can be molded into shape like Spore's Creatures, but this very same God game had one damning flaw in its character creation system – a devotion to symmetry and bodily conservatism. The Sims 4 carries those mistakes as well. Some releases indicate that holding a specific key can allow for the creation of asymmetrical Sims, but this has yet to be confirmed. With the game's offered extreme values being decidedly on the “aesthetically pleasing” level, it's now more difficult than ever to create some truly outlandish Sims. From Baby to Elder, everyone's beautiful and everyone is oh-so-very emotional.

The long and short of it is that my initial impressions are rather mixed, and tend to err on the negative side of things. Maxis could've done so much more than simply revamp the Personality system and toss in a few concessions to the builders, and I simply can't see how the growing pains of a new engine could justify the exclusion of features that used to be regarded as being part of the game's core. It all reeks of planned DLC to me, which only makes my inner cynic chew on the kind of vitriol I'd rather reserve for the game's actual release.

If the game's launch happens to be marked with server outages as well, then we'll all understand that EA honestly hasn't learned from SimCity's fiasco. If that's the case, I don't see the The Sims 4 being blessed with as many expansions as its predecessors, nor do I see it sticking to the retail price point for too long, at least not in terms of physical distribution.

As for Origin? Heh. Even if the game tanks, you can bet your ass that EA's download platform will carry the game at full price for years to come.
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